September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
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September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
roenxi · · focus · HN ↗
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
ericmay · · focus · HN ↗
How are you supposing that it looks like the US may crumble? I don’t understand where these kinds of comments come from, aside from perhaps verbalizing something one might want to see instead of what is factually true.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
The US has canceled all military guarantees and aligned with two different fascist states, so military cooperation is unwinding.
It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
ericmay · · focus · HN ↗
That's not what a decoupling looks like. Investors are probably just not buying because they know rates are going to go up. The Federal Reserve already strongly signaled another rate hike by end of year. Why would you buy something today that you can wait and buy for a better price later?
Second, if you want to make an argument about interest rates or the debt, you first have to make that argument and resolve it for the UK, Italy, France, and others.
Third, the USD is just the dominant reserve currency. It's not the only one. A reserve currency is just one that banks hold in reserve. The reason the US is involved in the Middle East is to protect the Petro-dollar which generally "requires" oil purchases to be settled in dollars. The trade off is we keep Iran in check from destroying the gulf countries.
> The US is the most oil-dependent country (although all western countries are quite dependent on it) and it cut off its own supply of oil.
This doesn't make any sense. The US is also the largest oil and gas producing country in the world. Even for the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea you can read for yourself that the US has been able to break through and Saudi Arabia has quickly repaired the east-west pipeline and 3.5+ million barrels are flowing through there now (IIRC 60% or so of pre-attack volume). Either way, most of those flows go to Europe and Asia, not the US. So while the US is oil dependent (all countries are) I don't think your assertion is entirely accurate.
> It's been unable to manufacture anything effectively for a while now as all the money gets siphoned off corruptly (identical to Russia in the Ukraine war), not even the weapons used in Israel.
That doesn't make any sense either. We manufacture all kinds of things, including incredibly advanced equipment. We make airplanes, we make semiconductors, pharmaceutical goods.
> What else is there to being an empire? Its nuclear aircraft carriers - with no aircraft since they run on oil?
If we don't have oil neither does anyone else. Except that we do have oil so our nuclear powered aircraft carriers would just use our own oil for the jets.