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On April 05 2025 09:07 Zambrah wrote: I dont think most people are paying that close of attention, most people just see the Teehee We're Desecrating Miyazaki Teehee Toys and thats their only direct interfacing with AI.
It doesn't have to resonate with everyone just the decision makers.
Like I get how blind people are that when I read JFK jr say that he always planned to fire way to many people and then hire some back, that 50% of America either believes it or pretends they do. But I don't think actual business owners are going to do it themselves. They know deep in their cockles that it was a huge expensive embarrassing mistake.
I think you grossly overestimate the intelligence of the business community, they're dumb people believing the wild and insane lies of overexaggeraters. They'll never understand what AI does or what it might actually be useful for, they'll only understand AI as an extremely hyped up product that costs X amount to create, if they stop being in on AI its because they estimate X is too much, not because of their understanding of what AI might be genuinely used for.
On April 05 2025 09:25 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I hope the Nintendo Switch 2 ends up being 40% more expensive in the USA than in Canada and people end up smuggling it over the border. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo pulls off that kind of "fuck you" move on the US government.
I will start smuggling avocados over the border if i have to if i am "caught" i'll just say i forgot or didn't know or whatever. I ain't payin' whatever the new tariff will be plus $2.25 USD for 1 fucking avocado.
Given that there's a $330 Japanese language only version of the Switch 2 in Japan, I'm hoping that the MSRP already included expected tariff markups but Nintendo hasn't told that to retailers, which has the retailers concerned until that's clarified.
However, that's probably just cope and Nintendo is being racist.
The applications of AI are likely underestimated, not over. The context advanced programs are used in isn‘t within the grasp of the public.
Just going by the rule of thumb that the military is usually 10 years ahead before an invention becomes accessible to civilians. And they are the main drivers of progress in engineering.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
I'm down quite a bit (as we probably all are) since my all-world ETF is 60% US companies, but I don't care much to be honest. I wasn't planning to get anything out for another 20 years at least, that's plenty of time for it to bounce back and even if it doesnt, I was aware from the start that there's a chance the economic system or even civilization itself might collapse before I'm supposed to cash out.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
I'm down quite a bit (as we probably all are) since my all-world ETF is 60% US companies, but I don't care much to be honest. I wasn't planning to get anything out for another 20 years at least, that's plenty of time for it to bounce back and even if it doesnt, I was aware from the start that there's a chance the economic system or even civilization itself might collapse before I'm supposed to cash out.
There‘s nothing the US wants more than inflation, I‘m pretty sure of that. Less debt, higher nominal prices and taxes.
Just cause it inflates in the US doesn‘t mean it does elsewhere. They‘d have to default on obligations. The inflation generated abroad goes straight back into their bonds.
They can‘t blow up a bubble without the cooperation of others.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
I'm down quite a bit (as we probably all are) since my all-world ETF is 60% US companies, but I don't care much to be honest. I wasn't planning to get anything out for another 20 years at least, that's plenty of time for it to bounce back and even if it doesnt, I was aware from the start that there's a chance the economic system or even civilization itself might collapse before I'm supposed to cash out.
There‘s nothing the US wants more than inflation, I‘m pretty sure of that. Less debt, higher nominal prices and taxes.
Just cause it inflates in the US doesn‘t mean it does elsewhere. They‘d have to default on obligations. The inflation generated abroad goes straight back into their bonds.
They can‘t blow up a bubble without the cooperation of others.
Drunk take tbh.
If this is about the last sentence in my post, I didn't mean to imply that this particular event is world ending (it's obviously not). I meant that I never took it for granted that life will be mostly the same or that I'll necessarily be alive in 20-30 years so I'm not that emotionally invested in my long term financial investments.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
I'm down quite a bit (as we probably all are) since my all-world ETF is 60% US companies, but I don't care much to be honest. I wasn't planning to get anything out for another 20 years at least, that's plenty of time for it to bounce back and even if it doesnt, I was aware from the start that there's a chance the economic system or even civilization itself might collapse before I'm supposed to cash out.
There‘s nothing the US wants more than inflation, I‘m pretty sure of that. Less debt, higher nominal prices and taxes.
Just cause it inflates in the US doesn‘t mean it does elsewhere. They‘d have to default on obligations. The inflation generated abroad goes straight back into their bonds.
They can‘t blow up a bubble without the cooperation of others.
Drunk take tbh.
If this is about the last sentence in my post, I didn't mean to imply that this particular event is world ending (it's obviously not). I meant that I never took it for granted that life will be mostly the same or that I'll necessarily be alive in 20-30 years so I'm not that emotionally invested in my long term financial investments.
I got an investment plan too. I forgot that I wanted to answer you in the first place tbh. Just treat the money you invest as if you threw it away and you‘ll be fine. It‘s all just a bunch of constructs anyway.
If Trump removes any standard of decency from geopolitics, then he‘s pissing away the value of whatever contract was stipulated until then.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
i've always had lots of criticisms of Trump. i projected economic growth of 2% this year as compared to growth of 2.5% of 2024.
Overall, I think the Trump tenure will be a net small-to-medium positive for the USA.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
i've always had lots of criticisms of Trump. i projected economic growth of 2% this year as compared to growth of 2.5% of 2024.
Overall, I think the Trump tenure will be a net small-to-medium positive for the USA.
Even if he somehow invades Greenland so the paypal bros can create their sodom and gomorrah there ?
I‘d pay the fucks to leave for their own city-state and stop appearing in the news tbh. They could at least operate a pair of huge hooters onto themselves to make it worthwhile.
Yeah, Thiel wants to make a place called praxis apparently. I already played enough bioshock to know where that goes.
A bit more on-topic: *adjusts tie*
Aside from the fact that he looked like he just snorted a fat line when presenting his 5-million gold card pay-to-win visum, Donald Trump signals that he wants to keep work places for low wage-Americans accessible by deporting aliens and basically offering access to anyone who has enough money, even if it‘s Pablo Escobar in the flesh.
On April 05 2025 10:59 JimmyJRaynor wrote: jobs report was very good even in the face of government layoffs. it is a cryin' shame Trump is doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiWjmnurMQ
i'm super modest and risk averse and yet i'm down more than 20K so far. how 'bout you guys?
Ah, that explains your recent tone change regarding the administration :D
i've always had lots of criticisms of Trump.
Where? Back when the tariffs were only for Canada/Mexico you were posting 10x per day about how amazing Trump is and how stupid Canada is. Quite the tone change indeed.
On April 05 2025 10:45 Vivax wrote: The applications of AI are likely underestimated, not over. The context advanced programs are used in isn‘t within the grasp of the public.
Just going by the rule of thumb that the military is usually 10 years ahead before an invention becomes accessible to civilians. And they are the main drivers of progress in engineering.
Sounds tinfoily, but it‘s just history.
Im sure AI is/is going to be very useful for plenty of things, but it will not make good art, basically ever. Its crappy and unreliable for customer service, its not actually intelligent, its just pattern regurgitation. Ive heard its useful for things like sequencing human DNA and other science-y shit, but a lot of the common use case that gets thrown around is replacing normal humans doing average human jobs and LLM bullshit just doesn't actually seem any good at it, or at least its not good enough to be safe replacing humans.
Its definitely not in a state that justifies the amount of money or resources being spent on it, let alone the raw unadulterated stolen material that a lot of the common LLM data sets are trained on.
Its very lucky that tech isn't adequately regulated. Lucky for tech company CEOs anyways.
On April 04 2025 19:46 Sent. wrote: I agree that bringing up uninhabited islands is a bad argument in this context. It's easy to counter and doesn't do much to convince people on the fence.
Normally when you roll out a bunch of high-profile things and one of them is obviously really stupid, it calls into question the legitimacy of the other things. Like, when I'm preparing a to-be-published report, and I have a stupid typo on page 1, my boss gets very upset with me because now the public won't trust the contents of pages 2-50.
I actually agree there's not much point in focusing on how stupid it is to tariff penguins at this point. It's not a "bad argument." It's that the opposing side you are arguing against is immune to arguments, whether good or bad, and they actually have obviously much more egregious typos on later pages that have already been identified, so who cares about the small typo on page 1.
This is what we used to assume how things works, and how they should work. But apparently for Trump, it isn't how things work. I can't quite explain why, because it seems really absurd, but for him the strategy seems to be to make so many absurd mistakes that no one can focus on a single one, and then they all don't matter that much for some absurd reason.
It kind of boggles the mind, but that seems to be how stuff works now. Maybe you should consider just making lots of absurd mistakes in your reports so no one can focus on a single one, and everyone is just overwhelmed by it.
I actually know this feeling when i have to give feedback on a thing. If i get a 10 page thing, and there are dozens of spelling and formulating mistakes on ever page, and then a lot of conceptual mistakes too, i have a hard time bothering about all of them and actually going through it and giving feedback on all of it. Of course, i would instead say something like "This is incredibly bad and full of mistakes, go through it yourself to get it into a state where it is worth for me to read it."
For Trump, the result seems to be "I cannot bother to deal with every single one of these obvious mistakes, so i just kinda accept it because there is no easy way for me to reject it."
I have a hard time coming to terms with this, because it goes counter to how i think the world should work, and counter to how i think humans should react to things. But the evidence that this is how stuff works for Trump is very clear. Just spam the news with idiotic stuff you do, and then nothing sticks because there is a new even stupider thing the next day, so no one can concentrate on one specific of these stupid things for more than 2 hours.
On April 05 2025 10:45 Vivax wrote: The applications of AI are likely underestimated, not over. The context advanced programs are used in isn‘t within the grasp of the public.
Just going by the rule of thumb that the military is usually 10 years ahead before an invention becomes accessible to civilians. And they are the main drivers of progress in engineering.
Sounds tinfoily, but it‘s just history.
Im sure AI is/is going to be very useful for plenty of things, but it will not make good art, basically ever. Its crappy and unreliable for customer service, its not actually intelligent, its just pattern regurgitation. Ive heard its useful for things like sequencing human DNA and other science-y shit, but a lot of the common use case that gets thrown around is replacing normal humans doing average human jobs and LLM bullshit just doesn't actually seem any good at it, or at least its not good enough to be safe replacing humans.
Its definitely not in a state that justifies the amount of money or resources being spent on it, let alone the raw unadulterated stolen material that a lot of the common LLM data sets are trained on.
Its very lucky that tech isn't adequately regulated. Lucky for tech company CEOs anyways.
I think AI is just the latest tech buzzword, proudly following "nft", "crypto", and the .com bubble. There are just too many examples of shoehorning AI into products, pretending they do something useful, while they really do not. For a lot of tasks, i vastly prefer internet searches, as I know what my sources are.
Thee was recently a huge scandal in my town where the townhall used AI to make a report about school policy. As a dutiful servant always eager to please request, the AI fabricated scientific reports and literature to go with the prompt, and this was uncovered by a newspaper. Ouch.
As I get more used to AI generated content, I have become much more sceptical towards images, text and reports. Why not just google it and get the proper info from a trusted source instead? As AI clutters the web with more and more bs, and AI are trained on that same BS, humans might just go elsewhere, and the web will devolve into AI spewing random characters to each other (I have seen several bots do this in comment sections).
Then again, the current AI tech is supercharged by huge investments, and is nowhere near paying for itself. If you would have to pay the actual cost, it might be cheaper to hire a human. Maybe simpler engines like DeepSeek are better.
On April 05 2025 10:45 Vivax wrote: The applications of AI are likely underestimated, not over. The context advanced programs are used in isn‘t within the grasp of the public.
Just going by the rule of thumb that the military is usually 10 years ahead before an invention becomes accessible to civilians. And they are the main drivers of progress in engineering.
Sounds tinfoily, but it‘s just history.
Im sure AI is/is going to be very useful for plenty of things, but it will not make good art, basically ever. Its crappy and unreliable for customer service, its not actually intelligent, its just pattern regurgitation. Ive heard its useful for things like sequencing human DNA and other science-y shit, but a lot of the common use case that gets thrown around is replacing normal humans doing average human jobs and LLM bullshit just doesn't actually seem any good at it, or at least its not good enough to be safe replacing humans.
Its definitely not in a state that justifies the amount of money or resources being spent on it, let alone the raw unadulterated stolen material that a lot of the common LLM data sets are trained on.
Its very lucky that tech isn't adequately regulated. Lucky for tech company CEOs anyways.
I think AI is just the latest tech buzzword, proudly following "nft", "crypto", and the .com bubble. There are just too many examples of shoehorning AI into products, pretending they do something useful, while they really do not. For a lot of tasks, i vastly prefer internet searches, as I know what my sources are.
Thee was recently a huge scandal in my town where the townhall used AI to make a report about school policy. As a dutiful servant always eager to please request, the AI fabricated scientific reports and literature to go with the prompt, and this was uncovered by a newspaper. Ouch.
As I get more used to AI generated content, I have become much more sceptical towards images, text and reports. Why not just google it and get the proper info from a trusted source instead? As AI clutters the web with more and more bs, and AI are trained on that same BS, humans might just go elsewhere, and the web will devolve into AI spewing random characters to each other (I have seen several bots do this in comment sections).
Then again, the current AI tech is supercharged by huge investments, and is nowhere near paying for itself. If you would have to pay the actual cost, it might be cheaper to hire a human. Maybe simpler engines like DeepSeek are better.
As always with the current "AI" tech it is about what it can actually do and where it is useful and how that changes over time.
Right now it is excellent at writing a summary of another text, such as a company yearly report for a news paper. Or a meeting summary. It is also good at spell checking and suggesting style changes or generating something semi relevant you can spin off on, including programming. Subtitles and translation is good enough for non-critical usage and used in a lot of places.
Seen a few people say the chatbots are getting good enough to scam people from money quickly as well. Since that is mostly a text problem and summary of social media as background.
It is great at generating average quality pictures from prompts. So you will see a lot of low end graphics people lose jobs. It is also getting good at recognizing things in pictures, so quality control, surveillance and at some point autonomous driving.
It is also good at generating voices, so low level voice acting or narrating is probably dying in 10 years time.
Other areas are more optimization challenges which isn't really AI. Or it isn't that great at it yet, I include accurate search engine and hard coding here. Though when it works it is very useful, not being able to trust is the major issue.
On April 04 2025 22:57 JimmyJRaynor wrote: another perspective from "the right" on Trump's tariffs. Thomas Sowell... + Show Spoiler +
There are many hard right tall foreheads like Thomas Sowell and Warren Buffett who normally speak in very restrained measured ways screaming from the hilltops that Trump's tariff policies are very bad.
It is one thing when moron talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC read the hyperbole on the teleprompter and adhere to a set of pre-written talking points made for them by the producers. It is a whole other ball game when guys like Warren Buffett and Thomas Sowell trash your policies.
Sowell does give Trump one out. If these tariffs are temporary to achieve a very specific goal. Goals such as getting Canada to spend 2.5% of GDP on military or the goal of getting Mexico to secure the border.
So far, the tariffs seem more like Trump and his team are fumbling around in the dark with no end game.
The tariffs have a very accessible justification, and endgame, which was figured out months ago by most people who were just open minded and paying attention and not wearing any blinders or looking too deep. This is not a dig at anyone, I just mean there have been people since last year going oh his plan must be this.
The uncertainty, and decrease in demand, hurt revenues of people doing business in ways that send money abroad (in general). They hurt stocks as people move from speculation to safety, which is treasury bonds.
Because of the increased demand of treasury bonds, yield rates fall. (If this seems counterintuitive, or doesn't add up, imagine this. You want a loan, but only one person has money. They will screw you on interest. But if everyone wants to give you the loan, the person you finally get the deal with will end up with a much lower interest rate, and so they will be getting less money from the arrangement than in the less-competed case.)
When yield rates fall, the government can refinance debt favorably, saving hundreds of billions/trillions in future budgets, which: 1) combined with savings from cutting waste and streamlining government 2) combined with increased revenues from the tariffs puts the US government in a much more fiscally healthy position, and
3) combined with immigration policy and tax cuts and onshoring because of domestic competition with imports and new trade alignments puts the US worker in a better place, and
4) combined with tax cuts that also become affordable due to having more federal revenue from tariffs, as long as the fed doesn't increase rates, should tentatively lead to (the start of) bull markets and growth in 2026/2027 range. That's approximately the planned trajectory. If the fed were to raise rates in the middle of all this when treasury yields are dropping, that would certainly lead to an unpredictable situation.
There is absolutely a risk of pain associated with this. More like an expectation of it, with some chance of lack of it. But the range of possible pain is wide so the severity depends on how markets adapt.
The plan as such is simple to digest once it clicks, like I said people worked it out last year or so, it's not something you can run on explicitly, "My fellow Americans, I'm going to tank the stock market to fix the fiscal situation," but putting together the pieces from his different allusions and interviews, people predicted it.
When Sowell, et al. criticize tariffs due to the 1930s, while correct, they are being a bit myopic, rigid, and uncreative. Tariffs were very successful in the 19th century, when the US was industrializing, they protected industries and brought in revenue to pay off the massive Civil War debt. In the 1930s the US was an exporter but mostly pretty balanced, and didn't have a huge sustained national debt it needed to pay down. (And you need to pay it down. Governments are not special exceptions as being the only things that don't actually need to pay their debt.)
What's different now is debt is approaching 1.5x GDP (by approaching I mean the train is not stopping, national debt will be 150% of GDP) and the government is close to spending $1 trillion per year simply on interest for the debt, which would be higher than defense spending. If you don't fix that now, you quickly get into a runaway situation where all you're doing is paying interest on debt. Trump's plan is untested. The use of tariffs to force treasury yields to plummet has no historical analogue. Because such a move has never been necessary: the confluence of circumstances we have now had never occurred before.
How long will it take for these benefits to occur? Do you believe Trump has the patience? How will you be able to tell if it was worth the economic "pain" that you will all incur in the meantime?
Trump has the patience because he doesn't have another election, that's why he can afford to start off with this.
But the party doesn't have as much time so the best case is 2026, like I said, before midterms. Stocks should be in a bull market then in confidence with the new growth, even though the growth itself is definitely not instant. Into 2027 is fine too. But the realignment will be a 5-10 year process.
If you ask me there are 3 approximate forks: 1) Mass "capitulation"/renegotiation - Most countries get their companies on board to rapidly adjust and change the global trade landscape. Which is radical, but not as extreme as it may look. US exports are about 10% of GDP, and imports are around 15% of GDP. The issue is just that extra 5% of GDP that could be renegotiated, rebalanced, with new deals and partnerships. Trump's not in a particular hurry to negotiate which puts the ball in their court.
2) Half renegotiation and half trade war - Here China's reciprocal tariffs come to mind as Trump loves trade wars with China most of all - as we know from his first term too. While the US might be fine with some countries, like NA or parts of EU or Asia or the Anglosphere, also Argentina, some countries will take China's route. As long as some are doing business, even if some aren't, the progress is good. China will have to find people to export to, or compete with US labor, even if they economically align with Japan and Korea. That's China's problem.
I find this the case the most likely. Not because it's the middle ground and the middle ground is always right, but for game theory reasons. If everyone enters a trade war then the one pair of countries that makes a deal for free trade have a wild advantage. (It probably won't be the US and Russia though.) Those pressures should roughly balance.
3) Total global trade war - No idea how that turns out if sustained. But because of partly the US's special position I don't think it's possible for everyone to team up and bully the US out so this case should quickly collapse to #2.
Progress he starts can be interrupted if Democrats jump in, put the country in a handbrake drift and switch to oh we suddenly need more democratic-socialist policies instead. Even if democratic socialism is good, putting the country on a seesaw is not.
But here's the thing about their policies. At the end of Biden's term, public sector jobs growth was outpacing private sector jobs, foreign born job growth far outpaced native born job growth. And "growth" in native jobs is a mirage, native employment now is basically flat to where it was just before the covid crash, while real wages are flat to slipping negative. The argument is there has already been a recession under the hood and the prosperity shown by the indicators people have used is superficial.
Democrats do not have a replacement for Liberation Day. They cannot accomplish with positive pressure what Trump/Bessent/Rubio can accomplish with positive and negative pressure. Every trillions of dollars jobs/covid/infrastructure bill spends like a million dollars each per makework job, is slow and never delivers legitimate private sector growth or significant public goods for the American people. That's been true for every administration since Obama, including covid spending under Trump.
Any time they subsidize a sector of the US economy in any way, the other half of the base rejects the notion as bailing out the rich. So they'll get angry - that Amazon has a sweet deal in New York, or that electric car tax deductions helped Musk get rich through Tesla, or that defense corporations have a stranglehold on incredibly lucrative government contracts and keep the gravy train coming for the military industrial complex - and as a result after helping the rich evil corporations, be so petulant as to not pass or do anything for small-medium business, or farmers. While then never actually holding Walmart or Amazon or insurance companies or Lockheed Martin to task. If you put tariffs, that's who hurts. Walmart and Amazon and Apple. Hedge funds. Most people won't hurt, or hurt a little. Walmart and Amazon will hurt more. And then everyone will feel better.
Republicans have not done better than Democrats on this. For the trade policy now, it's similar to illegal immigration, which both parties used to be against, and then both parties were for it until Trump. Both parties have factions that are like yeah we don't want the trade to be ENTIRELY free we sort of abstractly and ideologically believe that we want it to benefit the American worker and manufacturer but we have no idea how to actually implement that and if anyone tries it, like with a tariff war, we'll oppose it on some or other principle. What Trump is doing is not Democrat or Republican, it's apartisan.
Here's Trump's fellow Democrats Pelosi, Obama, and Sanders extoling the virtues of tariffs and the harms of unchecked free trade. In Obama's case, not tariffs per se but trade that is unfair if it disadvantages the US vs China. https://x.com/amuse/status/1908090226070741128
Now they have turned into petty agents defending the system that enriched them personally and Trump is the agent of not giving a fuck.
Bessent's interview he explains the issue of the public sector supplanting the private sector and Wall Street reaping benefits instead of Main Street, and the unsustainability of that. Especially the first 20~30 minutes.
Oblade you cannot build your manufacturing base up in 2 years for consumer goods. No one is even starting because theres a thought the tariffs may go away.
A brownfield or greenfield plant takes years to be operational and requires huge investment. You also need to have a plan on what products will go there. For automotive all of this is selected 2-3 years before start of production.
On April 05 2025 19:52 Sadist wrote: Oblade you cannot build your manufacturing base up in 2 years for consumer goods. No one is even starting because theres a thought the tariffs may go away.
A brownfield or greenfield plant takes years to be operational and requires huge investment. You also need to have a plan on what products will go there. For automotive all of this is selected 2-3 years before start of production.
Aye, it’s even difficult in something like education, which has less of that expensive, time-consuming infrastructural setup, but it still takes time to consider what you wanna do, try to get buy-in, retrain folk etc.
Exacerbated when party A does a bunch of reforms, Party B rolls it back and goes in the opposite direction, and it becomes a ping-pong ball.
That’s volatile enough, it’s even more so when you’re not even sure if Party A will commit to their plan of action for their time at the wheel.
The tariffs won't last long.. but for them to be an effective negotiation tool Trump must present it like they will last forever.
meh, Trump is just fucking with people to create a negotiation stance. Over the next few months Trump will get concessions from dozens of countries and brag about them as he reduces tariffs substantially one country at a time. He'll hold a party every time he signs a bilateral trade deal with each individual country. This is going to happen every week for many weeks. Remember Donald Trump thinks of himself as John Galt from Atlas Shrugged.
Every week when a new country makes concessions and signs a deal we're getting a "This is John Galt speaking..." speech from Trump. LOL.
I can't wait for the Canada//US deal to get made in May. It is going to be hilarious. Meanwhile, Governor Trudeau will be debating whether or not to have a stop sign or traffic lights in the busiest intersection of his parliament riding. Damn, did Trump kick his ass.
On April 05 2025 18:33 Yurie wrote: It is also good at generating voices, so low level voice acting or narrating is probably dying in 10 years time.
The union voice actors are behaving like idiots. They are making it a lot easier to replace them. They don't do anything special any way. They remind me of 1970s Unionized UAW American Auto Workers.
How many voice actors are there in America? This is really a nothing issue about a minuscule industry. I bet ya 10X as many RPG3 programmers got replaced in the 1980s as there are voice actors today.
On April 04 2025 22:57 JimmyJRaynor wrote: another perspective from "the right" on Trump's tariffs. Thomas Sowell... + Show Spoiler +
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie5IIrB7IdA
There are many hard right tall foreheads like Thomas Sowell and Warren Buffett who normally speak in very restrained measured ways screaming from the hilltops that Trump's tariff policies are very bad.
It is one thing when moron talk show hosts on CNN or MSNBC read the hyperbole on the teleprompter and adhere to a set of pre-written talking points made for them by the producers. It is a whole other ball game when guys like Warren Buffett and Thomas Sowell trash your policies.
Sowell does give Trump one out. If these tariffs are temporary to achieve a very specific goal. Goals such as getting Canada to spend 2.5% of GDP on military or the goal of getting Mexico to secure the border.
So far, the tariffs seem more like Trump and his team are fumbling around in the dark with no end game.
The tariffs have a very accessible justification, and endgame, which was figured out months ago by most people who were just open minded and paying attention and not wearing any blinders or looking too deep. This is not a dig at anyone, I just mean there have been people since last year going oh his plan must be this.
The uncertainty, and decrease in demand, hurt revenues of people doing business in ways that send money abroad (in general). They hurt stocks as people move from speculation to safety, which is treasury bonds.
Because of the increased demand of treasury bonds, yield rates fall. (If this seems counterintuitive, or doesn't add up, imagine this. You want a loan, but only one person has money. They will screw you on interest. But if everyone wants to give you the loan, the person you finally get the deal with will end up with a much lower interest rate, and so they will be getting less money from the arrangement than in the less-competed case.)
When yield rates fall, the government can refinance debt favorably, saving hundreds of billions/trillions in future budgets, which: 1) combined with savings from cutting waste and streamlining government 2) combined with increased revenues from the tariffs puts the US government in a much more fiscally healthy position, and
3) combined with immigration policy and tax cuts and onshoring because of domestic competition with imports and new trade alignments puts the US worker in a better place, and
4) combined with tax cuts that also become affordable due to having more federal revenue from tariffs, as long as the fed doesn't increase rates, should tentatively lead to (the start of) bull markets and growth in 2026/2027 range. That's approximately the planned trajectory. If the fed were to raise rates in the middle of all this when treasury yields are dropping, that would certainly lead to an unpredictable situation.
There is absolutely a risk of pain associated with this. More like an expectation of it, with some chance of lack of it. But the range of possible pain is wide so the severity depends on how markets adapt.
The plan as such is simple to digest once it clicks, like I said people worked it out last year or so, it's not something you can run on explicitly, "My fellow Americans, I'm going to tank the stock market to fix the fiscal situation," but putting together the pieces from his different allusions and interviews, people predicted it.
When Sowell, et al. criticize tariffs due to the 1930s, while correct, they are being a bit myopic, rigid, and uncreative. Tariffs were very successful in the 19th century, when the US was industrializing, they protected industries and brought in revenue to pay off the massive Civil War debt. In the 1930s the US was an exporter but mostly pretty balanced, and didn't have a huge sustained national debt it needed to pay down. (And you need to pay it down. Governments are not special exceptions as being the only things that don't actually need to pay their debt.)
What's different now is debt is approaching 1.5x GDP (by approaching I mean the train is not stopping, national debt will be 150% of GDP) and the government is close to spending $1 trillion per year simply on interest for the debt, which would be higher than defense spending. If you don't fix that now, you quickly get into a runaway situation where all you're doing is paying interest on debt. Trump's plan is untested. The use of tariffs to force treasury yields to plummet has no historical analogue. Because such a move has never been necessary: the confluence of circumstances we have now had never occurred before.
How long will it take for these benefits to occur? Do you believe Trump has the patience? How will you be able to tell if it was worth the economic "pain" that you will all incur in the meantime?
Trump has the patience because he doesn't have another election, that's why he can afford to start off with this.
But the party doesn't have as much time so the best case is 2026, like I said, before midterms. Stocks should be in a bull market then in confidence with the new growth, even though the growth itself is definitely not instant. Into 2027 is fine too. But the realignment will be a 5-10 year process.
If you ask me there are 3 approximate forks: 1) Mass "capitulation"/renegotiation - Most countries get their companies on board to rapidly adjust and change the global trade landscape. Which is radical, but not as extreme as it may look. US exports are about 10% of GDP, and imports are around 15% of GDP. The issue is just that extra 5% of GDP that could be renegotiated, rebalanced, with new deals and partnerships. Trump's not in a particular hurry to negotiate which puts the ball in their court.
2) Half renegotiation and half trade war - Here China's reciprocal tariffs come to mind as Trump loves trade wars with China most of all - as we know from his first term too. While the US might be fine with some countries, like NA or parts of EU or Asia or the Anglosphere, also Argentina, some countries will take China's route. As long as some are doing business, even if some aren't, the progress is good. China will have to find people to export to, or compete with US labor, even if they economically align with Japan and Korea. That's China's problem.
I find this the case the most likely. Not because it's the middle ground and the middle ground is always right, but for game theory reasons. If everyone enters a trade war then the one pair of countries that makes a deal for free trade have a wild advantage. (It probably won't be the US and Russia though.) Those pressures should roughly balance.
3) Total global trade war - No idea how that turns out if sustained. But because of partly the US's special position I don't think it's possible for everyone to team up and bully the US out so this case should quickly collapse to #2.
Progress he starts can be interrupted if Democrats jump in, put the country in a handbrake drift and switch to oh we suddenly need more democratic-socialist policies instead. Even if democratic socialism is good, putting the country on a seesaw is not.
But here's the thing about their policies. At the end of Biden's term, public sector jobs growth was outpacing private sector jobs, foreign born job growth far outpaced native born job growth. And "growth" in native jobs is a mirage, native employment now is basically flat to where it was just before the covid crash, while real wages are flat to slipping negative. The argument is there has already been a recession under the hood and the prosperity shown by the indicators people have used is superficial.
Democrats do not have a replacement for Liberation Day. They cannot accomplish with positive pressure what Trump/Bessent/Rubio can accomplish with positive and negative pressure. Every trillions of dollars jobs/covid/infrastructure bill spends like a million dollars each per makework job, is slow and never delivers legitimate private sector growth or significant public goods for the American people. That's been true for every administration since Obama, including covid spending under Trump.
Any time they subsidize a sector of the US economy in any way, the other half of the base rejects the notion as bailing out the rich. So they'll get angry - that Amazon has a sweet deal in New York, or that electric car tax deductions helped Musk get rich through Tesla, or that defense corporations have a stranglehold on incredibly lucrative government contracts and keep the gravy train coming for the military industrial complex - and as a result after helping the rich evil corporations, be so petulant as to not pass or do anything for small-medium business, or farmers. While then never actually holding Walmart or Amazon or insurance companies or Lockheed Martin to task. If you put tariffs, that's who hurts. Walmart and Amazon and Apple. Hedge funds. Most people won't hurt, or hurt a little. Walmart and Amazon will hurt more. And then everyone will feel better.
Republicans have not done better than Democrats on this. For the trade policy now, it's similar to illegal immigration, which both parties used to be against, and then both parties were for it until Trump. Both parties have factions that are like yeah we don't want the trade to be ENTIRELY free we sort of abstractly and ideologically believe that we want it to benefit the American worker and manufacturer but we have no idea how to actually implement that and if anyone tries it, like with a tariff war, we'll oppose it on some or other principle. What Trump is doing is not Democrat or Republican, it's apartisan.
Here's Trump's fellow Democrats Pelosi, Obama, and Sanders extoling the virtues of tariffs and the harms of unchecked free trade. In Obama's case, not tariffs per se but trade that is unfair if it disadvantages the US vs China. https://x.com/amuse/status/1908090226070741128
Now they have turned into petty agents defending the system that enriched them personally and Trump is the agent of not giving a fuck.
Bessent's interview he explains the issue of the public sector supplanting the private sector and Wall Street reaping benefits instead of Main Street, and the unsustainability of that. Especially the first 20~30 minutes.
Trump has the patience because he doesn't have another election, that's why he can afford to start off with this.
But the party doesn't have as much time so the best case is 2026, like I said, before midterms. Stocks should be in a bull market then in confidence with the new growth, even though the growth itself is definitely not instant. Into 2027 is fine too. But the realignment will be a 5-10 year process.
that timeline seems about as thought through as the actions that were set in motion. the massive trade imbalances were the result of decades of trade and market forces doing their thing...
I don't doubt that they have a plan and it might even make sense on paper. but that is the problem with theories. reality easily eats them for breakfast, and I don't think politically that the Rs will fare well in the coming elections.
US citizens were already on edge under Biden's economy, there's a reason people went for Trump and not more Dem policies. now Trump essentially added more pain. uncharacteristically without communicating properly which he is usually good at.
EPT
It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo pulls off that kind of "fuck you" move on the US government.
