dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
Well, what does a good outcome look like to you?
Every way I can think of to measure this universal tariff move looks bad, regardless of how many dimensions of chess I use.
Aside from maybe demonstrating that the coffee shop revolutionary liberals suddenly love capitalism and are hypocrites. That has been amusing but not really worth the cost.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
We'll just start an old-timey war effort to re-purpose old smartphones for military purposes. Win the War with your Brains and Brawn by recycling your old smartphones!
But more seriously, domestic production of smartphones is possible. Purism produces a Made in USA smartphone if you don't mind not having the SOTA. I expect interest in this space to increase from here.
I consider myself using the deliberate tactical choices lens here. Valuate the choices by its effects: it's bad!
Stated another way, I interpret your post as saying: don't judge Trump by the virtues of his choices, judge him by the results. See how he punks the planning boards who don't let shit get built? Great. Now lets apply that standard to his universal tariffs.
When I do that, they still seem like a disaster.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
So... how do you not read total literal societal collapse as an indictment of feminism?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Doesn't this "Art of the Deal" lens prove too much?
Can you find any economist who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea? Any published literature on it?
Maybe they're deliberate tactical choices, but to what gain? The markets lost something like $10t in value since he announced them. Losses on this scale were certain while any recovery afterwards is more speculative due to the loss of confidence. Is whatever Trump thinks he's going to gain from this worth that risk?
Almost certainly no. Just because you may be doing this as a tactical choice doesn't shield you from your choice mathing out to erratic and retarded.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
If we can make a phone, we can make AI killbots. If we can't make a phone, we can't make killbots. The Chinese can make both. They will win the next war if they have killbots and we don't, and it won't even be close.
I like the vibe but I think you're imagining different kinds of killbots than I am? Aside from microprocessors I believe phones and killbots have very different tech trees?
Some estimates suggested iPhone prices and other electronic goods in the US would have gone up three times if the costs of the tariffs had been passed on to consumers.
Estimates by who? This doesn't math out even if you do the naive thing and assume 125% tariff is on the retail price. A $1000 iPhone would cost $2250 then.
But aren't tariffs on the manufactured cost and not the retail price? Isn't the cost of an iPhone something like $300? A 125% tariff on that adds $375 to the price, not $1250.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
As if the natives prefer to live in teepees and hunt bison rather than living in houses with flush toilets and eating microwaved lean pockets like the rest of us.
Agreed, that would also be a bad precedent.
So where do we stand? If the POTUS disappears even a US citizen to a foreign prison we just have to trust their best effort, which may be no actual effort, to bring them back? Any consequences for the POTUS here would be judicial overreach?
The US has accidentally deported citizens before. Apparently, they've been so embarrassed they tried hard to fix it on their own, with no court order needed. That's just because the executives have thought this an important norm to uphold?
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Is it? Had the government accidentally deported a US citizen to an El Salvadorsn prison I don't see why they can't make the same exact argument: the courts cannot dictate to the executive how to retrieve them, it's completely up to the executive to do it or just kind of half heartedly try or just blow the whole thing off because they're too busy.
This is a pretty disturbing precedent to set if it stands.
Source
napkin math. let me see why I'm so off from the GAO report
UPDATE: I don't quite understand the takeaway from Figure 11. How does interest on the debt growing to 27% of federal "spending" mean we would find the revenue to keep paying it? Isn't it more clear to say that our liabilities would grow such that 27% of them are interest payments alone?
In 2025, we already currently deficit spend $2t to meet our $8t a year in obligations.
What figure 3 of that report makes clear is that the size of our interest payments will grow out of proportion with revenue growth. That's the scary part IMO. It's already happening and I think even higher GDP growth + the other politically impossible things I mentioned in my OP wouldn't help us catch up with it.
So, how doomed should I be about the national debt situation in the US?
It seems pretty hopeless. Even if we have excellent growth (>2%), and do something politically impossible like increase taxes by 2% and cut spending by 2%, we will still probably become unable to service the interest on the debt by 2032 or something. Do I have that right?
Anyplace safe? Seems like Europe just does as badly if not worse than the US if the US defaults.
Maybe it won't be so bad? #cope #cope #cope
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Yes, before, if China approached your country and said you must take your pick: the US or China, you would probably pick the US.
After all of this unhinged clown shit, if the US says you must choose between the US and China, it's a tough call!
I would add to this that uninformed order flow retail traders had much less access to derivatives in the past, whereas now, apps like Robinhood make them a breeze to enable and eagerly teach you how to use them.
Futures are therefore more broadly discussed.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products.
If I was sufficiently motivated to encourage buying from America, I would reduce tariffs on imports to 0 and maybe do whatever it is to my currency that makes it cheap to buy US goods.
I would also look at whoever we get a bunch of non-American stuff from and increase tariffs on them.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Yeah mine wasn't ideal, I had to go down stairs and around some corners.
If I had to do it again I would've just drilled through some walls. Was my landlord going to like it? No. Would they have been able to stop me? Also no.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.
You may want to consider one of those wall modules that have ethernet ports on them that you can plug into an electrical outlet, and uses the mains as a bridge. That's what I would do to get at a router far away from my desktop PC in a rental apartment.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
Right, in my (anecdotal) understanding even people without these qualifications or strong brains made a decent living before globalization.
My own father and uncles came to the US in the 70s (illegally!) with a 3rd grade education and no local language skills or writing skills (in any language), got jobs as construction workers and masons and still were able to buy houses and provide for big families.
They're not dumb, as they have started small business since then and have become substantially wealthier, but the work they were doing did not require even electrician or plumber level brain power and certainly not any credentials.
American plumbers and factory workers probably both earn more and have a higher employment rate compared to their German equivalent.
Don't you need to be at least a little smart to be an electrician or a plumber? Moreso if you are self-employed doing these things and making a nice amount of money?
I've done my own electrical work and plumbing at home and it requires a non-trivial amount of attention to detail and being able to do some basic computation. I probably couldn't do it stoned. Surely 100 IQ minimum needed to be employable.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
"Unions good" is a profoundly alien idea to me. What do you have in mind?
thesis of a possible effort-post. does this have legs?
Globalization didn’t have to break the working class, but blank slate liberalism did
A few decades ago you could show up with a 3rd grade education and still get a decent factory job that fed your family and gave your life... maybe not meaning, but some dignity. Today, those jobs are gone. Globalization took them, and now America has a surplus class of unemployable and underemployable mopes; people born too late for easy jobs but too early for gay-space communism to take care of them. They're stuck, adrift.
Was there any way to help them? Was the populist backlash unavoidable except for the choice of the form of our destroyer, Bernie Sanders’ classist rage or Trump's MAGA nationalist rage?
Is this a false choice? Yes, but the solution hinges on IQ realism. It hinges on slaying blank slate liberalism.
Countries like Germany faced the same global pressures but came out intact. They kept their working class employed, respected, and connected to dignity. How? By accepting a truth America refused: not everyone is wired for lambda calculus. Germany didn’t chase a fantasy of universal upskilling, or telling freshly unemployed coal miners to learn to code. Instead, they built protected, respected, cottage industries and stable vocational tracks with early sorting, precisely for the millions who weren't destined to debug beta reductions.
America, by contrast, swallowed a comforting lie: that we could escape globalization’s consequences without sacrifice. We embraced blank slate thinking, believing with enough TED talks and vocational bootcamps everyone could become high-skilled, high-status knowledge workers. We decided dignity wasn’t found in factories or plumbing, but in laptops and cubicles. Work that liberals secretly preferred.
But the bell curve didn’t care. IQ didn't budge. And so today, millions of Americans remain underemployed, abandoned, and pissed off.
Globalization didn't have to do this. Our denial of human cognitive differences, our stubborn insistence on the blank slate, did.
Germany got it right. America told itself comforting lies.
dr_analog
razorboy
2mo ago
I really wish it was possible to search flash cartoons. There's so many from 2000-2005 I just cannot find anymore.
Like that one with a gigantic Zangief in space on collision course for Earth and all of the video game characters become an army trying to stop him.
I am in the middle of the Culture series and feeling a loss of momentum. I enjoyed Player of Games, Consider Phlebus and to some degree Use of Weapons but it feels pretty underwhelming afterwards.
The State of the Art was a weird mix of short stories that barely kept me going. Had to skip ahead to Matter since the others aren't available in my library.. I'm finding Matter is also rather snoozeville.
Any other good ones? I really like being immersed in the Culture parts of the Culture universe but all of the rest is not that interesting.
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