Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
The following is a nakedly partisan take, but that's because you asked for a poll of opinions. These are my sincerely held beliefs; there's no room for anyone to argue me out of them, but I'm not expecting anyone to share it, either: there is simply no good faith left at all in my heart. my political opponents, and they will never operate in good faith. There is no negotiation in existential conflict. There is only the will and the power to act.
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
26d ago
You started your post with:
Why Should I Care? To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
26d ago
I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
I've been here the whole time. Lurking is just my natural state. This is the only forum I've participated in across thirty odd years on the internet.
What's your personal solution to this problem?
It's always been easy on a personal level. I have some innate affinity for and take pleasure from responsibility, returning the shopping cart, and working towards the flourishing of family/community/nation/humanity in that order. I appreciate that this is not a generalizable solution, although it's one I wish we could evangelize.
If one's moral framework is entirely built around one's own pleasure and benefit (or limbic gratification as you say), then sure, none of the above matter and anything I say will fall on deaf ears. There's no logical argument I can provide to convince you that I'm right. But frankly, not calling your parents or raising your children or treating your wife well or reading books or staying fit is, for lack of a better term, a bitch move, no? At the risk of typical-minding after already admitting I'm weird, I think nearly every man has this urge or understands what I mean when I say that.
Both sides of the aisle generally agree that the left fails to provide role models for men. Someone needs to wrest the banner of self-improvement, fitness, hygiene, stoicism, etc. from the Tates of the world and divorce it from the more toxic aspects of masculinity.
They just need a better physique and more charisma than I can muster.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
The time is ripe for the birth of a new religion. Gather thy flocks, and adapt thy sermons to tiktok.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
26d ago
'I hate it,' quoth the hater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
Well I hope you voted to acquit or you have some terrible karma.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
30d ago
If what you're doing deserves to be treated with dignity and without antagonism, you should not be shamed! In fact, it will probably be very difficult to shame you if you actually know that you're conducting yourself in a dignified fashion and feel strongly that the people who suggest otherwise are in the wrong.
I doubt this very much. Someone immigrating from a country where women are expected to bare their breasts in public would be readily shamed walking around downtown NYC. Conversely, I've met women in the Peace Corps who ended up in countries where they were shamed for wearing shirts and went with the flow, despite their discomfort. A hedge fund manager would be shamed mercilessly were he transplanted to a trailer park in a suit with a briefcase full of whatever they put in their briefcases, and a trailer park bro would be shamed for driving his ATV around Martha's vineyard. Self-righteousness won't get you very far if you're literally being ostracized by every person you meet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
Happy to, conditional on:
- You bothering to write more than lazy, snarky, single sentence replies to minimize the asymmetry of effort between us.
- Define outgroup.
- Define good faith.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.' Rather than grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe, we built massive tractors and combines to the work of dozens? Hundreds? of men. And more cynically, we outsourced the production lines to Bangladesh and roofing houses to illegals. But boomers and their children got to put on their white collars and push papers around in an office all day! Or, you know, become neets and shitpost on 4chan.
Tell me, do Chinese people tell their children to dream of a job on the production line or do they force them to study 20 hours a day for the gaokao in hopes of escaping a life of manual labor to do the white collar jobs that you sneer at? The future is not retvrning to backbreaking labor, but forging a new path that avoids both the perils of neetdom and the grievances of the dispossessed. The future lies in recognizing our love of zero-sum status games and squaring that with a world where there's fewer and fewer high-status jobs to go around.
A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Really...? When is the last time you heard MAGA supporters agitating for cuts to welfare and entitlements because those who do not provide for themselves, should go without? When has Trump ever supported anything resembling what you just said? The core ethical commitment that separates MAGA from the rest of the country is a revanchist bent to make the libs/globalists/elites suffer as they have. The reaction to the supreme court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn't jubilation about saving the unborn (although I did hear of some Catholic circles where this was the case), it was gloating about how arrogant Hillary and RBJ were in assuming that the arc of history was inevitably bending their way as they girlbossed their way to grinding the deplorables beneath their high heels. The reaction to DOGE isn't that cutting government spending would improve the union (see: all the arguments regarding the magnitude of the spending cut versus the actual federal budget), it was joy at the suffering of entitled, lazy government bureaucrats and globalists who care more about HIV in Africa than fentanyl abuse in the rust belt.
Whether the anger is justified is a whole other conversation, but consider this: If MAGA were forced to choose between 1) a debatably prosperous country where libs in New York and San Francisco flourished via tech/healthcare/finance and MAGA strongholds stagnated or 2) crushing the 'globalist agenda' and doing to those industries what was done to manufacturing, with questionable benefit to MAGA strongholds, which do you think they would choose?
If you take away the animus for the libs, the MAGA coalition collapses. You see it here where there is largely consensus against any kind of woke topic, but bitter arguments around the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the tariffs.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
It's true, although if Asmongold hops on the stage at the RNC and says "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better" to thunderous applause then is deplatforming really the answer to our problems?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
Yeah, I knew asking Jiro to be arsed to write more than two sentences was a pretty monumental ask. You shouldn't be so pessimistic though! Hope springs eternal and all that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Does that count as impeding progress?
No, because you can just go down to the store and buy fish oil for 30$? Not to mention eating fish oil isn't progress, we've been doing it for I don't know how many years. Lovaza is different in that it is manufactured in a GMP facility, with GMP protocols and supported (I presume, I don't follow the fish oil literature) by expensive clinical trials. Maybe you don't care when it comes to fish oil, but you probably care that your hideously complex chemo drug is both 1) effective and 2) safe.
Would the libertarians paradise where drug manufacturing and prescription was completely unregulated, and savvy consumers learned which manufacturers were reputable and which drugs were efficacious by word of mouth be better than what we have now? No idea, although it's worth noting that we effectively had that paradise in the era of snake oil salesmen and sulfanilamide killing over 100 people. We had thalidomide, we had SV40 contaminated polio vaccines, and other incidents I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it's reasonable to question whether the FDA in it's current state is net positive and how it can be reformed, but I'd wager that the vast majority of the 'FDA delenda est' crowd have no idea why this fence was built in the first place.
As some other anecdata, if you like, until recently many Chinese people prized medicine (and other goods!) manufactured in the USA. Largely due to the regulation and processes you dislike.
It only took them nine years!
Difficult for me to comment as I'm about up to date on epipens as I am on fish oils, but the rejection seems pretty opaque. Are you confident that the entirety of the issue here is the FDA just sitting on their application/dragging their feet, or were there actual major problems with the design?
I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator
What does 'theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator' mean?
Regardless, at the end of the day you face tradeoffs between safety and cost. The ideal number of pharmaceutical recalls/killed patients isn't zero, but it's hard to say what the optimal number is.
If you're curious, the Chinese have significantly deregulated. They also use a lot more 'phase zero' clinical trials that allow smaller biotechs to get clinical data much more easily and, as a result, are on a trajectory to wreck the US biotech ecosystem in the next 5-10 years. That said, I'd bet they've had some nonzero number of patients in clinical trials develop serious adverse events that were kept hush-hush in a way that's impossible to do in the USA.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I'm very curious how the Trump admin has been doing tackling regulation. There's a lot of things going on, and regulation seems to have lost the spotlight, but I'm very much hoping that we walk away from the next few years with dramatically reduced regulatory agencies.
Well, he appointed an HHS secretary (who oversees the FDA) who fucking hates the pharmaceutical industry. As far as I can tell, the twin north stars of RFK Jr. are 1) pharmaceutical companies are evil and 2) COVID was manufactured in a lab and facilitated by NIH money. I don't think he's a man who wants to maximize the number of drugs large pharma companies can get approved. They've also (as far as I can tell) entirely cut off government grant money to at least Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and others which probably isn't optimal for progress. He's threatening to block government scientists from publishing in top medical journals and is instead promoting his personal weird one. Biotech in the US is probably dead in the water, and the future is Chinese.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Proposal: Everyone else writes their own versions of your viewpoint, complete with what they think you do for a living, asl, etc.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I expect you'll dismiss what I say as just another smug American chauvinist...but watching you express with great confidence that the geniuses at the US state department were about to crush the Chinese upstarts a few years ago, to joining the ranks of the resident Chinamaxxers should be enough to give anyone whiplash. If anything, it should make readers update their priors about trusting anyone with grand geopolitical narratives.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking. Nor is the CCP. And even if you took US IMO team and forced them to study geopolitics rather than theoretical physicists finance, their ability to influence the world would be minimal. The NWO-deep state-Masonic brotherhood conspiracy theorists believe manipulate world events to their benefit doesn't exist, simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate. I don't seriously believe that anyone can predict what will happen or who the paper tiger is.
Is China an unstoppable manufacturing behemoth about to steamroll the US navy on their way to Taiwan, or an aging and shrinking nation who imploded their property sector with loads of debt? Is America the global hegemon with the best military, largest concentration of talent and strongest economy in the world, or a sclerotic, internally-divided shitshow? Probably...all of the above? Who can say whether China's population bomb represents a hard cap to their ascension, or whether they can dominate every STEM and manufacturing field to a degree that dwarfs the rest of the world before they lose their dynamism? Or whether China does a Pearl Harbor next October and Americans of all stripes rally around the flag, erasing the problem of partisanship?
The uncertainty is part of the fun, I suppose. But I'm fairly confident that nobody can make meaningful predictions about what will happen consistently. And I'm certain that whatever happens, some asshole on TheMotte will write a novella about how fucking stupid Trump/Xi Jinping were for doing X when any retard could see that Y was the obvious course of action. Hindsight bias is a helluva drug.
It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy...They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization? The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons, from which they will inevitably recover? And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular? Look at how they act in the SCS, or fish the hell out of South American countries EEZ. Look at where the Thomas and Sabina shoals are on a map and tell me what business they have ramming Filipino ships. Look at the wolf warrior diplomacy bullshit they pulled before realizing how ugly pulling back the veil made them look. Now scale that up to hegemon-level.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
I've burned plenty of incense. It hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I've seen how miserable the people are who walk far enough down that path. Boomers gonna boom boom boom my friend.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
Good faith doesn't require such petty sneers.
Indeed. I can forgive you for this one instance, though.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.
But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Particularly given that many of those same people have likely ridiculed the purity spirals on the left.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.
I've been laughing at this for the last 10 minutes. WMAF couples are by far the dominant demographic in my immediate social circle.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
When will the AI penny drop?
Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology. On the one hand, many clearly intelligent people with enormously more domain specific knowledge than me. On the other hand, I have a naturally skeptical nature (particularly when VCs and startups have an obvious conflict of interest in feeding said hype) and find arguments from Freddie deBoer and Tyler Cowen convincing:
That, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the AI debate – the tacit but intense desire to escape now. What both those predicting utopia and those predicting apocalypse are absolutely certain of is that the arrival of these systems, what they take to be the dawn of the AI era, means now is over. They are, above and beyond all things, millenarians. In common with all millenarians they yearn for a future in which some vast force sweeps away the ordinary and frees them from the dreadful accumulation of minutes that constitutes human life. The particular valence of whether AI will bring paradise or extermination is ultimately irrelevant; each is a species of escapism, a grasping around for a parachute. Thus the most interesting questions in the study of AI in the 21st century are not matters of technology or cognitive science or economics, but of eschatology.
The null hypothesis when someone claims the imminence of the eschaton carries a lot of weight. I dream of a utopian transhumanist future (or fear paperclipping) as much as you do, I'm just skeptical of your claims that you can build God in any meaningful way. In my domain, AI is so far away from meaningfully impacting any of the questions I care about that I despair you'll be able to do what you claim even assuming we solve alignment and manage some kind of semi-hard takeoff scenario. And, no offense, but the Gell-Mann amnesia hits pretty hard when I read shit like this:
It emails out some instructions to one of those labs that'll synthesize DNA and synthesize proteins from the DNA and get some proteins mailed to a hapless human somewhere who gets paid a bunch of money to mix together some stuff they got in the mail in a file. Like, smart people will not do this for any sum of money. Many people are not smart. Builds the ribosome, but the ribosome that builds things out of covalently bonded diamondoid instead of proteins folding up and held together by Van der Waals forces, builds tiny diamondoid bacteria. The diamondoid bacteria replicate using atmospheric carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight. And a couple of days later, everybody on earth falls over dead in the same second.
I've lost the exact podcast link, but Tyler Cowen has a schtick where he digs into what exactly 10% YOY GDP growth would mean given the breakdown by sector of US GDP. Will it boost manufacturing? Frankly, I'm not interested in consooming more stuff. I don't want more healthcare or services, and I enjoy working. Most of what I do want is effectively zero-sum; real estate (large, more land, closer to the city, good school district) and a membership at the local country club might be nice, but how can AI growing GDP move the needle on goods that are valuable because of their exclusivity?
Are there measures of progress beyond GDP that are qualitative rather than quantifying dollars flowing around? I can imagine meaningful advances in healthcare (but see above) and self-driving cars (already on the way, seems unrelated to the eschaton) would be great. Don't see how you can replicate competitive school districts - I guess the AI hype man will say AI tutors will make school obsolete? Or choice property - I'd guess the AI hype man would say that self-driving officecars will enable people to live tens of miles outside the city center and/or make commuting obsolete?
I can believe that AI will wreak changes on the order of the industrial revolution in the medium-long term. I'm skeptical that you're building God, and that either paperclipping or immortality are in the cards in our lifetimes. I'd be willing to bet you that 5 and even 10 years from now I'll still be running and/or managing people who run experiments, with the largest threat to that future coming from 996 Chinese working for slave wages at government-subsidized companies wrecking the American biotech sector rather than oracular AI.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Because 0.00001% of their endowment amounts to 5,000$.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
If either or both of them dedicate significant resources to striking at each other, then that will confirm that the breach is serious in nature, and that will bode extremely ill for my faction.
...why? I mean, firstly, 'significant resources' is load-bearing here in a way that's difficult to falsify. Secondly, I recoil at the use of 'my faction' (where's the guy who was trying to address the address the hate in his heart with his pastor, or something like that?) but I guess that ship has sailed. Thirdly, what does it matter to you whether Trump cancels Elon's contracts or Elon doesn't show up for republicans next election? Your coalition is the same, the people who vote for guns and the people who vote for abortion and the people who vote for whatever else will turn out in 2028.
Either way, I'll go way out on a limb and predict that the presidency goes D in 2028, without knowing who either candidate will be. In the grand scheme of things, Elon-Trump beef is irrelevant.
this would be evidence that our leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional, and I would expect that to manifest in other ways in relatively short order.
Again, why? Obviously your leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional - how can you read what Elon and Trump are tweeting at each other and conclude anything else? Would you ever behave that way, let alone behave that way if you were representing a nation? They're just dysfunctional in ways that you or your 'faction' approves of.
What updates beyond this would you recommend?
You should probably update on at least the stability of Elon. Whether the drug of choice is ketamine or culture war, something degraded significantly in the last couple years, and I say that as a papa Elon fanboy.
I'd say you should probably update on Trump as well, but I expect you already think he's bonkers and love him anyways or you'll never change your opinion, so that's probably not a worthwhile conversation.
thinly-veiled
Was this meant to link to a pop song? If so, the reference went over my head.
Where do you expect the thinly-veiled minecraft references to be directed?
From Trump supporters, towards Elon.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It'll probably prompt Rightists to make thinly veiled comments, if it keeps going. About minecraft.
You often talk about worldview, predictions, updating, etc. Do you have an update to your worldview based on this thread?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
26d ago
Welcome back.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Watch your tone or I'll ban you too.
The joke is that I'm not a mod. He is.
This post is about Tariffs, again, lest I be accused of burying the lede. Just read the last two paragraphs if you don't enjoy window dressing.
China tightened regulations on real estate developers in 2020. Xi Jinping stated 'houses are for living, not speculation.' Ghost cities, huge numbers of Chinese citizens owning multiple houses as investment vehicles, I assume you're all familiar with the stories after five years of news stories and discussion. Economists and western commentators largely agreed that the policies were A Really Bad Idea due to the ensuing chaos and meltdown in property prices.
To which I have to say ...what? They said they wanted to reduce housing costs! What did you think that would look like? How else are you going to do it? And what do you think it would look like to 'make housing more affordable' in the USA? If the YIMBYs and
neoliberalsabundance socialists get their way, home prices are going to tank here too. This is a good thing! Maybe there's some Chestertonian benefit to the upwards spiral of housing costs, but this here's a fence I'm ready to take a torch to.Anyways, to inch closer to the issue at hand - I have to confess that I had some tepid enthusiasm for Trump returning to office. Despite it all, I'm still an Elon stan and I thought some of the Dogemaxxers might have cogent arguments. I had some hope for racking up some China tariffs, eating bitterness for a few years and coming out the other end as a cohesive autarkical bloc of NATO + AUKUS + Japan + South Korea + anyone not named Putin or Jinping we can convince to join the squad. Setting aside my disappointments with Trump 2.0...
I'm utterly perplexed by the dialogue around tariffs? I can remember breathless fearmongering about shortages, empty shelves, inflation all spring. People on reddit posted invoices where what used to be a 10,000$ order from China was now over 50,000$. And yet...none of this chaos has come to pass? As far as I can tell, TACO is somewhat responsible, but also, average US tariff rates are just over 50% on Chinese goods?. Is it all TACO? If 50% tariffs have been painless, do you expect me to believe that 100% tariffs will truly be apocalyptic to the US economy? Do any of the firmly anti-tariff crowd have an explanation or prediction to make?
And on the other side, I fully expect victory laps and crowing about 4D chess from the 'Trump BTFOs retarded soyboy economics ExPeRtS crowd' again, but if the tariffs are painless and everyone is still buying cheap shit from China, aren't we losing??? Isn't the inflation, the spike in prices and the empty shelves the point of this whole exercise? Why are you promising people it will be painless, rather than YesChadding and telling them that the pain is the goal? You can have affordable housing when you're willing to accept that your own home will depreciate in value, and you can have low-skill manufacturing in your country when you're willing to accept higher prices for your goods. Eat bitterness with a smile on your face. Tell your daughter she only gets two dolls instead of 30 this Christmas because
communismuncle Jerry with the high school degree needs a better job.More options
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