The west coast doesn’t actually have pipelines to receive oil from the mountain/Midwest regions, and Alaska has been declining for a while now. So California mostly gets oil from Brazil (not affected) and Iraq (affected).

There are much easier ways of increasing the oil prices that don't have as much drawbacks as trump's war. Of course, for _some_ reason most people and countries prefer _lowering_ oil prices.

> since their [...] refineries are unaffected

Unfortunately not the case. There are an odd number of refinery issues happening across the US lately.

None of the Trump administrations actions look objectively different than what a foreign adversary would do to destroy the United States of America. It's staring us all in the face every day. My children will pay for this their entire fucking lives.

China is even worse than Russia on that matter. Before the invasion to Ukraine, Russia was heavily involved in Syria, Chechnia and other conflicts and with that experience it failed miserably. China, with all its posturing, military wise is even worse than Russia. That's why all it can do is propaganda war on social media to weaken American society.

How is that "saving grace" in any way

The flip side is that the US isn't used to fighting anything other than asymmetric warfare / insurgencies / terrorism against people who can't project force and can't really hit back. We park valuable assets out in the open on military bases and installations around the world, and don't do anything to shelter them or even move them around during a conflict because of hubris.

Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.

Ah, 'demand destruction', which in sounds positive in theory but in practice will likely mean poverty, famine and 'population reduction'.

In the short term, Trump is actually paying people to stop existing solar and wind projects and is not exactly open to new ones starting up. So.. oil it is then.

It's nice to be optimistic, but we already have incentives to upgrade to renewable energy.

Iranians were scoring direct hits on top priority infrastructure in the first days of the conflict. Only in the last couple of weeks has US media started to report the extensive damaged visited upon the (now mostly abandoned) US bases in the gulf.

Its really difficult to overstate the level of strategic defeat that has occurred here.

> I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.

I think we'll have that answer shortly after trump and xi have their little meeting, but I agree with you.

The situation in Europe is even more crazy. The US needs the bases in Europe to project power in the Middle East. If every country in Europe would ask the US to leave then the US would have a very serious issue projecting power around the world.

The US bases are also pretty expensive to set up. Lots of logistic support has to be in place to let those bases function. That require a lot of support from the host country. Normally, you would expect the US to be friendly with the host countries, but that seems lost on the current administration.

What is really wrong is that it is known that russia is fighting in Ukraine with drones designed in Iran. And we have seen how hard it is for US designed weapons to deal with those drones. To the point that a lot of development is happening in Ukraine to deal with this problem.

By attacking Iran, the US has shown the world that Ukraine is the weapon supplier of choice against future drone wars.

> The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line

As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.

It's such a lose-lose for everyone

The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....

If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...

I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore.

European here (from Spain), and the overwhelming majority of people I know are hoping for the removal of the bases. They are worried, yes... worried that it's just grandstanding and it's not really going to get done (which is likely, because those bases have always been there mainly for the benefit of the US).

Which US bases were destroyed?

> But somehow competence has completely vanished.

It was pushed out, by force.

When the war is fought over literal nuclear weapons, you should not be so tongue-in-cheek about calling a war nuclear.

> Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline.

It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.

I'm from Iran (now living in the West), there's a famous Shia motto: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala".

Around 30% of the population are die hard IRGC supporters, another 10% are neutral and the rest don't like the regime.

The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.

The IRGC has more support than ever now. It's a battle for the Iran now against United States, attempting to destroy people's homes.

I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.

Iranians are not going give up, right now, you will have to kill all 90M of us to "win".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashura

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karbala

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests

> For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible.

As others point out Iran had their own fair share of issues and there were protests but now they have a common enemy to fight. Most likely it keeps galvanizing people in the Middle East against US and then Americans wonder why people chant - Death to...But then again this shows average American has no clue about different cultures and the best analysis is - Iran is done, just like how Taliban was done right?

“ For the US, the only pain is inflation”

That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that

Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.

While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.

Besides inflation, American has other problems like running out of missiles and bombs. This war is about attrition, and American weapons are being attrited faster than Iranian ones.

The war is not over, but I would not count out the Iranians going for another strategic goal not mentioned in the GP post: make is so that the American president that attacked Iran loses the midterm big time.

It doesn't matter who "wins" the war, it's already a strategic loss for the US, like every single conflict the US went into since ww2. If they can't just blow the problem away with bombs they invariably and inevitably fuck it up, and as it turns out you can't bomb away that many problems

And if Iran drops or threatens just a single nuke, I doubt there will be left any arguments.

> For the US, the only pain is inflation

That and its trust and geopolitical influence even among allies being quickly eroded to the benefit of countries like China.

Inflation and ammo stockpiles are easier to fix.

And all of the options / predictions market money being made by insiders who know the next episode in the soap opera before it happens.

So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?

And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war. It’s a complaint that doesn’t make sense unless one is jd Vance.

The difference is obvious.

> because if Iran gets to keep their approx 1000lbs all they have to do is make a simple gun-type device and sail it into New York City

You need to stop watching too many movies and/or conspiracy videos. Given how security has gotten tighter it is impossible to "sail it into New York City". The budgets for nearly every 3 letter agency is up. The only reason to make up such absurd points is to get more funding for the agencies or just continuing the war.

> all they have to do is

US IC assessment is Iran is 5-10y away from delivery tech, and there's no imminent threat.

And yet again, even in these hypotheticals, New Yorkers suffer for decisions they didn't make and don't want. Why don't they sail it into Florida?

> It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment;

How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.

Easy. There has been no "almost complete dismantling of the Iranian military" and anyone saying so is lying or deeply propagandized.

> Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike,

No? https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/iran-war-russia-putin-t...

  > Data suggests that Moscow has already made billions of dollars of additional 
  > revenue from oil sales because of higher crude prices, as well as the fact 
  > that the United States temporarily rescinded sanctions on Russia to rein in 
  > global costs

At this point I doubt anything could make stock market go down... It seems that there is no connection to anything but itself.

Did the stock market come out ahead? The Dow is about where it was when this started.

I will say, this past inflation spike has completely broken the assumptions I had from 1970s economics that employers would raise their 'cost of living' raises to keep pace with inflation. My employer seems to think 2.5% is fine, as they've done it multiple years in recent past with only one extraordinary year netting 4%. I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'

> only 1% attributable to food and fuel

What do you mean by this? If adding food and fuel raises CPI by 1%, then the food and fuel prices have necessarily raised by _more_ than the combined 3.8%.

Ah fuel and food - those classic unimportant things.

For most Americans (aka: not the top 5% like SWEs), food and fuel increases hurt a lot.

I think you're misinterpreting that. Everything other than food and fuel went up 2.8%. Everything (including food and fuel) went up 3.8%. Therefore food and fuel went up more than 3.8%.

Part of the reason people voted for "no more wars" was because of the long history of more wars from both parties. Desperate people make desperate choices.

I feel like wages have stagnated too, but data says it has been keeping up (barely) with inflation: https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

That's what you call stagnating wages?

State and local governments care?

As you’d expect from the staggeringly low (by international, 1st world standards) turnout

The very first time I thought "That's it, Trump is done, it's over" is when he complained wages were too high in the US.

Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.

This is the story overall of strategic bombing campaigns. All they do is strengthen the resolve of the recipient country and rally people to the flag.

Before using the nuclear weapons on Japan, we literally firebombed every city in Japan BUT Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And arguably the only reason they surrendered when they did was because Russia was beginning a large scale invasion of their own.

People who call themselves "foreign policy experts" but advocate for regime change through bombing are not serious people, and the fact that we have treated them as such for so long is an indictment on our collective intelligence.

You are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.

Our household income is less than the US household median. So that price increase on milk does feel a bit more stingy than I'd like to be.

    You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.

If X goes up in price, then Y and Z will have increased demand, and end up also going up in price..

Just because you don't drink milk, doesn't mean that you'll be unaffected.

A better source is the USDA AMS which surveys the prices of several different milk products in retail outlets in many cities. They do this not only for milk but many common foods. The data goes back decades.

Example report https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/fil...

up and down 15% every 3 months? if that's the case then I take my comment back. I am not super aware of how milk pricing works.

This has serious "the climate changes naturally" energy.

you’re not totally wrong but it’s not the outright lie you seem to imply. things like tweaks to the “standard basket” that they claim are in line with consumer preferences, which themselves changed because of inflation, for example, are one way we get a sort of hidden shrink flation.

idk, I read an analysis recently that retail investors in funds like the S&P500 are breaking how the stock market is "supposed" to work since people keep pumping the same money every month for retirement into the same 500 companies (or whatever an index is funding) without consequence to their actions, so they're never punished. Line goes up. The purchasing power of the masses outweighs the old brokerage class that decided which companies succeeded based on "real merits".

M2 is only up $1T in 7 months or am I missing something?

Ok, benefits no one other than Israel AND American warlords.

Only certain types of contractors, and likely only in the short term.

Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will happily approve tax dollars going to the military industrial complex when their constituents view the US as the global protector of democracy. Wars like this one that aren't popular and make us look like thugs open the floor up to anti-military candidates. So yeah, the companies building missiles do well while the war is on, but the people like me who automate military fuel farms see budget cuts and projects cancelled.

I wonder if it does benefit arms R&D folks. At least, as someone not too well informed on the military stuff, it looks like the moral of the story has been that our high-end stuff hasn’t functioned as well as the price tag lead us to expect, and a bunch of cheap drones might be the way to go.

If I worked in military R&D I’d be worried that focus might shift away from the more speculative/less delivery-oriented/fun to work on products…

The mayor's rock-throwing spree is doing wonders for growth in the town's window repair sector!

China is going to be selling solar panels and EVs at triple the previously projected rate after this crisis.

Soooo just to be clear here with your argument:

The USA was doing something to guarantee that stuff can flow through it, then they start a war, now they can no longer guarantee this?

Did they suddenly loose the power to protect this flow?

Just because USA is war mongering, doesn't mean no one else would have stepped up or that it wouldn't be better without all of this involvment.

How is closing the strait a continuation of a legacy of guaranteed safe passage?

This is some extraordinary up-is-down construction. Hormuz was open in February, and for decades preceding that. It's closed now. How is this situation the result of the "guarantee of safe passage of shipping", exactly?

We probably aren't missing anything. It just can't happen right now because if the stock market capitulates then it does so for years and everyone loses a bunch of money. Their only option is to hope for some kind of end or bailout or whatever that keeps getting further away, and they've pushed that hope way past reason.

> But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?

The current rally is extremely narrow, mostly just AI/Big Tech and chip stocks. But yeah, the "market" appears to believe that this will all be over soon, which seems unlikely to me.

I should invest a non-trivial amount. That usually results in markets trending down.

> what are we missing here?

Markets is just gambling but the gamblers wear suits and pretend things are respectable.

It doesn't need to make sense, line just needs to go up. It works until it doesn't.

> But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?

You are missing that the current governance is very ready to print money to bailout any situation. The market can go down in nominal value but still up in dollar's.

I wonder how many Americans realize that their soft power is dead. Will it cost them?

i don't own a car, i bike everywhere with young kids. i like public transport. we're not talking about that. people fucking LOVE cars. they LOVE single family homes. everywhere, in every community.

The perspective from over here in HN land is very skewed.

According to the US Census, median household income in 2024 was $80,000. Add federal and state income tax* of 30%, and you're left with $56,000. Rent in lower-cost areas is around $12,000 ($1k/mo.) and health insurance (assuming ACA, not fancy private plans) is another $7000. Utility prices vary wildly but average something like $450-500 (so $6000 per year). if you don't live in a particularly high-cost area and skip luxuries like home Internet service or media subscriptions.

That's just over $30,000 left over per year for all household expenses, including "luxuries" like food, clothes, and car and home maintenance. Heaven forbid you have loans (car, student, etc.) or any revolving credit debt.

The difference between $5k and $10k in fuel costs is therefore easily 15% vs. 35% of total "inessential" spending. With food and other goods consistently been driven up by inflation and tariffs, there's just no margin for an "average" family.

(Sources vary for the above; US Census comes data from its own website, rent from TIME, health costs from Forbes, and utilities from move.org. Feel free to find better reference numbers if you doubt the above.)

*- yes, not all states charge income tax; most of the ones that don't have other taxes (sales, gas, property) to make up the gap

> The average family spends something like $5,000 on gas a year, maybe $10k.

Half of that.

https://www.fool.com/money/research/gas-prices/

You're forgetting the downstream effects of high gas prices though

In 2015, the US lifted its ban on exporting domestic oil. Since then, US domestic pricing has been linked to the global price.

This means that "domestic production" does not mean what you imply (which is "domestic production that must be sold in the US.") If US producers can make more money selling 100% of domestic production overseas, they will do that.

This is not price-fixing, it is the predictable outcome of a market design where US drivers bid against Asian airlines for petroleum products.

Oil is fungible. Oil producers are going to sell it to whoever pays the most. There is no law that says US oil producers have to sell it to US customers. Having domestic supply does nothing to insulate US consumers from higher prices.

Many products are shipped half way across the US on semi trucks, that hits everyone’s pockets even if you drive an EV.

Train’s move around vast amounts of freight but they got optimized for coat per ton for coal, wheat, etc not latency. Which then plays havoc if you try and do just in time manufacturing etc using them. Airfare and thus airfreight is simply dominated by fuel costs which hits many industries in ways that are less obvious but still expensive.

The transaction costs of selling the median home is like $40k. Buys a lot of gas.

How often do you buy groceries? How are groceries transited over to your local store?

They might support it in spirit, but an actual invasion of the US would be pretty difficult to pull off.

I can see sanctions though, maybe a re-shuffling of alliances where China becomes the world's default Adult In The Room.

They will just pay the toll.

Or they finally tell Trump to fuck off as he as no tariff leverage any more as their economies are cooked anyway?

It is funny watching economies like Japan -- where their new prime minister was fluffing Trump like crazy -- get fully screwed.

They have more dictators in store it seems.

Jumps by 15%!

Don't you know that on HN, if the theory does not agree with the facts about US, so much the worse for the facts.