“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.”
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).
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.
1 week ago
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.
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.)
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!"
Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan's governor) gave a speech saying "look, I like tariffs too, but this is just nuts!" and Jared Polis (Colorado's governor) responded by saying that nobody should like tariffs because tariffs are bad for everybody (and adds a note about how sanctions can be cool, though).
He saw a really funny and insightful meme and wanted to share it.
I was hoping it was the Trump as Voldemort image where Voldemort has bad hair and is yelling "MAKE HOGWARTS GREAT AGAIN!" but Trump as Kim Jong Orange is good too.
With memes that good, you don't even need an argument.
I'd like to point out that music and movies have really fallen off in the last decade or so.
AI is surprisingly good at microcode and it hasn't shown indications that it's stopped getting better at it.
Pizza technology advancements have slowed (but not stopped). The small-batch artisanal stuff is surprisingly good while, at the same time, Costco's $9.99 16" Pepperoni pie's only rival in value is the $1.50 hot dog.
2 weeks ago
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
I don't remember her walking back from her 2020 positions. I *DO* remember her defenders arguing "she didn't run on that!" instead of "she reversed herself!"
I don't think that the language is how we got Trump as much as I think that the failure to compromise on stuff is how we got him.
I also think that there was quite a cultural backlash against the Mostly Peaceful Summer and covid-lockdowns continuing into 2022... and that's without getting into the immigration debacle and the crime numbers (that ended up actually going up instead of down after all of the smoke cleared).
Biden was the compromise. And Harris said that she wouldn't have changed anything.
I'd say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!
The problem is that he didn't govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden's doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that's fine.
But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then... well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.
As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!
And that's without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like "but she didn't *RUN* on that!"
And so you're stuck with the Harris attacks being "here's what she said on camera" which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.
Why doesn't the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?
I don't think that those same voters will talk about wringing out the rot. If I thought that even one out of twenty of them knew who von Mises was, I'd feel better about things.
But there's the "what those same voters think" and there's the "what I think" and there isn't a whole lot of overlap there.
There are a handful of goals that overlap, though. That's probably incidental.
The question, as always, is "what are you willing to compromise on?"
And if the answer is that all of your beliefs are too precious to compromise on, then... here we are. With a group of people who also are unwilling to compromise.
Maybe you can throw together a list of reasons that it's morally incumbent on two groups of people who disagree with each other to compromise and work together.
If you think that if someone believes a set of right things and a set of wrong things gives you an out against agreeing with them where they are right because of how offensive you find their wrongness, you're effectively putting a tariff on truth.
And the person who is getting the short end of the stick in that is "everybody".
But I also don't know that their perceptions will shift to "I will vote for whomever promises cheaper imported electronics".
I don't know that it won't... but I don't know that it will.
As for a recession, I go back to my von Mises. We need to wring out the rot. It's going to hurt. It's going to *SUCK*. But we need to wring out the rot. Not wringing out the rot got us here. Kicking the can down the road will make the eventual wringing even worse.
Well, I suppose that denial that a large number of American producer types got the short end of the stick during the global outsourcing thing over the last few decades is a good play.
Worked well so far.
Maybe it will continue to work as well as it has so far.
It took approximately 3 seconds for people to start calling DeSantis worse than Trump during the 4 seconds that DeSantis was ahead of Trump during the 2023-2024 primary season.
I'm not quite sure that we've escaped the hyperreality of the moment.
But maybe a trade war will bring us back down to reality...
That strikes me as a lot more likely to normalize Naziism than to crush it.
But I'm one of those people who sees the American ex-Producers as not particularly Naziish and conflating what they are with what happened in the 30s and 40s is not going to work out in the favor of the people who keep nominating Clintons and Kamalas.
"There’s a (IMO good) case to be made for a correction and tariffs may well be part of it."
It looks like a substantial portion of the American ex-Producer market feels like it was defected against and is now part of defecting back.
I have a handful of suggestions for putting things right again... but the first step is acknowledging that something bad happened and the something bad involved defecting against the American ex-Producers.
But doing that involves, among other things, agreeing with Trump.
2 weeks ago
One thing that I've seen over and over again is some variant of this argument:
"It's possible to have done the tariffs correctly but this isn't how to do them! They should have done them like this..." and then they rattle off a handful of ways that the tariffs should have been done instead.
Trump's biggest weapon is that he appears to be directionally correct to huge numbers of his critics, just inept at execution.
The market fundamentalists have been singing their same song as since the 90's, of course. Tariffs are bad, they're always bad, you're costing yourself money, so on and so forth. Anyone who has argued with Libertarians over the last 30 years has these arguments memorized.
The whole "libertarian" thing is played out, though. Low-status. The new hotness is arguing "other industries than the one I'm in should not have tariffs... Trump should have *SOME* tariffs but he shouldn't be doing them the way that he is doing them! He should do them like this..."
The commenter archive features may be temporarily disabled at times.
I just saw a very good point: "China can stay poor a lot longer than the US can stay poor."
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:
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).
So I guess Trump did blink.
Say what you will about Voldemort, but he would have seen it through.
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.)
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.
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.
More Market Fundamentalism vs. Well You Have To Understand:
Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan's governor) gave a speech saying "look, I like tariffs too, but this is just nuts!" and Jared Polis (Colorado's governor) responded by saying that nobody should like tariffs because tariffs are bad for everybody (and adds a note about how sanctions can be cool, though).
In related news, China has filed a complaint with the WTO.
"As good as the median programmer" is still pretty darn good.
He saw a really funny and insightful meme and wanted to share it.
I was hoping it was the Trump as Voldemort image where Voldemort has bad hair and is yelling "MAKE HOGWARTS GREAT AGAIN!" but Trump as Kim Jong Orange is good too.
With memes that good, you don't even need an argument.
I'd like to point out that music and movies have really fallen off in the last decade or so.
AI is surprisingly good at microcode and it hasn't shown indications that it's stopped getting better at it.
Pizza technology advancements have slowed (but not stopped). The small-batch artisanal stuff is surprisingly good while, at the same time, Costco's $9.99 16" Pepperoni pie's only rival in value is the $1.50 hot dog.
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Most of the tariffs are unpopular. The ones for my industry have a lot of local support.
It's those other ones that we don't need.
Oh, yeah. Fracking. Yeah, you'd think that more people would give her credit on that.
I don't remember her walking back from her 2020 positions. I *DO* remember her defenders arguing "she didn't run on that!" instead of "she reversed herself!"
I don't think that the language is how we got Trump as much as I think that the failure to compromise on stuff is how we got him.
I also think that there was quite a cultural backlash against the Mostly Peaceful Summer and covid-lockdowns continuing into 2022... and that's without getting into the immigration debacle and the crime numbers (that ended up actually going up instead of down after all of the smoke cleared).
Biden was the compromise. And Harris said that she wouldn't have changed anything.
I'd say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!
The problem is that he didn't govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden's doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that's fine.
But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then... well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.
As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!
And that's without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like "but she didn't *RUN* on that!"
And so you're stuck with the Harris attacks being "here's what she said on camera" which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.
Why doesn't the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?
Yeah, you'd think that they would.
Oh, I wouldn't suggest that DeSantis is a compromise candidate.
I would, however, suggest that he is not as bad as Trump.
I would not, for example, call DeSantis "God's Punishment".
As for what I might expect from others, I's expect fewer to compare DeSantis to Hitler or compare DeSantis supporters to Nazis.
Or maybe that's just where we are now. Anybody who disagrees with me is Ontologically Evil.
It might explain how we got Trump, now that I think about it.
I don't think that those same voters will talk about wringing out the rot. If I thought that even one out of twenty of them knew who von Mises was, I'd feel better about things.
But there's the "what those same voters think" and there's the "what I think" and there isn't a whole lot of overlap there.
There are a handful of goals that overlap, though. That's probably incidental.
Well, this goes back to the whole NAFTA thing. Was NAFTA supposed to make their lives better?
They don't seem to agree that their lives are better.
Maybe you could point out the GDP again. Point out how much better off you are.
The question, as always, is "what are you willing to compromise on?"
And if the answer is that all of your beliefs are too precious to compromise on, then... here we are. With a group of people who also are unwilling to compromise.
Maybe you can throw together a list of reasons that it's morally incumbent on two groups of people who disagree with each other to compromise and work together.
If you think that if someone believes a set of right things and a set of wrong things gives you an out against agreeing with them where they are right because of how offensive you find their wrongness, you're effectively putting a tariff on truth.
And the person who is getting the short end of the stick in that is "everybody".
I don't think that "bordering on autistic" is an insult when you're actually talking to people who are "bordering on autistic".
It certainly not an argument for those people to change.
Of course it's worth mentioning.
But I also don't know that their perceptions will shift to "I will vote for whomever promises cheaper imported electronics".
I don't know that it won't... but I don't know that it will.
As for a recession, I go back to my von Mises. We need to wring out the rot. It's going to hurt. It's going to *SUCK*. But we need to wring out the rot. Not wringing out the rot got us here. Kicking the can down the road will make the eventual wringing even worse.
Well, I suppose that denial that a large number of American producer types got the short end of the stick during the global outsourcing thing over the last few decades is a good play.
Worked well so far.
Maybe it will continue to work as well as it has so far.
It took approximately 3 seconds for people to start calling DeSantis worse than Trump during the 4 seconds that DeSantis was ahead of Trump during the 2023-2024 primary season.
I'm not quite sure that we've escaped the hyperreality of the moment.
But maybe a trade war will bring us back down to reality...
That strikes me as a lot more likely to normalize Naziism than to crush it.
But I'm one of those people who sees the American ex-Producers as not particularly Naziish and conflating what they are with what happened in the 30s and 40s is not going to work out in the favor of the people who keep nominating Clintons and Kamalas.
Oh, I'm not trying to excuse Trump as much as I see him as God's Punishment.
(Of course I agree that we should have bilateral 0 industrial tariffs with Europe.)
"There’s a (IMO good) case to be made for a correction and tariffs may well be part of it."
It looks like a substantial portion of the American ex-Producer market feels like it was defected against and is now part of defecting back.
I have a handful of suggestions for putting things right again... but the first step is acknowledging that something bad happened and the something bad involved defecting against the American ex-Producers.
But doing that involves, among other things, agreeing with Trump.
One thing that I've seen over and over again is some variant of this argument:
"It's possible to have done the tariffs correctly but this isn't how to do them! They should have done them like this..." and then they rattle off a handful of ways that the tariffs should have been done instead.
Trump's biggest weapon is that he appears to be directionally correct to huge numbers of his critics, just inept at execution.
The market fundamentalists have been singing their same song as since the 90's, of course. Tariffs are bad, they're always bad, you're costing yourself money, so on and so forth. Anyone who has argued with Libertarians over the last 30 years has these arguments memorized.
The whole "libertarian" thing is played out, though. Low-status. The new hotness is arguing "other industries than the one I'm in should not have tariffs... Trump should have *SOME* tariffs but he shouldn't be doing them the way that he is doing them! He should do them like this..."