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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33460 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.

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.

I’ve been wondering for awhile how this happened. It seems our best, high quality people avoid politics as much as possible. Meanwhile some of the most cynical, power hungry sociopaths are getting elected. This doesn’t seem to be the pattern in early 20th century. What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?

That's just the normal state of democracy, I think.

When military careers were attractive to able people, they acted as a gateway to government work in general and politics in particular. And of course in the Greatest Generation essentially every male citizen served in WW2. I think something similar happened in the 19th century - the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson) were in charge and then declines.

the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson)

I wouldn’t exactly call Jackson a high-quality politician, especially in the same thread with complaints about Trump’s economic policy. He was historic for sure, but he caused economic damage by vetoing the renewal of the Bank of the United States on populist grounds against all expectations.

I consider politicians who successfully execute on agendas I oppose in the face of powerful opposition to be high quality, particularly if they remain popular while doing it and break fewer things that I expect (or would have expected ex ante in the case of Jackson). Effective/ineffective and good/evil are approximately orthogonal axes.

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