There's a thread up on the sidebar about this!

I just saw a very good point: "China can stay poor a lot longer than the US can stay poor."

I have cheated a couple of times. I was stuck at having 3-of-4 mask pieces and looked up the ones I missed and, apparently, I missed a boatload.

So I'm going back and getting them and hoping that maybe I'll find something that will let me upgrade my nail because, seriously.

Someone created a masterpiece using Yakko's World song.

Trump's Tariff Song (Hats off to whoever made this; this must have taken forever)🤜🤛 pic.twitter.com/17VQlSI8G3

— Jayroo (@jayroo69) April 9, 2025

I knew about this document, but it's very interesting to hear that there might be more.

Who likes conspiracy theories?

CIA files reveal search for Hitler in South America 10 years after his suicide as Argentina prepares to release classified docs on Nazi fugitives

You know, if Argentina releases those documents as retaliation for the tariffs, we may have found the absolute funniest outcome to all of this.

Open Source Yellow Journalism. Go on Twitter and explain "I am an Economy Scientist. This Economy is in great distress."

Or "I am an Economy Scientist. This is the best Economy the world has ever seen. The red line going down is good, actually."

A flashback from 2016:

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Doubly so, if one of the judges in charge of the case rules that alternative evidence is inadmissable.

This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out

I've met one or two smart people before. They were pretty cool. They didn't have gummint jobs.

Maybe part of the WTO or something.

Yeah. You, like me, have met pretty smart people.

And here we are.

I probably wouldn't consider India a first world country but they're getting there (and good for them). Street beggars have smartphones now and it wouldn't surprise me if India is a first world country in the next couple of decades.

Eh, I'm not a fan of tariffs at all. If the other guy is shooting himself in the foot, why join him?

As for the whole labor rights/workforce safety standards thing, I get it and wouldn't want to argue against it but those things are gameable in practice with Potemkin factories and the like and it'd end up being a pain in practice (though I get it in theory).

I don't know that he's lying. I'm sure that he believes everything he's saying, just as he believed that there was a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank.

Please do not take my saying you shouldn't trust him as me saying that he is not earnest.

I'm sure he's earnest as hell.

So I guess Trump did blink.

Say what you will about Voldemort, but he would have seen it through.

If you trust anything that Beauchamp says, I've got a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank to sell you.

"Those conspiracy theorists are crazy! Besides, this is evidence for *MY* position!"

He Truth Socialed this morning that "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!"

This was about four hours prior to the tariff announcement.

As someone who thinks that tariffs are pretty much always bad ("just because your opponent shoots himself in the foot doesn't mean you should"), I do think that China has engaged in bad action over the last few decades when it comes to IP theft and whatnot.

Moving our manufacturing over there means that we're giving them our blueprints and they can build an identical factory next door to the one we're renting and make the same stuff to the same specs and sell it for just-above-cost and undercut the ever-living itshay out of American designs.

Which is bad.

And so we're in a place where we can't make it on US soil because we can't afford to pay people what they'd require to do the work and the people who will do the work for pennies are willing to do the work for pennies because they're stealing it. In the short term it looks great... and in the medium term, we're out of business.

So tariffs, as retaliation for stuff like IP theft, makes sense to me. It's a weird backwards protectionism in that it's an attempt to protect IP rather than industry itself.

And it's still a very blunt instrument that probably won't work to disincent doing it again next time.

But it's better than, say, war. Or a depression.

A pretty good insight from a since-deleted tweet. (It wasn't mine but since the guy deleted it immediately after posting it, I'm guessing he doesn't want to be associated with its authorship.)

Trump is going to play with market for the next year. One tweet it goes down and another it goes up. He will be like the master of the world.

and then one day, the market won't go up with his tweet.

Everybody knows that *MY* industry should be protected somewhat against malevolent actors who are abusing "so-called" free trade.

It's those other tariffs that are bad. It's in Adam Smith!

He has a number of folks he doesn't respect explaining that tariffs are bad but he also has a number of folks he does respect explaining that tariffs are bad. Meanwhile, the only folks who are saying that tariffs are good are people he doesn't respect.

It's not a *DEDUCTIVE* argument but it *IS* an inductive one.

(And, let's face it, if I wanted to argue for tariffs at all, easy mode would be "reciprocal tariffs against fellow first world nations". The fact that a non-zero number of fellow first world nations reluctantly dropped their own tariffs would be an argument *FOR* reciprocal tariffs in practice even for someone who is a market fundamentalist in theory.)

Here's the Tweet from the White House.

NEW TRUTH SOCIAL FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP:

🇨🇳125% TARIFF ON CHINA
🌎90-DAY PAUSE & LOWERED 10% RECIPROCAL TARIFF FOR OTHER COUNTRIES

🚨EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

ThTh3: multiple government agencies have already announced that it came from a lab leak.

Granted, these are intelligence agencies and not scientific ones... but we've got multiple agencies that have already announced their conclusions (to this point).

That's one hell of a strong signal to undecideds and weak Republicans. "Hey! This guy feels about markets the way that *I* do! He's even willing to take on his own side!"

Yeah. And then there will be only three things we do better than anyone else.

Music.
Movies.
High-speed pizza delivery.

The report said "COVID-19-like symptoms could have been caused by other respiratory infections".

And so we're merely in a place where we don't know, we just know that these guys came back with symptoms that could have been lots of things and it was pre-outbreak so, of course!, they didn't test for it.

The only notable thing about the report at all is that it wasn't released until just recently.

I do wish we got more into what the specific symptoms were... that way we could differentiate between something that causes lack of taste for a while versus, say, the common cold.