A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).

Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.

I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.

The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.

Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.

As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.

>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.

What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.

In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.

My point is precisely that the US system is substantially a copy of European stuff. It had some significant innovations for it's time of course, but it's really showing it's age. Meanwhile Parliamentary systems have significantly reformed and further innovated since.

I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?

A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason?

Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did.

It's not for me, but I can see the appeal - minimalism, distraction elimination, geek cred, and the sort of flow state one gets from working in a low latency, high muscle memory environment.

The problem isn’t the present tense. The problem is once those artefacts are destroyed then they’re destroyed forever.

They might find some important writing that can shed light on history.

Those people live in a museum-- Rome would be nearly empty if not for the tourist attractions, as it was for so many centuries.

Yes. I travel around the world looking for such things.

Is it encumbering? It seems like it's not at all.

Is it really worth? YMMV, but yes if you ask me.

That's the kind of corporate baby-talk I use when I'm trying to resist doing something.

Amazon extracts a lot of the value of a purchase from the seller's take. Sellers risk sanctions if they sell a product cheaper thru their brand website.

It's normal for wholesale prices being at 50% to 60% of what the retailer will sell it for. It's always been like that.

And those wholesalers would not do business with you if you undercut their retail price.

Amazon's practice is normal throughout the industry.

I know this because my business in the 80s would wholesale my products through mail order retailers.

Note that populist demagogue started a trade war and threatened allies with invasion. That tends to put a damper on friendship. And that's before the idiotic blunder with Hormuz.

What a coincidence. I also read the book and can't recall what it was about. Umm, what were we talking about again?

While true, that doesn't make it acceptable. In a functioning society, companies would be punished harshly for this behaviour.

> In a functioning society

Have you been alive for the past decade?

Obviously he thinks society is functioning for HIM just fine. What's your problem?

It's because they never have been meaningfully punished and won't be that this happens and will continue to happen. Act accordingly.

all societies are dysfunctional...

They should have gone all in and published the travel history of elite politicians, CEOs, and celebrities. That'd get a lot more media attention and potential for consequential legislation.

It's an unstable equilibrium: companies can always make more by adding ads, therefore they do so. This isn't the consumer's fault.