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Biden should have been removed. I am just saying that even though he wasn't, it didn't seem to be so bad because people who actually made the policy on his behalf were reasonable. Not great but competent.
Maybe the same expectation was with Trump. It doesn't matter how crazy he is if the administration is reasonable. No one believed that absurd tariffs will get implemented etc. In a way, the problem is not with Trump but that he is surrounded by people who are not competent.
Have they actually gotten implemented though? I keep hearing that Trump keeps kicking the ball down the road on them. Which is a pretty classic negotiating tactic - hit people with sticker shock, and then walk it back.
I am still very very suspicious that some of the motivations behind the Tariff Whiplash Phenomenon is Secret Sauce Stuff that will come out in 1 - 40 years. Not confident, just suspicious. (There seem to be other plausible explanations.)
Either way, I don't really think Tariff Whiplash is really good evidence that Trump has dementia (I suspect he has lost a step but isn't suffering from a mental illness if that makes sense).
"Currently, the US's 145% tariff rate on goods from China and a 10% baseline rate on all other countries are in effect."
Many communities are freaking out right now as either goods or parts used by US manufacturers have now more than doubled in cost. For individuals there's the additional insanity of a flat minimum of $100 / $200 fee for individual packages where the tariff would fall below that amount, starting in one week from now.
There you go - sort of a silly question from me, sorry, it's just that there's been so much stuff announced and then paused that I haven't been tracking when all of these things were actually for real kicking in (as opposed to being announced. I guess I'm not used to the government working so quickly!)
Anyway, to my point, it's looking like The Latest is that they'll be brought back down, at least a bit, supposedly. Which is, again, pretty classic negotiating. Slap them on, show that You Mean Business, pull back when you get a deal, which...might be happening?
I hope this helps reshore domestic light manufacturing. Not sure that it will, but that could be good.
The problem is that applies to any goods or parts that are imported. Need a $2 component to fix something? That’ll he $100 in one week and $200 starting in June. Ordering a batch of prototype pcbs (something no US manufacturer has capacity / interest in providing)? That’ll be $200 extra. The biggest freakout about the tariffs is in communities dealing with or closely associated with small manufacturing businesses as their materials costs are suddenly doubling or more.
This demonstrates possibly the largest single difference between Chinese and Western manufacturers / vendors. China is chock full of manufacturers who are perfectly happy to handle small quantity orders while Western manufacturers by and large are only willing to deal with major customers.
Tiptrans (package consolidation) is going to make absolute bank.
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Yes. I tend to think this should change. I would prefer it changed in a smoother way, but I guess I'll take what I can get.
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Some still believe that general tarifs apart from specific cases could be a reasonable policy, not great but somewhat reasonable.
I see them as if the hospital director decides that some medicines are too expensive and have many side-effects and suggests replacing them with some complementary medicine (such as homeopathy or any other alternative treatment without evidence base). Trump or his handlers basing his idea about tarifs on 100 year old use cases is exactly like that.
In some third world countries the medical system still uses such treatments. In India it was common for politicians to say that they want to improve healthcare but also dedicate more funds for Ayurveda. It is a total waste of money though and can harm by denying people effective treatments. Poor countries are poor because of corruption and incompetence of leaders.
Any such hospital director in the western country however would be swiftly fired or let to retire. It would be too obvious that he is no longer competent. Otherwise the staff would revolt.
Trump is offering homeopathy to treat cancer. He has lost his plot.
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My man, are you not familiar with OSHPark and DigiKey Red? The bare PCB options there are fairly cheap as long as you can use their standard stackups.
If you need something more complicated and/or populated, there are choices like Advanced Circuits, too. At least in my area, if you look, there are commercial shops that can populate SMT/TH boards. Admittedly, these might be more than $200 above the Shenzen costs today.
Yeah, I'll second OSHPark. They're a little slower than the standard Chinese options like JLC, but the price premium isn't very severe and they've generally been great from a support and quality perspective.
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People have been expecting Trump comebacks all the time and somehow he always did. At least with elections, he still had his genius. But ultimately everyone succumbs to old age and loses everything. It is very hard to accept the ultimate demise but with Trump it is now. With Biden most people including Scott Alexander managed to live in denial until the end of his term. Could happen the same with Trump.
How would you differentiate “lost a step” and “suffering from dementia”? Dementia is exactly like that, initially mildly losing a step, with some better days and some worse days. Trump has always been very erratic and that's why many people don't notice. But if you are able to separate his rhetoric, you could see that now he has lost a plot.
You peak at intelligence in the late teens or early twenties - before you are even eligible to be President. So from that perspective all Presidents have "lost a step" - none of them are as bright as they once were. I think Trump was better at debates in 2016 than in 2024.
I'm not a doctor, so I tend to defer to them for the definition of dementia. Personally I would use a sort of everyday definition - if someone is mentally lucid enough to take care of themselves in the day-to-day. With POTUS, the standard should arguably be higher - "if they can fulfill the duties of the office."
Which plot specifically? I don't see "Trump doing wacky stuff with tariffs" as, by itself, indicative of dementia. But I don't typically watch Trump speeches, so if he was noticeably out of it, the way Biden sometimes appeared to be, I wouldn't necessarily notice. If Trump is actually suffering from dementia then he should step down quickly, before it meaningfully impacts his duties.
Less intelligent decisions are one thing but doing senseless things are completely another.
Trump's dealings with tariffs make no sense. Some people continue to refer to hidden motives but by now we are aware that this is not the case. He is not capable to fulfil the duties and is greatly harming the US. It's only going to be worse with every day. A lot of loyal people will be in denial. Just like many still believe in Havana syndrome as real or something like that. And his election was mostly luck. Democrats hid Biden's dementia and people felt cheated and decided to punish them for this. It just happened that Trump was the candidate. Could have been any other guy. Now people will be even more angry when they realize they have been cheated again.
I dunno. I would have a stronger opinion of this if I considered myself more economically literate. But the basic strategy that seems to be shaping up, as reported, of essentially forcing countries to choose between the US and China does make sense. We'll see if he's able to pull it off.
I don't really think that's true. Keep in mind that the press has sat on really big stories in the past at the request of the executive branch. If (as has been rumored) China was planning to attack Taiwan - and this precipitated some frantic economic maneuvers - I could definitely see "us" being unaware of the story. I don't hold that theory strongly but it's been in the back of my mind.
Why would you use this as an example? (This keeps happening, to me, I swear!)
Almost certainly, Havana Syndrome is real and is being covered up by the US government to smooth over relations with foreign powers and/or conceal the fact that we have and use the same technology. We know how it works (it's a directed energy weapon). It's possible that the symptoms are not even being induced as an anti-personnel attack, but rather an electromagnetic spectrum attack that targets data. President Bush and his family were plausibly affected by this at a summit in Germany (and he wrote about it in his memoir). The Russians have even been reported to have alluded to these types of weapons publicly. There are other incidents, too (such as then-Vice President Richard Nixon being bombarded by extremely high doses of radiation - probably not due to any attempt to harm him, but rather due to a wiretapping attempt) showing that certain foreign powers are willing to irradiate high-ranking US personnel in potentially dangerous ways as part of their espionage programs.
This stuff is all public knowledge and findable on a Google. That doesn't mean that every reported case of Havana syndrome is legit, but there's absolutely zero reason to believe that it's somehow impossible and very good reasons to think it is real.
And rightfully so, if your idea is true.
The Trump administration advances multiple mutually exclusive theories justifying high tariffs:
The problem is that you can't have all three. If tariffs are a negotiating strategy, you're agreeing to drop them in exchange for whatever concessions you're angling for, negating their use as industrial or tax policy. If they're revenue raisers, you're counting on Americans continuing to prefer imports over domestic consumption, so there goes industrial policy. If they're industrial policy, you're betting on Americans switching to domestic production and thus not replacing revenue.
There are other problems, as well. For example, the Trump admin not having any coherent idea of what they're looking for in a trade deal (in no small part because Trumpian trade theory makes no sense), so trade talks are floundering. Anti-Chinese coalition building is not consistent with trying to shake down your trade partners. ISI has a terrible record (I mean, who doesn't look at Argentina and think it's something to aspire to). Not to mention, the entire endeavor seems to be rooted in either a delusional belief that the US can reclaim post-war era style manufacturing supremacy despite radically different global economic conditions or just straight autarky.
Even being maximally charitable and assuming there's a serious plan behind all this, the Trump admin being so high-handed and transactional towards allies is absolutely the wrong way to go about negotiating the creation of an anti-China trading bloc, especially when they're also badly overestimating the strength of the US' position. The US already benefits substantially from the present global economic arrangement, so going to your trading partners and saying "give me more, also cut off your biggest trading partner who produces a bunch of difficult to replace inputs for your domestic industry" is a tough sell. Doing it in an aggressive and insulting matter further undermines the goal by invoking national pride.
If you wanted to build an anti-China trading bloc, you would probably try to carefully negotiate a multi-lateral trade partnership with other critical trade partners in a way that encourages trade to shift away from China rather try trying clumsy threats and hoping for the best with bilateral negotiations.
I feel like I've been hearing this line more and more lately :V
I...don't think this is true. It probably is true that you can't maximize the benefits from all of them. But having tariffs at all creates a protective effect and generates revenue, unless they are so high they cut off all trade (which might happen in one or two categories but ~never happens wholesale).
I'm not privy to the talks, so I don't have a strong opinion on them.
I think the US negotiating position is quite strong. I don't know that I would have been as bellicose about all this as the administration is reportedly being, but I think the current administration basically (and, sadly, probably correctly) sees the US military and economic arrangements as part of a whole cloth arrangement. The leaked Signal chats were very instructive in this regard. And so the US can't just threaten to tank your economy (which they absolutely can do) they can threaten to cripple your national security structure as well.
Please note: I am not saying threatening to do this is a good idea, necessarily. But I am saying I think the US has a lot of leverage. Not that you should weigh my opinion on this stuff (particularly economics) very strongly.
Hmm, yes, it seems like DJT is trying to have his cake here (TPP) and eat it too (protective tariffs). I'm not even sure that's impossible, but it will almost certainly mean compromises will have to be made. Alternatively, Trump tried to have protective tariffs and then pivoted to a less ambitious program when the stock market panicked.
In Trump's shoes, I would have tried a much slower approach, with gradually ramping up tariffs to smooth the transition (this would be less abrupt and painful whether your goal is industrial policy or dealmaking, so it seems like a straight-up win). That seems very obvious to me, which is part of why I can't shake the suspicious feeling Secret Sauce Stuff might be involved. But there are other plausible, perhaps much more plausible explanations for the apparent urgency.
To the extent that you pursue any one of those goals, you sacrifice the other two. And that's being charitable and assuming there are actual benefits and these policies don't just make America poorer and weaker. Raising enough revenue to replace income taxes requires extraordinarily high tariffs without a decrease in imports (good luck). Trading partners are not going to accept radically asymmetric tariff arrangements, so if you're conceding tariffs as part of trade negotiations, you're effectively dropping the tariffs and any attendant hypothetical benefits (i.e. returning to something approximating the status quo after torching a bunch of good will).
I suppose one could reconcile tariffs-as-industrial-policy with tariffs-as-tax-policy if one supposes that the economic boom from ISI policy will be so massive that even with massive hikes in taxes on imports, people will still consume enough imports to generate a substantial amount of revenue. This is a) not credible b) under Trumpian trade theory, a bad thing.
Frankly, the most honest pitch would be that this is just right-wing degrowth policy - arguing that poverty is an acceptable tradeoff for certain intangible benefits (for left-wingers, it's environmental protection and anti-capitalism; for Trumpists it is the reestablishment/reaffirmation of certain social hierarchies). The Trump administration seems to willing to make this case, though I don't know that they realize that's the case they're making.
The problem is that this is an iterated game, which the Trump administration seems to forget. After decades of acquiescing to US preferences on a range of subjects, suddenly the US comes to you and says "You've been taking advantage of us. Give us more." Worse, their demands are irrational or incoherent - their primary grievance seems to be that their consumers buy more stuff from your producers than your consumers do from their producers. The 'deal' they're offering is that you should give American good privileged status in your domestic markets while they tariff your products at home and that you should cut off your biggest trading partner.
Not only is this a shit deal, you're also going to ask yourself "what about next time?" (and, if you're someone depending on US security guarantees, "do I believe they'll actually show up if the shit hits the fan?") The US is a valuable market, but it's not so valuable that you can't live without it. Especially if they plan to shake you down on the regular and you're starting to doubt they can be counted on in a pinch.
Were they?
Has Trump ever done anything to make you think 4D chess theories are plausible and not cope? Trump had an anti-China trade deal on his desk during his first term. He vetoed it.
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Yes, it forces other countries to choose China instead of the US. How does it make sense?
If you go to countries and say "we are going to slap you with a massive tariff if you choose China, or a teensy-tiny one if you choose us" it...makes total sense? The US is the largest consumer market in the world – if you are forced to choose between China and the US, all other things being equal, you pick the US every time.
Now, obviously, there's room for Trump to bungle the execution (by making all other things not be equal). But the plan is not crazy.
Teensy-tiny would be 1% or maybe 2-3%. That is practically zero. Europe had tariffs towards the US about 2.5% overall. The EU had an agreement with the US to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars, I think the EU decided on 35%.
It means that the EU has already chosen to be the partner of the US instead of China. Why is he now putting tariffs on the EU? He is punishing countries for choosing the US.
Maybe Trump means something else by “choose us”? From all other talks it could mean that he is not happy about trade deficit and he means that the EU should buy more from the US and not the other way around. I already explained that trade deficits are imaginary problem. In a free market conditions any country cannot force people to buy from the US. You have to offer things for good price for that to happen. You cannot bully customers to buy from you. But he is trying to do exactly that. Even if we could regulate the market to buy more from the US, such intervention is not good, it would make all of us poorer.
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It doesn't.
Any tariff increase is an incentive to sell more to China and/or other countries and not to the US.
Because tariff towards said country is meant to reduce imports from said country. It is not meant to increase trade with the US.
Basically, Trump is bullying countries. He is saying, I am going to punish you for no reason, but I will punish you less if you do this another nonsensical thing for me about which I will change my mind two days later.
Now all countries need to find other export markets to replace lost exports to the US. The US role in going to diminish, China is going to become stronger which is a threat to the world stability and peace.
How can anyone find sense seeing Trump doing this?
P.S. Notice that China has increased tarifs towards the US as well. Which means that Chinese people will buy less from the US. All the other countries have a perfect opportunity to reroute lost exports to China instead. The US imports will decrease, but its exports will also decrease. The US will become isolated.
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JD Vance is competent, but these people are chosen for loyalty
By the metrics of 'accomplishing their/Trump's' agenda, Trump's appointments are mostly highly competent, at least so far.
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I can understand that some say nothing against Trump because of loyalty. But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA. Most likely they are not competent and don't even understand that.
Is the economy that central to the American nation? I understand that market freedom has been an important component of our political strength, but at the same time, this feels like preparing for the last Cold War right as we are in the midst of a new one.
Yes.
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I think nothing is more important than economy. People talk about different values and in that sense we need more than economy, for example, democracy and pure air (ecology). But economy is a central thing that allows the country to thrive because everything is based on it. It is just that historically the growth was non-existent (0.01% per year) therefore not many past thinkers have mentioned it in the list of good values. We need to add this to the constitution of every country that achieving growth is very important.
I dunno, I think both left and right have been directionally-correct in that the economy is not the end-all-be-all of civilization. Plenty of societies in the past didn't give as much consideration to economic growth, yes, but they seemingly didn't really need it.
The way you wrote this post, I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sincere, because, at risk of mod intervention, it sounds like an alien value. If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are other values that allow us to have economic power, they are what lead to an economy and not strictly the other way around.
We are at this point, and you are concerned, because some of the very values that enable the economy are themselves weakened and endangered.
To be honest, it could be that some people have so different world view from others that it is indeed completely alien.
For me I cannot reconcile the idea that “societies didn't really need economic growth in the past”.
All societies wanted more, at all times. Obviously, some people are happy to be monks, live life in rejection of worldly pleasures and engage only in reading, talking about philosophy and commenting in online forums (he-he). I can understand them. But majority want more things, not less. It was never that they didn't need it, they simply couldn't have it.
Monks are a terrible example. Medieval monasteries were communes of second+ sons of aristocrats who, while technically rejecting personal wealth and living in relative privation for their social class, commanded vast wealth through said communes.
Wealth made possible in large part through their ownership of land-bound slaves, aka serfs. Which are the only social class that really matters when talking of the economy of past societies - any praise of the benefits of pre-industrial agricultural society that ignores the part where 90%+ of people were taxed-to-death subsistence farmers and/or slaves (don't forget the chances for death by violence being vastly higher than the 20th century including both WWs) is a comically rose-tinted view.
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I think that both left and right makes the same mistake by not valuing economy enough.
Obviously, all people in the past depended on economy 100%. When it was on a subsistence level and they run out of game to hunt, they had to change to agriculture. When crops failed, a lot of people died from famine etc.
Only relatively recently in the history we have something more in our lives than just food to survive. But some of the values that ensure growth are not intuitive, for example, free trade. No wonder people have difficulty getting their heads around.
When Latvia got independence from the USSR, its nationalistic government didn't think clearly about economy, their idea was that we are finally free from the Soviet occupiers we should concentrate on agriculture and close all factories because they pollute. That shows this primeval thinking of economy only as a food source. In a way it is right, we would die without food. But they were unable to grasp the idea that economy is something bigger than that and people got very unhappy when they couldn't get stuff other than food. Food is to survive, what makes life worth living are other things that is not food.
Yes, but some might argue that numbers on a graph are not what makes life worth living.
I think using the example of a formerly-communist country is misleading, and that there is a minimum level of prosperity in absolute terms, not relative, wherein people can be satisfied. Did Latvians suffer in the post-Soviet scenario you described, or were they still happy despite a lack of industrial capacity?
GDP by definition is an abstract measure of the country and not of an individual. It makes no sense to go back and say “hey, this one person is poor despite rising GDP”. Maybe some people are not able to see the big picture and will get stuck on individual examples?
Latvians suffered tremendously in the first years of the post-Soviet period. We never experienced famine, all the services were still working and everybody got basic healthcare and social needs covered. But income, or rather inflation made everyone very poor and limited of what we could buy. And the fact that goods finally were freely available in shops but no money to buy them probably was like psychological torture. Depression, alcoholism, suicides increased, life expectancy decreased.
Eventually the economy grew, people started earning more money, Latvia joined the EU which accelerated growth even more, some industries were restarted, yet many people emigrated to western countries for work because they wanted even higher income now instead of waiting 20-30 years until Latvia catches up with the west.
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My hypothesis is Trump did not think the stock market would react as negatively as it did, so he has since backtracked.
It is quite an indictment of the Trump administration's competence for them to not know the stock market would respond like that. We'll see if we get anywhere on retreat. April 9 changed the flavor, but not the severity, of the damage. The small shift toward sanity on car parts is good news, but we still have the Section 232s looming over a lot of things, Trump getting played by China, and the 10% tariffs that seemingly are not going to go away.
Trump had made it abundantly clear during campaign and after winning that there would be tariffs, and even when he floated some tariffs in January 2025 and Feb against Mexico and Canada , the stock market brushed it off, only to crash a month ago. The market seemed to have no problem with tariffs until only a month ago.
The market didn't believe it would actually happen until a month ago!
he literally did https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-tariffs-on-imports-from-canada-mexico-and-china/
see for yourself
Huh? The Feb 2 tariffs on Canada and Mexico never took effect. They were set to begin the 4th, but were delayed on the 3rd. This is a strange point for you to bring up since I feel that it is an obvious reason for the market to indeed believe that cooler heads would prevail.
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Imagine you knew in advance that covid restrictions would get introduced all around the world in 2020. Would you predict that the stock market goes down? Of course, you would.
I happen to believe that these restrictions were mostly unnecessary and due to overreaction. But at least covid was real to elderly and risk groups. Increased mortality among them was real due to covid (but also from misapplied restrictions).
Even if covid wasn't real and it was all Chinese hoax the same restrictions would have caused stock market to drop.
Tariffs are exactly like that. If you knew in advance that such tariffs would get implemented, you could bet safely that the stock market is going to react very negatively. That they are introduced to imaginary problem, doesn't change their effects.
Eventually people will have enough and will remove Trump from office and it will recover. I predict that Elon Musk will come out as a winner despite all his mistakes because he seems to be the one disagreeing with Trump (by openly stating that he wishes for zero tariffs between Europe). His loyalty to free market will be rewarded in long term even if we don't see how it could happen now.
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