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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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My fancy ramen from the Asian grocery does indeed seem to have gone up significantly in price. That's the only "pain" I've been personally felt from the tariffs and I'm pretty sure the response from pro-tariff policy people would be that I should stop buying Chinese noodles and get aboard the Korean noodle train. Because I am a very stable genius, I predicted this months ago:

None. I think the impact of tariffs will turn out to be wildly overrated. I have no actual empirical basis for that belief or an articulable mechanism, I just kind of don't believe that Nike is actually going to have more than a marginal price change. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my current stance is that "tariffs don't work" will be even more true than many people believe.

In all seriousness, I will continue to be actually pretty agnostic about the whole enterprise and think that we won't really know what the actual outcomes are for quite some time yet.

As a boardgamer, I can tell you that the tariffs have really fucked over a lot of boardgame publishers and Kickstarters. For those who don't know, the vast majority of boardgames are manufactured in China, and many publishers have written detailed responses to "Why don't you print in the US instead?" (The answer is "We've tried and the manufacturing facilities don't really exist here" and also "Costs will go up, not by a little but by so much that basically only people who don't care about price will buy boardgames.") Admittedly boardgames are very much a niche luxury good, but in at least a few industries there have been significant impacts.

Adding onto this, this is an example of the real stupidity of this. For boardgames, it requires making lots of different little pieces. China outcompeted in manufacturing so hard that the only manufacturers left only want to deal in volumes significantly higher than most games would sell. The margins aren't there to set up manufacturing in the U.S., so the boardgame industry will likely collapse or stop selling in the U.S. before it ever does what Trump seems to want people to do.

That's the real stupidity of the tariffs. Even if you think tariffs are good, a blanket tariff doesn't care about the reality of the industries it targets.

Oh, that sucks. I actually do enjoy boardgames, but I don't buy them often enough to have bumped into that. We grabbed Wingspan and its expansions, Ark Nova, and Brass: Birmingham and we've been pretty happy with that rotating set for the time being. My wife bought me a preorder copy of First Monday in October which makes for delightful nerd cross appeal, but that order went in quite a while ago.

I also backed First Monday In October. That company is one of those that's been posting on the impacts of tariffs (they have had several games delayed). Most recently they thought they found an alternative by printing in Brazil... and then Trump announced BRIC tariffs.

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