Yes, I know there are examples where he is trying to screw with big corps like Anthropic. But Anthropic is not Google.

His whole schtick seems to be getting voters to show up at the polls who otherwise don't bother to put forth the effort. I've heard it said that this was also Mamdani's trick in NYC (heck, maybe that explains why Trump is so smitten with Mamdani).

So GOP politicians do significantly better any time Trump is sharing the ballot with them. I won't be surprised if the 2026 midterms go very poorly for the GOP. And given that Trump won't ever be on a ballot again, I won't be surprised if his control over congressional GOP members starts to noticeably erode even before the midterms. They definitely know how the game works, and they are going to start looking for ways to keep their jobs.

Yeah, people were getting fed up with the chaos. Biden owes his presidency to Donald Trump, for sure. He tried several times in years prior and could not win on the merits.

Enthusiasm gap. And not during COVID. 2020 was an interesting time as you may recall.

> How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?

You will be less likely to fall prey to grifters if you look past absolute numbers and realize that the voting age population tends to increase about 10 million every four years. And with turnout generally abysmal, under 60% most times, there is a lot of room for variation.

Which Google definitely knows are not enforceable.

  * focus on abortion, which is an important issue ... mostly to evangelicals
  * focus on threats to democracy, which sounded shrill and got blown off
  * no real message on the economy, which was widely perceived as floundering under Biden, and was very important to a lot of swing voters

Then of course there's the whole "hey, let's not tell the senile old man that he basically promised to be a one-hit-wonder, and wait until the last moment to switch to his running mate instead".

In a way, it's impressive that the dems didn't lose by larger margins. Trump wasn't that popular, the dems were just that incompetent. I hope they pull their head out of their ass for 2028. But I'm not counting on it.

2020 had about 4 million more votes cast.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnou...

You could make this argument, but the Supreme Court does not seem to agree, they have consistently said that "the people" is basically everyone here. Even those unlawfully here.

That said, the second amendment does have some interpretation that allows for restrictions on temporary visa holders like the student that is the topic of this discussion. But it also has rulings that support it applying to illegal immigrants.

Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo.

In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.

This is something that I would have thought HN readers were pretty familiar with. LLMs can make my code work faster or more prolific, but with 30yoe I spend a fairly significant chunk of my work time doing anything but code.

I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.

There is certainly some logic behind the old joke about young people with no heart and old people with no brain. It's natural to become a bit more conservative as you age. Though I would clarify that I think it is natural to become more of a normal conservative; the current conservative party in the US is ... not.

If you want to pick a generation to complain about, look how hard the younger folks swung in favor of Trump in 2020 and then even more in 2024.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

Agreed, but wouldn't that be captured as 'under employment'? The stats are there for that, too, seems to be close to 20%.