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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33456 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Trump tariffs McDonald's:

BBC article for a more detailed overview.

Highlights or lowlights include:

  1. 32% tariffs on Taiwan, though I'm told that they thankfully exclude semiconductors.
  2. 46% on Vietnam and 49% on Cambodia, so gg to companies encouraged to diversify outside of China.
  3. 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.
  4. Some quite seriously speculating that the entire policy was AI generated. https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292 :

This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

  1. Others note the resemblance to the common ReLU function in ML, but the gist of it is a hamfisted approach that is setting tariffs off the equation trade deficits/imports, despite denial by the administration (or at least the Deputy White House Press Secretary), who presented an equation that literally says that but prettied up.

I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.

I think it's broader than just Trump. American governance generally is a disaster zone, they do bizarre costly blunders like this all the time.

They opportunistically bomb and invade random Middle Eastern countries with made-up reasons, then flail around ineffectually, failing to achieve hazy and undefined campaign objectives.

They invented DEI (and export it), a low-level Cultural Revolution.

De facto drug liberalization/opiate abuse has inflicted vast harms on the US public. A rich and powerful country shouldn't have open air drug markets and crazy homeless people shooting up in public, making public transport a fearful and disturbing experience.

They spurred the development of China with globalization and investment, the strongest competing power to the USA.

Australian governance isn't much better. My country is addicted to bungling everything too, propping up a property ponzi scheme (our biggest city is second only to Hong Kong in unaffordability) and a massive NDIS grift. We're selling iron and coal to China, that's the steel they're building warfleets out of. The EU has successfully technologically sterilized the most dynamic continent in history and is somehow struggling to overcome Russia.

Trump is only an example of a highly dysfunctional political system, late-stage democracy. It should never happen in a properly-run country, you should get dignified, wise statesmen - not demented geriatrics, incoherent drunks, reality TV stars or whatever riff-raff. There's lots of excellence in the US but it doesn't seem to filter through into highly effective government institutions and sustained policy success.

Hey man, you can't learn things unless you are willing to experiment.

Drug decriminalization seemed like a good idea at the time. Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.

China was an experiment in sweet sweet capitalism inducing democracy that appears to have fairly clearly failed.

Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.

Singapore has excellent results on controlling drug usage by beating or executing people, but we didn't try that route.

Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.

Singapore's policies aren't going to apply to the USA without accounting for scale.

That said, I'm pro public caning as a punishment rather than incarceration.

Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.

How does any of that matter in this respect?

  1. No drugs will ever be produced in Singapore herself, and the borders are relatively small, densely populated, wet and easy to police.

  2. Wealthy Singaporeans who want to sin travel to other nearby countries to do it.

Whereas in America, there's always going to be drugs coming in because you have huge borders and massive empty areas to police. And there's always going to be $$$ demand for party drugs from rich people, which will trickle down.

It’s worth noting that everyone else who’s tried Singaporean drug policies has succeeded in solving that specific problem- these countries are brutal dictatorships, but the evidence behind ‘send everyone with enough drugs to be a dealer to the chair, and enforce strong penalties against private consumption’ is very strong if your goal is to get rid of drugs.

I don’t think the U.S. is capable of doing this but if we were we wouldn’t have drugs.

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