Dude, it's awesome that you found that. I couldn't get past Google explaining to me that I couldn't vape indoors and those things didn't exist in the early 1900s anyway.

THANK YOU!!!

Whenever I post, I get sent to a message like this:

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probably Niels Juul an Illinois state senator at the time and later a us representative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Juul

might also have been on the mind of Briggs because his son Herb Juul was a Major League baseball player around this time. He's actually higher ranked in relevant internet searches around 'chicago' 'Illinois' 'juul' '1913' despite having a Major League career only slightly longer than Doc Moonlight Graham's

Something Chait muses about over at the Atlantic and something I'd agonized about right after the election in November, was that this is a historically massive own goal on Trumps' part. All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from "The economy is garbage" to "The economy is great thanks to me" and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with "the genius of Trump" nonsense. Trump utterly cratering the economy is, politically, the less dangerous thing he could have done vis a vis trying to topple the electoral order. It'd be a lot harder to try it with a hostile populace and congress controlled by the Dems which Trump seems to be working hard to conjure.

Once again, don't be fooled by the naked idiocy- there's no deeper scheme; they really just are idiots. Cold comfort but that's something.

In theory congress could knock this whole flaming edifice of feces down. The law Trump is using to impose these tariffs obligates Congress to weigh in on it. The current congress actually fiddled with their legislative calendar (IIRC) to functionally make their entire legislative session "day one" of this term specifically to evade a legally required vote on Trumps tarrifs. A new congress (in less than 2 years) or even this congress, if they notice the whining of the rails under their feet or the shrieking of their (suddenly much less) wealthy paymasters could put an end to this stuff with a vote.

But I'm very glad you saw the writing on the wall and jumped off near the peak.

I'm looking at retirement in the next couple of years, so I switched to mostly cash a few weeks back.

The last time we saw anything this idiotic was Smoot-Hawley. At least that was voted on by Congress, so the perpetrators could be gotten rid of in a couple years. Now that Congress has inexplicably ceded that authority to the president, we have 4 years of this idiocy.

Oh for sure, I'm in the same boat. Not planning on looking at my 401(k) until approximately 2029 but I've got at least twenty some working years still ahead of me, maybe more once social security is converted into an exotic reverse equity investment portfolio of some kind. Really tough morning though, and potentially many more to come for anyone who thought they were retiring in the immediate future.

It's only sane if you believe it's going to result in major reinvestment in low skill manufacturing in the US, so things may be (way) more expensive but there are more jobs that may or may not be preferable to restaurants and retail. Of course you have to be stupid to believe that's a likely outcome, which he is.

The only tariff that makes any sense are those on China and that's only because some sacrifice is worth it to strangle a motivated, highly hostile adversary wherever we can. What we should really be doing is loosening and harmonizing trade with the free world and not exactly free Asian countries on condition they impose similar restrictions on the Chinese.

I can't even with this sane washing: "Trump’s Tariffs Are Latest Sign of His Second-Term Appetite for Risk

President Trump’s announcement went beyond most predictions, showing a greater willingness to follow his instincts even when critics — and some allies — consider failure a likely outcome."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/politics/trumps-tariffs-risks-second-term.html

One China in theory, two in practice. For example, Taiwan has long had permission to buy almost leading edge US weapons systems that China would never get. Taiwan has purchased both Patriot and HIMARS missile systems. There is active discussion to let them buy Excalibur artillery rounds. Remember when F-35 deliveries were curtailed after it was discovered that some parts supplier had included Chinese magnets? The F-35 incorporates integrated circuits fabbed in Taiwan without any complaints.

On this 'liberation day' I'm reminded of Norm's clip about going to war ... with the World.

Maybe just start with a hemisphere or some ripe continent spoiling for a fight and see how that goes first.https://t.co/Qque9xdxQ2

— Marchmaine (@Marchmaine) April 2, 2025

It's also right after we were breathlessly and repeatedly told Biden was showing no signs of age.

The other massive issue is: How big a problem is this? It could be first-sign-of-fascism-torture... or it could be extreme outliers selected for being extreme outliers.

Trump's people could illegally arrest/imprison/deport 100 US citizens this year and it would be a serious improvement because the system averages 200.

We have about 11 million illegal immigrants living in the USA at the moment. In a normal year ICE will deport about a quarter of a million. If Trump tries to deport our way out of this mess then we will see a massive uptick in deportations that will be easily noticeable, negatively affect the economy, and won't be hidable.

If you want to worry about illegal immigrants then worry about hundreds of thousands, not dozens.

The Bar Associations still control access to the courts through licensing and since most legislators have a lawyer background, that isn't going away. Plus the attempts at using AI in law have been an utter disaster, especially in the Court room but I'm guessing AI will make a muck of contracts, wills, and other legal documents as well.

One of the big problems that is going to have to be overcome is the whole "that's not true! That's a conspiracy theory!" thing.

Remember when TDA being in charge of an apartment complex in Aurora was a conspiracy theory? Well, as it turns out, it ended up being true. The authorities (including the 4th Estate, for some reason) was very interested in making sure that we all knew that the rumors of TDA being in Denver were exaggerations.

Oh, so now as part of the cleanup, we find out that TDA was here and all that? And in getting rid of TDA, we're getting rid of people who aren't part of TDA?

You're going to have to get the really good people in charge of asking for empathy. Having them be the same people as the folks who sneered at the conspiracy theorists is going to have results that you're not going to like.