What are the thoughts on Tariff's from the American side here?

[neorichieb1971]

Hi guys,

I'm going to describe what I believe a tariff to be and my experiences with them, I will state what I think and you can chime in with whatever you think. Keep it pleasant please I just want to hear your thoughts.

So anyone who has read my posts in the past will know I lived in the USA for 6 years so I have been on both sides of the fence.

Tariff goes by another name : Import Tax.

So we all know Trump is in power and has gone a bit tariff mad. From the news I read/heard that some USA President in the 1900's was successful with the tariff agenda in some capacity. But lets face it, any tariff applied during this time was when the manufacturing booms in the USA were at their highest. Detroit was the center of that world with car manufacturing. I would say that the % of imported goods was quite low compared to today.

Also during this time, USA was buying almost exclusively American made product as in most cases (as with cars/trucks) quite a lot of the vehicles were only sold exclusively in the Americas.

Today, the world is a mess. Every lever to make things cheaper has been pullled. Up until 2024 the importation of cheaper labor and parts, for cars phones, computer chips and lets not forget oil. We now eat from everywhere importing foods. In such a world putting tariff's on raw materials, energy, food would need a strategy where you first put in place a home grown manufacturing plant, then apply the tariffs. To me, you need a timing strategy to make it work. Trump has gone and applied tariffs with years of preparation not even started yet.

Americans : Its your choice

Trump seems to believe that Americans have a choice to buy or not to buy products made overseas. Hmm, well like I said food is imported, energy is imported, raw materials are imported.

From my research, USA can only drill light crude in the USA, which is not suitable for refineries in the USA as they are geared/configured for heavy imported crude. Apparently light crude is better for Gasoline which the USA has, but currently it seems alot of the refineries are setup for heavy "imported" crude from neighboring countries, which seems silly really. But it is what it is. I'm sure reconfiguring the refineries to light crude isn't a switch proposition. It would probably take months to repurpose those refineries.

With all that said and done. It does seem to me that there is a lot of shooting of the foot when Trump's policy was to drop prices day 1 and then go on a tariff bonanza on things that Americans cannot afford not to buy.


Whats my personal experience?

I do believe Trump is right that other countries have put tariffs on the USA its not fair. But.. but... Take iphones, MS Windows and gadgets, electronics. They are always cheaper in the USA than other countries. If those other countries did not impose tariffs their own countries commerical outlets would suffer. Its a bit like the DVD region 1 and 2 thing. DVD's were sold earlier in the USA and were cheaper in the USA. For people like myself I have witnessed play.com in the 90's who imported DVD's into Jersey island 6 months before the PAL release. The original pokemon movie was on DVD R1 before it came on at the movie theater in the UK. USA phones, gadgets and consoles are all cheaper in the USA and sometimes the USA dollar is weaker. HMV in UK along with other outlets in the UK strongly opposed the importation of DVDs as it hurt them badly, so the UK government stopped allowing importation of these goods toa tax free zone to protect companies like HMV who sell UK DVD's who had much higher overheads and costs than a warehouse on a remote island off the coast of France who had access to the UK without taxes.

I import a lot of stuff myself from the USA into the UK. I have to pay import taxes (Tariffs) on those items sometimes. When I lived in the USA, I never got any such penalty. Every item just arrived. So I guess this is a one way street after all.


Anything else?

When I lived in the USA I saw a Jaguar X something or other. Being British I got the bug to get one. I looked at Jaguar.com and the car was $29,999. So out of curiosity I went to Jaguar.co.uk. The car was £35,999. The exchange rate at this time was about £1 to $1.60. Which meant the UK Jaguar cost $57000, even if it was from the Birmingham dealership next to the factory it was built.

And lets not forget also, that there are markets where the USA reigns supreme. No country is moaning that every digital payment system is USA. Nobody is moaning that every cloud platform is USA, nobody is moaning that every music, TV and movie makes up 85% of the market in English speaking parts of the world.

In some cases, the bias goes the other way. Trump can't just ignore that. Or maybe he can.

There is an issue with the EU buying in USA food. USA chicken is chlorinated for human consumption due to them being caged in poor conditions pooping on each other. Fruit loops, Ketchup,, Fries and other processed foods have what we call poisons in them. The USA food regulator allows it but some of the ingredients are on the poison list in the EU. Your cars are too big for our streets so we don't import them either. There is a difference between a F250 and a BMW mini.

When I went to Switzerland, the tour guide kept telling us they are 95% self sufficient. Thats a country that can put tariffs on things.

I honestly think the world was balanced in the grand scheme of things. As we say swings and roundabouts. If the USA can tariff everything it imports, but expects to have almost 100% export on the things I mentioned, thats not balanced.

But anyway, whats your say.... Put your comments down below. Am I wrong on anything? Lets goo..

[GaijinPunch]

Disclaimer: I didn't read the post, but just the title.

Obviously most of my friends are libtards, but we know how to read. In this case, econ 101 books, history books, and of course, the room. So the general discourse is that tanking the economy is fucking stupid. The only reason that makes sense is to get the market artificially low so those w/ tons of cash can buy. And that might be what he's doing, under the guise of his small dick energy. But, he used to jerk it to the stock market being green in his first term, so this is quite off brand, historically anyway.

I cheer Canada, Europe, and the others to unflinchingly retaliate, whether it be with tarrifs or just flat out taking the products off the shelves. I'm sure there are some red voters out there that are infuriated. I know many wealthy ones that are which worked in finance their whole careers, so know that his definition of what tariffs do are WAY off the mark, but hey -- America first, right? These jobs are NOT coming back to America. Anyone that thinks they are is fucking delusional.

Most of my savings tracks the S&P500 and I seriously though about throwing it in a bond fund, but I'm going w/ the age old "time in the market" > "timing the market". It may cripple me though.

EDIT:
There is an upside to this. I have been purposely not following a lot of the wrecking ball shit that I knew was coming in, but posts and clips about the trade war are hard to miss. So now I've seen Trumps press secretary, and she seems just as retarded as all the other ones.

[BryanM]

The only reason that makes sense is to get the market artificially low so those w/ tons of cash can buy.

It's kind of funny that your colleagues and me, the doomsayer techno communist, are in agreement. The elites have chosen to kick off a recession to consolidate capital; it doesn't hurt the people at the very tippity top after all.

If it did in even the slightest manner, your boss's boss's boss would have had Trump shot. Or at least have told him to knock it off.

"Shot" can be the heart attack gun in his sleep or a faulty screw on an airplane or whatever. They don't actually shoot anyone that high profile. ...They also don't install presidents that could be a problem. "The job of the president is to distract people from those who actually wield power." By that objective metric, Trump and Elon Musk are the best presidents we've ever had.

Most of my savings tracks the S&P500 and I seriously though about throwing it in a bond fund, but I'm going w/ the age old "time in the market" > "timing the market". It may cripple me though.

One of the exchanges from here that's always stuck with me was your unflinching belief that 2007 would never happen again, which lingered with me for various reasons. One your absolute faith in that it was an 'accident' and not a feature. But also a refusal to internalize what 'eternity' means. Over an eternity, all things will happen. You'll go crazy, you'll be a fish, you'll go sane again. (Extremely pertinent if subjective quantum immortality is a thing.)

... but more immediate is the fact the gas chambers could make a return.

Everyone needs to internalize that this is probably the end of the capitalism era. There's around 20 years left until we regress to feudalism, or advance to techno-feudalism or techno-fascism. This is what the elites really believe.

... I honestly can't recall a more obviously telegraphed recession, though. (They were screaming "RECESSION SOON, MORONS!" at the top of their lungs, for real...) If it's not the end of the world and housing re-inflates after this is over, think of how much more capital will be consolidated. Frankly things should get so fuckin' miserable and hopeless for so many people that it'll be kinda weird that there won't be a literal revolution with guillotines.

... I worry a lot that people won't let themselves be scammed by another fraud like Obama and we'll go the gas chamber route this time.

We might really have to do it. "Because of 'the trans'" :eyeroll:

[neorichieb1971]

I think the USA economy will suffer in the immediate future no doubt about that.

According to Trump on TV just now the top 150 CEO's in the USA were in a meet and he said it went well. The problem for Trump is how many people are on credit card living and can they afford to keep borrowing against that living. When I lived in the USA most folk welcomed credit card debt for a perceived standard of living, whether they could really afford it or not.

[BulletMagnet]

The only thing anyone needs to know about Trump's tariffs, particularly those on Canada and Mexico, is that the "incredibly unfair" existing trade situation with those two specific countries is the one his administration created during his first term to replace NAFTA, which he praised as, among other things, "the best agreement we've ever made".

If you think this latest situation has anything whatsoever to do with legitimate trade concerns, you need to pay MUCH closer attention.

[orange808]

It's obvious Trump has no coherent plan. I honestly don't mind unwinding some of America's heavy dependance on China or Mexico, but that's a ridiculously complicated endeavor, no? That could take decades to accomplish.

Not something we can manage by pushing every button and throwing every lever like an unattended child in an airplane cockpit.

What to do with Mexico? It's obvious that corruption runs deep and anyone that tries to push back ends up dead. Their president is essentially useless. To top it off, America finances and sells arms (indirectly selling is still selling weapons) to the cartels.

As for the border, if the "progressives" would get real and the "liberals" (aka NIMBYs) would stop virtue signaling, we could have admitted there's a border crisis years ago--because there is! Then, we could craft a coherent policy. Yes. That means saying 'no' to a lot of people and discouraging them from coming. It also means we won't save a huge slice of South America from poverty, crime, and corruption. I'm sorry... The "right thing" is a tricky thing and the more you know, the more difficult it gets.

I suppose knowing a tonne of not shit makes it easy for Trump.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

If you think this latest situation has anything whatsoever to do with legitimate trade concerns, you need to pay MUCH closer attention.

Absolutely nothing Trump does appears to be with any longterm goals in mind. He's directly done so many contradictory things that it seems he's either senile or deliberately reveling in chaos for its own sake simply to be on the front page of the news non stop.

If there's one thing I've become painfully, depressingly aware of, it's that humanity absolutely does not learn from its mistakes. History might as well be a complete waste of time, apparently. Seriously, less insane individuals already tried "more tariffs" as an economic strategy ages ago around the great depression, with disastrous results. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2% ... Tariff_Act This is the same, but infinitely stupider, and from a guy who has no ethical qualms about acting as a used car salesman at the same time.

There is zero question that he is the single worst elected leader any North American country has ever seen, with unquestionably the worst administration / staff as well.

[neorichieb1971]

You guys always take the conspiracy route, although I Admit we are in that world now. Especially with the track records of those in power.

I googled which car is completely manufactured (parts too) in the USA. Its came back NONE, ZERO . Thats news to me. I thought at least one would be.

The only thing anyone needs to know about Trump's tariffs, particularly those on Canada and Mexico, is that the "incredibly unfair" existing trade situation with those two specific countries is the one his administration created during his first term to replace NAFTA, which he praised as, among other things, "the best agreement we've ever made".

If you think this latest situation has anything whatsoever to do with legitimate trade concerns, you need to pay MUCH closer attention.

Yeah, but as I said Canada (don't know about Mexico) had tariffs the other way already place. Granted it was a signed deal by Trump in Term 1.

I have no doubt in 4 years time this Putin, Tariff thing and other bits will be tackled by a polar opposite of Trump unless Trump can make these 4 years count for something that can be built on. I am extremely worried about Putin because if Trump is the only one that can make a peace deal with him because they are chummy, then Putin and the next President will need to be chummy as well, and I cannot see that happening. I might be wrong. USA throws up curve balls in the political arena all the time.

[BryanM]

You guys always take the conspiracy route, although I Admit we are in that world now.

Eh, it's not really a conspiracy to say there's people and organizations in charge of steering the boat, and it ain't us. (Well, most of us.)

One thing that's really tiresome is how you see certain 'jokes' being made like The Onion's "Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over" bit... time passes, and then like 95% of what they were joking about comes true. (The jokes aren't particularly insightful either, all they do is draw a straight line from where we're going from our current position.)

Like I mentioned in the parent doom thread, >30% of people thought Trump wouldn't finish his first term. The rational part of my brain was like "the only way he doesn't make it to the end is if he literally dies", but the emotional part of my brain refused to completely believe reality. You'd really think he's the kind of guy who'd fuck off to play golf and snort cocaine in some shady place overseas with non-existent prostitution laws.

But of course, in reality he's someone who loves being on TV and that's the only real job of the president in this modern age.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I googled which car is completely manufactured (parts too) in the USA. Its came back NONE, ZERO .

I wouldn't have expected there'd be any. Cars have a ton of electrical and computer components that are made overseas in Asia since microprocessors and semiconductor production just isn't really done domestically in North America (at least not on a large scale) so even local assembly plants that try to source domestic parts production would likely have to get these abroad. There are still a large number of assembly plants in North America though, both in Canada and the USA, that generate a lot of local jobs.

Trump, while lying about how his tariffs were to boost local manufacturing, directly yanked funding away from a project that aimed to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing in the USA. This is the same guy who was only too happy to get his trashy merchandise made in China while talking about how China was stealing all the jobs, so it's typical pathological liar bullshit from him.

[Lord British]

Trump seems to believe that Americans have a choice to buy or not to buy products made overseas. Hmm, well like I said food is imported, energy is imported, raw materials are imported.

Implying that Trump spends any amount of time thinking about the welfare of American citizens is laughable. His only interest is to be a TV star and have people say nice things about him from one side for bullying another side, nothing else. It's all theater to him.

[Sima Tuna]

Obviously most of my friends are libtards, but we know how to read. In this case, econ 101 books, history books, and of course, the room. So the general discourse is that tanking the economy is fucking stupid. The only reason that makes sense is to get the market artificially low so those w/ tons of cash can buy.

That's the only explanation that makes sense to me as well. Deliberately crashing the economy so all the wealthy can buy up every company and we can reach true old-school early industrial levels of wealth inequality. Complete with robber barons owning entire towns and all money spent funneling back to them.

That we will have a recession seems a certainty at this point, because Trump is doing his damndest to engineer one. But even so, I did put a little money into the market recently. My thought is that I may as well emulate all these robber barons and buy some stocks myself when they crash hard. Short of a truly apocalyptic scenario (beyond the ability of any of us to cope,) the market will eventually go back up. So long as the market exists, it will recover at some point. It will probably take years, but that's ok. I don't think a massive, global megacorp is going to go bust overnight.

If we have a proper apocalypse then nothing any of us does will matter anyway and we'll have worse problems on our hands than the market being bad.

None of Trump's decisions make any fucking sense unless you assume that deliberately destroying the administrative state and tanking the stock market are his objectives.

[BryanM]

Short of a truly apocalyptic scenario (beyond the ability of any of us to cope,) the market will eventually go back up.

And the elites literally believe this is the end : [

At least the AI apocalypse is in line with my core values. I'm glad that's working out; looks like a good fifteen years or so until humans are obsolete in every way.

I never really believed I'd touch a cent of social security retirement, but now my estimate % is in the low single digits.

Damn it feels good to be a millennial. Just try imaging being dumb enough to be born a zoomie, those poor doomed bastards.

[BulletMagnet]

You guys always take the conspiracy route, although I Admit we are in that world now.

If you think "he wants the rich to benefit from a recession" is too much, try "it's a precursor to military invasion" on for size.

EDIT: Off to the side, if anyone has a bit of time on their hands and wants to get REALLY dark, check out the possible implications of the administration's recent "clawback" of New York City funds.

I am extremely worried about Putin because if Trump is the only one that can make a peace deal with him because they are chummy

Even if you want to assume that Trump actually has any interest in (or actual ability to) stop or even slow Putin's advances - and frankly I wonder where you'd even get that impression - I should think that you, as a Brit, would be particularly familiar with the track record of appeasement when it comes to despots.

[neorichieb1971]

Ok, imagine we are 4 years in the future or thereabouts and the next USA election campaigns are ongoing.

Apart from the rhetoric around MAGA, dropping prices (if they have not) and a whole load of billionaires buying out cheap companies in this current 4 year term, what sort of things do you want to hear in the campaign? What if Canada is Annexxed, Greenland is Annexxed, Panama Canal is USA property?

Trump won in my eyes because Kamala Harris wasn't a great speaker and offered nothing that wasn't already in place. Folk were struggling a lot so went for the save $$$$$$ rhetoric.

Also, does all this stuff come from Trump? My understanding is that advisory experts push the agenda upwards and Presidents sign off on it or not. These current agendas seem to be pushed down the chain of command to me.

It amazes me in this day and age that a 2 party system operates in some of the most powerful countries (quite a few have only 1 lol). Each term is 4 years and a lot of the problems the USA has are bigger than 4 years.

I
Looks like UK got hit with steel tariffs, no exemptions for us . The UK steel industry is on its knees already. Quite ironic that 200 years ago Americans came to the UK for the railroad steel formula to build their own railroads.

[Sima Tuna]

Short of a truly apocalyptic scenario (beyond the ability of any of us to cope,) the market will eventually go back up.

And the elites literally believe this is the end : [

At least the AI apocalypse is in line with my core values. I'm glad that's working out; looks like a good fifteen years or so until humans are obsolete in every way.

I never really believed I'd touch a cent of social security retirement, but now my estimate % is in the low single digits.

Damn it feels good to be a millennial. Just try imaging being dumb enough to be born a zoomie, those poor doomed bastards.

What does an AI apocalypse even mean though, bro? Post-scarcity world? You've said a lot (and I've read it) about how this is going to happen, possible timescales, sources speaking about it and so forth, but what does it even mean in practical terms? How do you think that shakes down, supposing it happens? Some supercomputer hacks the entire world's supply of armed drones and starts capping everyone randomly?

As long as people are going to exist, there will be resources people want. Some people will have x resource and want y resource. That creates markets, right? So the only way I can see for a post-markets world is we either become a post-scarcity world (won't happen) or a post-humanity world (we're all dead.)

Okay okay, you say AI will all rule over us. Sure. I accept this proposition of your argument. How does that change society in a way that nullifies the stock market, currency and trade of goods and services? We're just exchanging our current shitty despots for more intelligent despots.

If social security dies it will be because other humans killed it out of spite, not because we're in some star trek or terminator universe. Coca Cola is going to continue to exist even after Skynet takes over. That's my belief anyway.

Think about how much crazy shit would have to happen for EVEN ONE giant megacorporation to go fully bankrupt. I'm talking, brand is dead, nobody can buy it or revive it. Completely zero'd out. Like Amazon. How much shit would have to happen for Amazon to die everywhere on this planet? Even a fucking nuke couldn't kill a megacorp! Positions get shuffled around and the dance of business continues.

[Lemnear]

Trump won in my eyes because Kamala Harris wasn't a great speaker and offered nothing that wasn't already in place. Folk were struggling a lot so went for the save $$$$$$ rhetoric.

Judging from his first term, it seems that the Memes about him have guaranteed him the presidency, it seems absurd to say, but, it seems that today if a Meme can become reality, then the community will do everything to make it real. And this has happened. Global alienation from reality is making reality the same as the internet.

[BryanM]

What does an AI apocalypse even mean though, bro? Post-scarcity world? You've said a lot (and I've read it) about how this is going to happen, possible timescales, sources speaking about it and so forth, but what does it even mean in practical terms?

That's my point about capitalist realism, and how we're emotional engines. We can't even imagine a world past the current one.

Simply imagine they actually succeed their goals in the most tepid form possible, and the technology doesn't advance much further than that: They create NPU's as capable as any human. At first they'll be astronomically expensive, like how air conditioners cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were first available. But eventually they'll get down to the 'price' of a very small car, like 10 to 15k.

That's like how we replaced horses with the internal combustion engine. What is the economic value of a person when they're slower, more error prone, have less uptime, and cost more? In pure objective material terms as total costs of inputs go, how inefficient is it to have a person drive tons of material back and forth to their job every day?

Money is a control mechanism for human labor. If human labor is worthless, it isn't money anymore. Some other unit(s) of trade value would exist, basically denoting rights to raw resources and land.

I use the word "apocalypse" in the sense of a collapse of the current order and way of life. People not having real jobs (aside from fake jobs like in Fifteen Million Merits) meets that standard imo. Tell people they won't have a job in the future, and they'll look at you like their world is ending.

The alternative is the gas runs out and horses have an uptick in their population. If you're optimistic we'll have the electricity production to handle the power demands of electric cars, I suppose you can imagine things remaining the same as they are now. ... it simply doesn't seem like we're building as many of them as we'd need in the timeframe we need to provide that. Maybe they'll surprise me in five or ten years and get their asses in gear, I grant that's possible. It's not absolutely too late.

The level of competence they've shown me all my life makes me really damn skeptical of it, though.

That's just the material reality we're facing. Everything past that is merely wild speculation meant as a way to pass the time at the water cooler - the future can go any which way. 'Nothing ever changes' is merely one possibility out of a dozen general scenarios. Everyone has their own opinions how it'll be and nobody can really know how it'll end up, it's as low-information a problem domain as we've ever had. Sample size: zero. (How could our ancestors have imagined the current world we're living in today, after all?)

Of course the end point of capitalism is a single corporation planet like in WALL-E, which is the most emotionally neutral prediction one could make of a future that's different from now. The easiest for our primitive monkey brains to accept.

If the idea was to replace everyone with robots and cull the population to reduce the amount of resources they'd have to share or people they'd need to exterminate later, how different would the world have to look from the current one for that to be true?

Also, does all this stuff come from Trump? My understanding is that advisory experts push the agenda upwards and Presidents sign off on it or not. These current agendas seem to be pushed down the chain of command to me.

Bingo, though I think of Trump as being downwards on the totem pole.

Like how you eat food and gravity helps liberate it from your body-prison.

Judging from his first term, it seems that the Memes about him have guaranteed him the presidency, it seems absurd to say, but, it seems that today if a Meme can become reality, then the community will do everything to make it real. And this has happened. Global alienation from reality is making reality the same as the internet.

Totally totally.

Attachment is everything, and you have to create a story and emotions in people to get them to even remember you exist, let alone want to fight for you. Kamala is so much like John Kerry - she's fucked off and nobody will even remember who the hell she was in eight or twenty years.

I've gotten into watching this Vaush guy this year, it's a bit cathartic that he can convert my internal screaming into external screaming without requiring any effort on my part. His rant We Will NEVER WIN AGAIN Unless This Changes really sums it all up.

But here in the real world, Democrats are happy to help the fascism along. Maybe it's what they really want (most probable, considering the donors literally told Kamala to lay down and lose when she tried to stand up and win there in the first month of her campaign), or they think they'll get to squeak by another 0.00000001% win like Biden had again, from the backlash. ... Then the next guy even worse than Trump will invariably come along and stomp them into meat paste and the gas chambers go up or some shit.

...It's incredibly bold of them to assume there's going to still be elections.

[Sima Tuna]

What does an AI apocalypse even mean though, bro? Post-scarcity world? You've said a lot (and I've read it) about how this is going to happen, possible timescales, sources speaking about it and so forth, but what does it even mean in practical terms?

That's my point about capitalist realism, and how we're emotional engines. We can't even imagine a world past the current one.

Simply imagine they actually succeed their goals in the most tepid form possible, and the technology doesn't advance much further than that: They create NPU's as capable as any human. At first they'll be astronomically expensive, like how air conditioners cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were first available. But eventually they'll get down to the 'price' of a very small car, like 10 to 15k.

That's like how we replaced horses with the internal combustion engine. What is the economic value of a person when they're slower, more error prone, have less uptime, and cost more? In pure objective material terms as total costs of inputs go, how inefficient is it to have a person drive tons of material back and forth to their job every day?

Money is a control mechanism for human labor. If human labor is worthless, it isn't money anymore. Some other unit(s) of trade value would exist, basically denoting rights to raw resources and land.

I use the word "apocalypse" in the sense of a collapse of the current order and way of life. People not having real jobs (aside from fake jobs like in Fifteen Million Merits) meets that standard imo. Tell people they won't have a job in the future, and they'll look at you like their world is ending.

Well, I think maybe we're talking a bit past each other here. I'm not saying capitalism is eternal. But I'm saying that markets are a reality of human existence. You don't have people without communities and markets. At least not now. Maybe in the pre-Homo Sapien days, it was possible. But even in the proto-agricultural era, you had people harvesting x resource and wanting y resource from that other tribe that lived in a different area and had access to y resource.

The ancient world had trade and markets. They weren't like the market today, for sure. That level of petrochemical-fueled globalism probably isn't possible in a post-gasoline world. But the ancient world had markets. Tea grown in China was taken on camel back through the desert to Russia, which is where the very name of the tea known as Russian Caravan came from. That was a form of proto-global marketplace. Goods traded in Greece could travel across on ships to other countries.

So when I talk about how I don't think markets will go away just because of an AI revolution, that's what I mean. Unless people all die, markets will stick around. Markets aren't capitalism. Capitalism is just a certain philosophy surrounding markets. Big cities have always had marketplaces. Even 9000 years ago.

If currency is replaced and work-hours are invalidated as a medium of exchange, then a different type of value will be inserted instead. Could be... Fuckin' bitcoin. I mean, could be anything. Could be farmable land (farmed by robots.) Could be units of solar energy held in giant batteries (battery farms in place of monetary banks, etc.) But the market will remain. I mean, I just don't see any way for a market to not exist. Maybe I'm fuckin' stupid, I dunno. But people want things. EVEN in a post-scarcity world (which will never happen,) people will still want things. They will have things they want and they will have other things they don't mind trading.

Fuck, man, even on this forum. If money disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have people trying to trade across PCBs or whatever.

[BryanM]

Well, I think maybe we're talking a bit past each other here. I'm not saying capitalism is eternal. But I'm saying that markets are a reality of human existence. You don't have people without communities and markets.

Oh, I see what you were saying. I didn't believe I made any claim markets wouldn't exist: "People want stuff" is indeed self-evidently true. I've talked about energy rations every now and then.

Something like the stock market isn't really the market though. It's not even a pure abstraction of it, either: It doubles as a speculation instrument.

Tesla finally collapsing after it's been over-inflated for a long time is one of the few nice things to happen from all of this...

[orange808]

Something like the stock market isn't really the market though. It's not even a pure abstraction of it, either: It doubles as a speculation instrument.

We can put proper numbers, description, and terminology to this discussion.

R>G

[Sima Tuna]

Tesla finally collapsing after it's been over-inflated for a long time is one of the few nice things to happen from all of this...

The sad thing about that is it's likely to bounce back now that Trump is shadow president. He has two years to figure out how to recover. Yes, he can't make people buy his shitty cars, but he can get government kickbacks, contracts and tax breaks gift-wrapped from his sugar daddy Trump.

Tesla is a dogshit company and I've thought that long before the current administration. Musk sells futurism to gullible people and walks away with their money.

[Lemnear]

Totally totally.

Attachment is everything, and you have to create a story and emotions in people to get them to even remember you exist, let alone want to fight for you. Kamala is so much like John Kerry - she's fucked off and nobody will even remember who the hell she was in eight or twenty years.

I've gotten into watching this Vaush guy this year, it's a bit cathartic that he can convert my internal screaming into external screaming without requiring any effort on my part. His rant We Will NEVER WIN AGAIN Unless This Changes really sums it all up.

But here in the real world, Democrats are happy to help the fascism along. Maybe it's what they really want (most probable, considering the donors literally told Kamala to lay down and lose when she tried to stand up and win there in the first month of her campaign), or they think they'll get to squeak by another 0.00000001% win like Biden had again, from the backlash. ... Then the next guy even worse than Trump will invariably come along and stomp them into meat paste and the gas chambers go up or some shit.

...It's incredibly bold of them to assume there's going to still be elections.

Not even if your story is of the self-made-man winner, no one will remember you because they will envy you (so maybe they remember you but it will not be a good memory), if instead it is a story full of traumas they will forget you because no one likes their own traumas, let alone those of others.

The only way to be remembered nowadays is to be funny and comical.


I guess Trump's madness will be stopped by the same industry giants he's hurting, because hurting them indirectly hurts America.
Tesla itself has asked to stop the tariff madness because it will lead to higher costs and lower sales, which is the exact opposite of Trump's plan to "make the rich richer" (MAGA).
He's acting like a bully and nobody likes bullies.
But then he's acting like America is suddenly on the brink of imminent collapse...and of course firing 16,000 federal employees will save 50 states and the remaining 350.000.000 people, right? LOL

He looks like a kid in the White House...he throws tantrums, imposes duties that he then removes and then puts back, makes threats as if he had forgotten that he now represents the greatest world power....this is very unprofessional.

[To Far Away Times]

My opinion on Trump fluctuates between him being genuinely evil or a tremendous dumbass.

I genuinely hate that man, and as soon as I find out someone is conservative, my opinion of them absolutely plummets. It goes long past political differences, it’s conservatives reliably bending their morals and ethics to meet Trump at whatever his new low point is. None of them are ever above anything he does. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.

Tariffs when applied selectively, strategically, slowly, and seldomly can be a good thing. I would say the slow rollout of vehicle tariffs over many decades have been largely successful in getting companies like Toyota to build their cars in the US and Mexico.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to do tariffs. A blanket tariff on everything is the equivalent of artificially creating inflation. Using tariffs to bully countries (and even allies!) into making lopsided trade deals and trying to extract rare earth minerals is repulsive, and we are better than this.

Lastly, the push to make the US a manufacturing economy again is beyond stupid. The US should not be trying to change from a successful services driven economy to a poor manufacturing one. If we master the manufacturing process we’ll hit our peak at around the level of China, but with the benefit of the petro dollar backing us up. Is that really what we want to set our economic goals towards? Long term that is only going to benefit the donor class. Which is probably why Trump is pushing it so hard.

[orange808]

What the fuck is a successful service economy?

[ryu]

What the fuck is a successful service economy?

The USA. Microsoft, Netflix, Meta, Google, Apple (partially), Amazon, Cloudflare, Uber even SpaceX all offer services that almost every person in the first world is paying for. Even the gaming industry counts in some capacity.

[neorichieb1971]

What the fuck is a successful service economy?

The USA. Microsoft, Netflix, Meta, Google, Apple (partially), Amazon, Cloudflare, Uber even SpaceX all offer services that almost every person in the first world is paying for. Even the gaming industry counts in some capacity.

And these services that are exclusive USA services are why tariffs are a bit unfair, because it respresents the flip side of the coin for most countries. All the cloud platforms, all the digital payment systems, a host of fast food chains, a whole host of moviies and music, online shopping like Amazon which billions use. Even the games we buy are mostly owned by USA investors. So I believe that Trumps arguments are only a half truths for tariffs. In most cases, its not even as if any other countries are trying to compete in those arenas.

[Sima Tuna]

What the fuck is a successful service economy?

The USA. Microsoft, Netflix, Meta, Google, Apple (partially), Amazon, Cloudflare, Uber even SpaceX all offer services that almost every person in the first world is paying for. Even the gaming industry counts in some capacity.

And these services that are exclusive USA services are why tariffs are a bit unfair, because it respresents the flip side of the coin for most countries. All the cloud platforms, all the digital payment systems, a host of fast food chains, a whole host of moviies and music, online shopping like Amazon which billions use. Even the games we buy are mostly owned by USA investors. So I believe that Trumps arguments are only a half truths for tariffs. In most cases, its not even as if any other countries are trying to compete in those arenas.

Or can compete, reasonably.

[GaijinPunch]

One of the exchanges from here that's always stuck with me was your unflinching belief that 2007 would never happen again, which lingered with me for various reasons. One your absolute faith in that it was an 'accident' and not a feature. But also a refusal to internalize what 'eternity' means. Over an eternity, all things will happen. You'll go crazy, you'll be a fish, you'll go sane again. (Extremely pertinent if subjective quantum immortality is a thing.)

Not sure how you got that that's my unflinching belief. Will the exact same thing happen again? No, not soon anyway. Will another fist fuck of an economy happen again? Probably two more in my lifetime (potentially more), and I've never said or thought otherwise. I have a handful of friends that are quite a bit younger than me and I try to tell them about the basics of tracking the entire index and avoiding single stocks as investment tools. I always tell them they have youth on their side and to not freak out about inevitable dips.

did put a little money into the market recently. My thought is that I may as well emulate all these robber barons and buy some stocks myself when they crash hard.

You're timing the market. Good luck w/ that.

[BryanM]

Not sure how you got that that's my unflinching belief. Will the exact same thing happen again? No, not soon anyway.

Eh, you seemed really aggressively pushing the idea that 2007 was some kind of anomaly, and the next recession wouldn't be nearly as bad. Fast forward ~ten years and here we are, some people talking about the possibility that we're on the brink of a second great depression, and you've just said 'not soon'.

It's important to fight against motivated reasoning imo.

R>G

It's annoying when you see guys like Bill Gates conflate these two as if they're the same thing. Growth is a function of human labor and productive methods... But they just mean it as their personal estimated net worth.

As has been mentioned numerous times, pretty much everything that isn't put into gambling and scams is devoted to 'tech'. With the end goal of cutting human labor out of the equation entirely.

A common thing some anon will say to that is 'Who will buy ur stuff if no jobs?' and I can only shake my head at what helpless little animals we all are. Those who are 100% convinced things will be stable and mostly the same as they are now for the rest of their lives, I envy'em.

We have a sitting president that's 35% of the way to being a fascist dictator after only a couple of months, and they're doing the This Is Fine dog thing. Perhaps... things will not be fine???