We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I think that’s right. To summarize, here’s where I think we agree and disagree:

We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.

We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.

We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.

We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don’t, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.

We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.

We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.

In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.

We are far beyond the GDP vs. GDP(PPP) that started this.

No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn’t about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.

The US’s main problem is it’s lack of industrial production.

Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there’s going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn’t matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.

On the world stage, as an economic power, the US is losing to China.

I think if we’re talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn’t have anything to do with that particular competition.

If we’re not comparing the ability of a citizen to buy things with the fruit of their labor. What are we comparing?

In this particular case? I think we’re comparing Chinese and American ability to project economic influence (from trade or aid, to outright bribes or coercion or boycotts or sanctions or everything in between) over Venezuela.

The normal person

But the normal person has nothing to do with governments dealing with other governments on the global stage. And that’s what this story is about, Venezuela being caught between two competing visions of their future in the international order.

If a country wants to build an airport in their capital city using the resources of foreign governments seeking to influence them, the question isn’t about how many eggs the citizens of those countries can buy in their home turf, but about how much concrete and steel and heavy machinery those other countries can provide in the country considering offers.

No serious economist uses GDP as a metric for actual economic production. Can we please at least use GDP (PPP)?

In terms of flexing on foreign countries on the international stage, though, raw GDP (or at least imports and exports) is pretty important.

The PPP calculation comparing China to the United States may tell us a lot about how much a resident of either country can expect to experience using the local currency domestically, but if we’re talking about influence over a third country, in that third country’s local currency, then I think each respective PPP back home doesn’t matter as much.

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

The boring answer: criminal investigative files generally aren’t released, so they’re compiled in a way that mingles information about victims with information about suspects and witnesses and others potentially involved in criminal activity, intentionally or unwittingly, directly or tangentially.

If you want to export a list of all names in the files, you’ll want to filter out victims for sure, and probably mere witnesses. You definitely don’t want to out informants and make them vulnerable to retaliation.

So most law enforcement agencies simply will keep everything secret. The idea of releasing names from the file was unusual, and it’s not surprising that Trump’s own people refused to follow through, especially when it’s highly likely that Trump was in that list of names.

That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.

That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.

You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.

I use Signal to avoid government accountability.

We are not the same.

Slim Charles, one of the Barksdale enforcers from The Wire.

In 2024.

Helpfully highlighting the baseline so that we can see how much it changes over time.

You’re still too narrowly focused.

The courts can and still do order the executive branch to follow the law, and undo unlawful actions, and order them to follow the law into the future. That’s the whole reason why at any given time there are thousands of lawsuits against the government under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the type of lawsuit being brought against Trump’s new policies.

If he ignores court orders, that’s a constitutional crisis, but it also really fucks up his chain of command. Elon Musk can’t fire thousands of people or freeze thousands of contracts, he has to direct the thousands of people who actually control those things to do the paperwork to do that, and those individual civil servants won’t violate court orders.

The lawsuits are important, and people need to not roll over and just accept Trump’s illegal actions.

This is a misconception that should stop.

The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can’t bring criminal charges against someone for acts that were done as President.

Here’s what that doesn’t stop:

• Criminal cases against the former president for non-official acts.
• Civil cases against the former president for acts, whether official or non-official.
• Criminal charges against anyone else who wasn’t literally the president
• Civil cases against the government, its agencies, its officers, or its employees.

The Supreme Court fucked up when it said prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence relating to unofficial acts, which basically made it impossible to prosecute a whole bunch of types of crimes.

But what it doesn’t do is stop people from suing the government, here and now, for breaking the law, or stop the courts from ordering the government to comply with the law.

And the scope of immunity covers only the President personally. Any other adviser, employee, or officer can still be prosecuted for breaking the law, including following the President’s illegal orders.

Part of the Trump strategy right now is to demoralize the opposition and make us believe that he actually has all the power. He doesn’t, at least not yet. We shouldn’t make it easy for him by assuming that he can break the law with impunity, and instead we should make sure we continue to do everything in our power to hold him and everyone who helps implement his agenda accountable.

Any quiet firing will tend to selectively get rid of more good workers than bad workers. The stars with good resumes and reputations in the industry can find good work elsewhere, and on the margins shittier work conditions will cause them to leave. The ones who can’t get another job are the ones that stay, and aren’t going to be as productive.

Yes it does. It’s only offered on an irregular basis, so for the people that would only go to McDonald’s for the McRib, and no other item, would need to be notified when it’s available.

But some who has earned a penny in interest has spent time as both worker and owner.

I’m not talking about people who only make a small amount of interest or investment return over the course of their lifetimes. I’m talking about people who are already unambiguously middle class (between 25th and 75th percentile incomes), who end up relying on investment income to provide most of their retirement expenses.

I’m talking about people with half million dollar 401(k)s that return hundreds of thousands over the course of a retirement. Some of it is principal but most of it is gains/return/interest.

Basically if you’re able to retire in America, you’re an “owner” for those decades. Yes, there are people in America who can’t afford to retire, but most people in the middle class can.

Also, its not the conventional way. You 100% made that up and what you’re describing is petite bougouise.

Defining the middle class as middle incomes is pretty conventional. I think you’ve misunderstood my description of the middle class (people who fit the definition generally have income from both work and from investment) as a definition.

So let me be perfectly clear:

1. The American middle class, defined as those with middle incomes, earns significant amounts of money from both wages/salaries for their work and on return on their investments, especially in their primary home (with a 60+% homeownership rate) and retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, 403(b)s, even multi employer or government pension funds that are paid for through investment in publicly traded securities).
2. The worker versus owner definition you proposed near the top of this thread is insufficient to describe class, because of the large, large number of people who rely on both and could not support their existing lifestyles without both.

And hey, I was gonna let it go but it’s clear your autocorrect has now adopted it as a new word it will happily let you spell wrong repeatedly: it’s spelled petit bourgeois, or petit bourgeoisie for plural.

The median net worth of a 65-year-old in the United States is about $390k, so the income it produces is generally a modest supplement to social security. At the 75th percentile, which is also generally considered middle class, net worth is about $1.1 million and easily enough to provide a comfortable retirement lifestyle.

The idea that someone is middle class because they’ve earned a penny in bank interest is absurd.

No, the idea is that the middle class (defined in the conventional way) spends time in both the “worker” category and the “owner” category.

The ordinary middle class pathway is to work for 30-50 years and then retire on their savings (or a defined contribution retirement plan) or to rely on a defined benefit pension fund that is itself invested in securities, aka capital. This is the baseline expectation of retirement planning for the middle class in the U.S.: the investments/savings provide the cash to live on, while ownership of the primary residence shields the retiree from certain housing costs, or can provide cash flow through a reverse mortgage.

Through the power of compounding, a 40+ year savings plan generally increases its value over time so that the vast majority of the value comes from return on investment rather than invested principal.

If you want specific calculations, we can do that to show that the typical middle class path takes in more than “a very small amount” in their retirement savings/investments.

Or are you planning on coming back with a load of caveats

These details are obvious from my first comment in this thread, that the middle class in the United States works its way into an “ownership class” in time for retirement, through savings/investment. That’s exactly what I meant in that comment, and spelling it out makes it pretty clear what I meant at that time, and that I haven’t shifted my position in this thread.

Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.

I’m specifically pointing out the problem with the “how they earn income” definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there’s no such thing as a middle class They’re not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as “middle class” under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.

So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn’t a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn’t earn money without their own labor).

Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).

If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I’d still point out there’s a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.