People need to be careful when acting as if history started recently.
The US has had a number of protectionist regimes through its history, and many of them were far more potent than anything we're seeing out of Trump's Whitehouse.
In 1807, The Embargo Act effectively banned trade with Britain altogether. Considering that they were the biggest trader on earth at the time and the largest manufacturer, that would be like totally banning trade with China. This was done to pressure England and France to respect American neutrality during the Napoleonic wars. The embargos ultimately led to tensions which culminated in the war of 1812.
In 1828, very high tariffs between 45 and 50% were implemented to protect American manufacturing. This was called the "tariffs of abomination" and had major negative effects on the south, who relied both on European imports and exports, and faced reciprocal tariffs. The South eventually sought to nullify the tariffs in an early example of the tension between the north and the south which would ultimately lead to the civil war.
In 1832, those tariffs were dropped to about 35%. That was considered a compromise, but they were still considered quite high.
It wasn't until 1846 that tariffs dropped somewhat, and even then they weren't lower than Trump's across the board tariffs today.
Some of these embargo or tariff regimes did in fact have recessionary effects, and tariffs were the cause of some recessions not attributable to the debt cycle.
Reality is that tariff based protectionism is complicated. On one hand, global trade does tend to result in higher overall growth, so low tariffs are good in that regard. On the other hand, it can also result in markets that are somewhat exploitative and extractive -- if we extract materials such as metals or agricultural output and ship it elsewhere for value added processing, you almost end up with primary producers as colonial economies, only existing to enrich stockholders who are likely not even from this country (and in fact this practice of economies shipping out raw materials and shipping in finished goods has been called neocolonialism). It isn't a new idea -- Alexander Hamilton proposed a protectionist industrial policy in his Report on Manufactures as early as 1791, which recommended protectionist measures to protect against cheaper and more advanced British exports.
With tariffs being complicated, it's true that a lot of the instances above caused pain for Americans. The embargo act really hurt the US more than Europe. Industrial tariffs harmed the southern US and was likely one of the pressures behind the civil war, and the high tariffs in that period did absolutely cause a recession, as I've noted. However, it's also true that there were benefits for at least some Americans, with the US industrial base being reliant on early tariffs to compete with cheaper and more advanced British goods.
"Free trade" as a dogmatic mantra in the United States is relatively new in concept, and was practical in part because in the post-war period the United States dominated value added industries like manufacturing because most of the rest of the world had been bombed into dust in two world wars.
People who think Trump's protectionist tariffs make no sense simply don't know about a big chunk of America. If you replace a union factory with a strip mall, it's cold comfort to say "the global GDP went up. You should be happy." -- workers don't get paid in GDP, only the state does, and shareholders also benefit to an extent, but at the cost of local communities. Perhaps cotton is grown in America, processed in China, clothing is manufactured in Bangladesh, packaged in Singapore, then shipped back to the United States -- and that's fine for global GDP and share prices, but no local communities benefit.
Like it or not, extractive versions of free trade are considered neocolonialism, and even when it results in regions that are wealthy for a while, eventually it sends the wealth elsewhere and someone else capitalizes on that wealth. For an example, North America was focused on building value added industries early on, but South America was considerably more extractive. At first South America was considered wealthier since they were better capitalizing on natural resources, but today even a hollowed out America is still a more attractive place to live despite the fact that geographically, South America is still a place more suited to human florishing for the most part, given how much of the US is desert or swamp, and how much of South America is dense and green.
The bottom line here is that history didn't start in 1901, and there are a lot of examples of protectionist tariffs in the United States. Compared to those eras, the current tariffs by Donald Trump would even be considered relatively low. The post war situation of free trade between the United States and other countries was an aberration caused in part by extremely favorable conditions to the United States, but as the global economic system is normalized those assumptions may no longer be an important. That doesn't mean that tariffs are a entirely net good, or that they are entirely good for the entire country or entirely bad for the entire country, historically different economic blocs within the county had different opinions on the topic. All that being said, however, it should be obvious that the truth is more nuanced than protective tariffs simply being a stupid idea brought up by an idiot.
The US has had a number of protectionist regimes through its history, and many of them were far more potent than anything we're seeing out of Trump's Whitehouse.
In 1807, The Embargo Act effectively banned trade with Britain altogether. Considering that they were the biggest trader on earth at the time and the largest manufacturer, that would be like totally banning trade with China. This was done to pressure England and France to respect American neutrality during the Napoleonic wars. The embargos ultimately led to tensions which culminated in the war of 1812.
In 1828, very high tariffs between 45 and 50% were implemented to protect American manufacturing. This was called the "tariffs of abomination" and had major negative effects on the south, who relied both on European imports and exports, and faced reciprocal tariffs. The South eventually sought to nullify the tariffs in an early example of the tension between the north and the south which would ultimately lead to the civil war.
In 1832, those tariffs were dropped to about 35%. That was considered a compromise, but they were still considered quite high.
It wasn't until 1846 that tariffs dropped somewhat, and even then they weren't lower than Trump's across the board tariffs today.
Some of these embargo or tariff regimes did in fact have recessionary effects, and tariffs were the cause of some recessions not attributable to the debt cycle.
Reality is that tariff based protectionism is complicated. On one hand, global trade does tend to result in higher overall growth, so low tariffs are good in that regard. On the other hand, it can also result in markets that are somewhat exploitative and extractive -- if we extract materials such as metals or agricultural output and ship it elsewhere for value added processing, you almost end up with primary producers as colonial economies, only existing to enrich stockholders who are likely not even from this country (and in fact this practice of economies shipping out raw materials and shipping in finished goods has been called neocolonialism). It isn't a new idea -- Alexander Hamilton proposed a protectionist industrial policy in his Report on Manufactures as early as 1791, which recommended protectionist measures to protect against cheaper and more advanced British exports.
With tariffs being complicated, it's true that a lot of the instances above caused pain for Americans. The embargo act really hurt the US more than Europe. Industrial tariffs harmed the southern US and was likely one of the pressures behind the civil war, and the high tariffs in that period did absolutely cause a recession, as I've noted. However, it's also true that there were benefits for at least some Americans, with the US industrial base being reliant on early tariffs to compete with cheaper and more advanced British goods.
"Free trade" as a dogmatic mantra in the United States is relatively new in concept, and was practical in part because in the post-war period the United States dominated value added industries like manufacturing because most of the rest of the world had been bombed into dust in two world wars.
People who think Trump's protectionist tariffs make no sense simply don't know about a big chunk of America. If you replace a union factory with a strip mall, it's cold comfort to say "the global GDP went up. You should be happy." -- workers don't get paid in GDP, only the state does, and shareholders also benefit to an extent, but at the cost of local communities. Perhaps cotton is grown in America, processed in China, clothing is manufactured in Bangladesh, packaged in Singapore, then shipped back to the United States -- and that's fine for global GDP and share prices, but no local communities benefit.
Like it or not, extractive versions of free trade are considered neocolonialism, and even when it results in regions that are wealthy for a while, eventually it sends the wealth elsewhere and someone else capitalizes on that wealth. For an example, North America was focused on building value added industries early on, but South America was considerably more extractive. At first South America was considered wealthier since they were better capitalizing on natural resources, but today even a hollowed out America is still a more attractive place to live despite the fact that geographically, South America is still a place more suited to human florishing for the most part, given how much of the US is desert or swamp, and how much of South America is dense and green.
The bottom line here is that history didn't start in 1901, and there are a lot of examples of protectionist tariffs in the United States. Compared to those eras, the current tariffs by Donald Trump would even be considered relatively low. The post war situation of free trade between the United States and other countries was an aberration caused in part by extremely favorable conditions to the United States, but as the global economic system is normalized those assumptions may no longer be an important. That doesn't mean that tariffs are a entirely net good, or that they are entirely good for the entire country or entirely bad for the entire country, historically different economic blocs within the county had different opinions on the topic. All that being said, however, it should be obvious that the truth is more nuanced than protective tariffs simply being a stupid idea brought up by an idiot.
You're doing a fact check for a fact that wasn't in the discussion. You have not in this discussion referred to any person you could be referring to when you say "he", and I'm aware of the contents of the links I showed you and the links I didn't show you that I based my post on, and none of them refer to whoever or whatever you are referring to as well.
Now, you might think you're referring to where I said: "The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa." -- but if you're correcting that line, you're making a mistake because the stories I dug up were all as I described, and while I laid out my terms, you did not. I'll admit however, I erred in incorrectly laying out exactly what I was referring to, I probably should have dropped a link to the stories.
I looked this up before replying to you the first time, so I know many deportations were people on student visas alleged to be supporting Hamas. I can dig up many links if you'd like. So the best you can say is not "you're wrong about the facts", it's "you're right about those cases, and here are other cases in addition". My facts are straight, even if there are more facts that add nuance to the discussion and straighten the facts further.
The key factual elements I've brought up have been factual, and you haven't brought up any factuals in response until now, and what you've brought is incomplete -- some "he" who happens to fulfill your requirements.
Let's regroup a bit and look at what's happened already:
You started this discussion by specifically calling out the US as particularly bad for freedom of speech. I countered by pointing out a recent case where a Canadian was fined $10k for a private conversation.
Your response: "I suppose it depends on whether one wants to use one's speech to verbally abuse tenants or to protest war crimes." is comparing a case where a lady who considered another lady a friend and in an off-line, private conversation between two people who considered each other friends said she didn't agree with that lady going through transgender surgery in part because of her mother's double mastectomy complications resulting in a fine of $10k to a class of situations where people were deported for anti-Israel protests under laws which are intended to prevent people from expressing support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas. You is implicitly accepting the private discussion as less worthy of protection than public dissent by characterizing both in the least charitable way possible. Honestly, the correct answer should be that neither form of speech policing is acceptable -- or at the very least, that they are both last resorts we need to be deeply skeptical of even if we disagree with the message itself. However, having to watch what you say in private conversations lest the state punish you is a universal trope in dystopian literature for a reason: It's a dangerous and overwhelming insertion of the state into one's private life. There's a worthwhile discussion to be had about how governments define "support" and how that plays out, but that worthwhile discussion is largely blurred in this conversation for reasons I'll discuss in my conclusion.
I then countered by showing that some anti-israel protesters -- particularly in Germany where the server you are using resides -- have been either deported or arrested in Germany, and I also pointed out that any such deportations are under laws which are in effect in each country mentioned, showing that similar laws exist and that they have either been utilized in similar ways or it has been discussed. This showed that the idea that to "protest war crimes" isn't something uniquely unprotected in the United States.
To be honest, there are actually lots of avenues one could take to break my argument. You could argue that the cases I'm citing aren't as important as similar ones in America. You could argue that you were referring to scientific freedom of speech rather than contemporary freedom of speech (though you'd have to show how one region is markedly better than the other), you could have even gate kept me out of the discussion with a "you know, we're not really talking about that and even the freedom of speech part was only a piece of the whole that's more important" which I probably couldn't have done anything about because I'm not equipped for a full discussion of science funding. You could likely make convincing arguments about my argument tactics such as switching frames or that things I saw in one way were actually intended in another way. That last one if you did it convincingly would be devastating to my argument. Honestly, I actually like it when someone can make me step back. Another way you could have broken the back of my argument was to specifically show that the lady who was fined 10k really did deserve it, for example by showing up at the tenants house every day to lecture them even after being told to leave them alone or something equally outrageous.
If you're going to lecture someone about getting the facts straight, you should be doing it with a little more precision.
More importantly than any of this, we're witnessing a broad degradation of liberal speech norms—where the boundaries of “acceptable dissent” are being enforced not just in the US, but increasingly throughout the Western world. Whether the trigger is something the left finds sancrosanct or the right finds sancrosanct (though the right is presently largely out of institutional power globally), the state has gotten comfortable with legal tools to punish thoughtcrimes. We should be paying attention to that as a general theme, not just pointing and laughing at a particular country we think is doing it slightly faster. While many worldviews may not paint this as a particular problem, liberalism and human rights are the moral framework through which the current world order retains legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it's probable that another framework, such as dictatorship or theocracy, will rise, or that without legitimacy the current regimes will simply grind to a halt, as has happened in the past. If we're busy sniping at one another for the bits and pieces where one country is better than another, we'll miss that we're all drowning.
In this regard, we might be able to agree that post-9/11 USA did set the western world down this path with its reduced scrutiny in the face of terrorism, but unfortunately the truth is there's nowhere one can escape the totalizing state worship that regulates people's personal speech, and the fact that the government agrees with you this week and allows your speech is no guarantee of future protection.
Now, you might think you're referring to where I said: "The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa." -- but if you're correcting that line, you're making a mistake because the stories I dug up were all as I described, and while I laid out my terms, you did not. I'll admit however, I erred in incorrectly laying out exactly what I was referring to, I probably should have dropped a link to the stories.
I looked this up before replying to you the first time, so I know many deportations were people on student visas alleged to be supporting Hamas. I can dig up many links if you'd like. So the best you can say is not "you're wrong about the facts", it's "you're right about those cases, and here are other cases in addition". My facts are straight, even if there are more facts that add nuance to the discussion and straighten the facts further.
The key factual elements I've brought up have been factual, and you haven't brought up any factuals in response until now, and what you've brought is incomplete -- some "he" who happens to fulfill your requirements.
Let's regroup a bit and look at what's happened already:
You started this discussion by specifically calling out the US as particularly bad for freedom of speech. I countered by pointing out a recent case where a Canadian was fined $10k for a private conversation.
Your response: "I suppose it depends on whether one wants to use one's speech to verbally abuse tenants or to protest war crimes." is comparing a case where a lady who considered another lady a friend and in an off-line, private conversation between two people who considered each other friends said she didn't agree with that lady going through transgender surgery in part because of her mother's double mastectomy complications resulting in a fine of $10k to a class of situations where people were deported for anti-Israel protests under laws which are intended to prevent people from expressing support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas. You is implicitly accepting the private discussion as less worthy of protection than public dissent by characterizing both in the least charitable way possible. Honestly, the correct answer should be that neither form of speech policing is acceptable -- or at the very least, that they are both last resorts we need to be deeply skeptical of even if we disagree with the message itself. However, having to watch what you say in private conversations lest the state punish you is a universal trope in dystopian literature for a reason: It's a dangerous and overwhelming insertion of the state into one's private life. There's a worthwhile discussion to be had about how governments define "support" and how that plays out, but that worthwhile discussion is largely blurred in this conversation for reasons I'll discuss in my conclusion.
I then countered by showing that some anti-israel protesters -- particularly in Germany where the server you are using resides -- have been either deported or arrested in Germany, and I also pointed out that any such deportations are under laws which are in effect in each country mentioned, showing that similar laws exist and that they have either been utilized in similar ways or it has been discussed. This showed that the idea that to "protest war crimes" isn't something uniquely unprotected in the United States.
To be honest, there are actually lots of avenues one could take to break my argument. You could argue that the cases I'm citing aren't as important as similar ones in America. You could argue that you were referring to scientific freedom of speech rather than contemporary freedom of speech (though you'd have to show how one region is markedly better than the other), you could have even gate kept me out of the discussion with a "you know, we're not really talking about that and even the freedom of speech part was only a piece of the whole that's more important" which I probably couldn't have done anything about because I'm not equipped for a full discussion of science funding. You could likely make convincing arguments about my argument tactics such as switching frames or that things I saw in one way were actually intended in another way. That last one if you did it convincingly would be devastating to my argument. Honestly, I actually like it when someone can make me step back. Another way you could have broken the back of my argument was to specifically show that the lady who was fined 10k really did deserve it, for example by showing up at the tenants house every day to lecture them even after being told to leave them alone or something equally outrageous.
If you're going to lecture someone about getting the facts straight, you should be doing it with a little more precision.
More importantly than any of this, we're witnessing a broad degradation of liberal speech norms—where the boundaries of “acceptable dissent” are being enforced not just in the US, but increasingly throughout the Western world. Whether the trigger is something the left finds sancrosanct or the right finds sancrosanct (though the right is presently largely out of institutional power globally), the state has gotten comfortable with legal tools to punish thoughtcrimes. We should be paying attention to that as a general theme, not just pointing and laughing at a particular country we think is doing it slightly faster. While many worldviews may not paint this as a particular problem, liberalism and human rights are the moral framework through which the current world order retains legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it's probable that another framework, such as dictatorship or theocracy, will rise, or that without legitimacy the current regimes will simply grind to a halt, as has happened in the past. If we're busy sniping at one another for the bits and pieces where one country is better than another, we'll miss that we're all drowning.
In this regard, we might be able to agree that post-9/11 USA did set the western world down this path with its reduced scrutiny in the face of terrorism, but unfortunately the truth is there's nowhere one can escape the totalizing state worship that regulates people's personal speech, and the fact that the government agrees with you this week and allows your speech is no guarantee of future protection.
The craziest thing we're seeing this post in the same color scheme as my site, and without a domain. So I'm like "wtf are my users doing now?!"
I feel you.
The book(s -- the appendix is almost long enough for a full release of its own at this point) I'm hoping to have released in 15-30 weeks depending on my pace (planned pace vs. actual pace, I'm getting way more done than I planned) are so far turning out to be way more than genre fiction. It'll be entertaining and interesting, but I think it'll also change the way the reader sees the world if the fact that writing it has changed me.
But let's be real, without institutional backing, what are the odds anyone even reads it?
It won't stop me because something deeper than that keeps me going forward, but we're in an age of slop, and the building is made of slop, and what happens if you throw a diamond at a house made of slop? It's lost in the slop.
Fwiw when I wasn't writing so much I'm a voracious reader, but I'll admit some of my reading is slop (lots of Japanese isekai and fantasy) because I'm not stuck in traffic, I am traffic. That being said, Japan's content pipeline is incredible and the fact that the West lacks anything similar is really to our detriment.
The book(s -- the appendix is almost long enough for a full release of its own at this point) I'm hoping to have released in 15-30 weeks depending on my pace (planned pace vs. actual pace, I'm getting way more done than I planned) are so far turning out to be way more than genre fiction. It'll be entertaining and interesting, but I think it'll also change the way the reader sees the world if the fact that writing it has changed me.
But let's be real, without institutional backing, what are the odds anyone even reads it?
It won't stop me because something deeper than that keeps me going forward, but we're in an age of slop, and the building is made of slop, and what happens if you throw a diamond at a house made of slop? It's lost in the slop.
Fwiw when I wasn't writing so much I'm a voracious reader, but I'll admit some of my reading is slop (lots of Japanese isekai and fantasy) because I'm not stuck in traffic, I am traffic. That being said, Japan's content pipeline is incredible and the fact that the West lacks anything similar is really to our detriment.
If you think about it, making housing impossible to afford is basically suicidal. People need massive wages just to not die of exposure so all costs must go up and basic jobs are unacceptable to anyone not living 64 men to a 400 sqr ft apartment.
Finally got the 5th proxmox server set up, gonna install it tomorrow.
I don't want anyone to misunderstand: I have absolutely no use for 5 proxmox servers. Especially since two of them are just intel atoms.
One of the two atom boxes is idling to run nostr, the other one I'm hoping to set up to do software defined radio.
I don't want anyone to misunderstand: I have absolutely no use for 5 proxmox servers. Especially since two of them are just intel atoms.
One of the two atom boxes is idling to run nostr, the other one I'm hoping to set up to do software defined radio.
If anyone goes "hey you should kidnap Gretchen Whitmer!" Or "you should go commit violence against schools!" That's a sign that they might be a fed and you should block them.
And if they turn out not to be a fed, well you know it's like that a girl that you dated that one time who turned out to be actual pants on head insane. And doesn't matter how great her memes were, sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze
And if they turn out not to be a fed, well you know it's like that a girl that you dated that one time who turned out to be actual pants on head insane. And doesn't matter how great her memes were, sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze
You mean whether one wants to use their speech to express their personal opinions about an individual's personal choices in a private conversation or to publicly support and organization whose goal is the genocide of the Jews.
The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa. Canada has a law, most European countries have the same law. This isn't new.
You know, the website you're on is hosted in Germany. Supporting Hamas is fully illegal there too. Are you sure you want to support a regional authority which committed numerous acts of terrorism? You'll get to find out exactly how much free speech there is in Germany if you're not careful.
Germany can and does arrest people for social media posts: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/berlin-police-arrest-pro-palestinian-woman-for-writing-from-the-river-to-the-sea-on-social-media/3165593?utm_source=chatgpt.com
In fact, Germany deported a bunch of people for the exact same thing.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/four-foreign-activists-face-deportation-from-germany-after-berlin-university-sit-in
There has also been discussion in the UK of doing the same thing under similar laws.
I'd also like you to consider that there are two examples of heinous invasions by horrible states recently -- if Russians were going out to different countries to protest against Ukraine's handling of the war in Ukraine, would you be opposed to deporting them? I'd be perfectly OK with sending them back to Russia if they love it there so much. If you're here on a student visa, you should be studying and not protesting. Ironically, Russia's was far less of a war crime than that of Hamas, but nobody seems to care about the red line war crimes Hamas has committed and continues to commit by holding civilian hostages.
If you think that supporting a terrorist organization in public on a student visa is actually better than expressing sincere concern to ostensibly a friend in private, then I think you need to reconsider your moral frameworks.
The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa. Canada has a law, most European countries have the same law. This isn't new.
You know, the website you're on is hosted in Germany. Supporting Hamas is fully illegal there too. Are you sure you want to support a regional authority which committed numerous acts of terrorism? You'll get to find out exactly how much free speech there is in Germany if you're not careful.
Germany can and does arrest people for social media posts: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/berlin-police-arrest-pro-palestinian-woman-for-writing-from-the-river-to-the-sea-on-social-media/3165593?utm_source=chatgpt.com
In fact, Germany deported a bunch of people for the exact same thing.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/four-foreign-activists-face-deportation-from-germany-after-berlin-university-sit-in
There has also been discussion in the UK of doing the same thing under similar laws.
I'd also like you to consider that there are two examples of heinous invasions by horrible states recently -- if Russians were going out to different countries to protest against Ukraine's handling of the war in Ukraine, would you be opposed to deporting them? I'd be perfectly OK with sending them back to Russia if they love it there so much. If you're here on a student visa, you should be studying and not protesting. Ironically, Russia's was far less of a war crime than that of Hamas, but nobody seems to care about the red line war crimes Hamas has committed and continues to commit by holding civilian hostages.
If you think that supporting a terrorist organization in public on a student visa is actually better than expressing sincere concern to ostensibly a friend in private, then I think you need to reconsider your moral frameworks.
[admin mode] had a power bump or something that messed up all kinds of equipment. Then the VMs weren't set to auto-restart, then pleroma wasn't set to enabled.
I guess it shows how solid things have been that it's only come up now.
I guess it shows how solid things have been that it's only come up now.
That's more than I paid for all the major hardware upgrades I implemented this year, and I really went to town upgrading all my hardware!
Trump is obviously a complex and multifaceted figure but I can't see this as anything but total win.
Maybe we should tell the kids they're evil Nazi rapists some more. That should help!
There's been a lot of talk about the recent drop in stocks due to the tariffs in the US.
Whoever won the election everyone should have been positioned as if something catastrophic would happen. Figures such as Jamie Dimon have been sounding alarm bells for a while now, and Berkshire Hathaway had been selling off securities at an unprecedented rate, having more cash in the bank than ever before.
Most indexes are double what they were in 2019. Does anyone seriously think businesses are twice as healthy as they were pre-pandemic?
Obviously Trump implementing global tariffs was the match that set the field on fire, but it is burning because it's filled with dead dry grass.
We've already seen something similar during a Trump presidency: in 2018, Trump implemented high tariffs on China amount many other things and it led the markets down 20% for the year, but the year after that saw markets rise nearly 30%. Now that's not going to happen this time because that was the largest stock market rise in history, but it shows that volatility in the short term doesn't mean low growth in the long term.
So two truths that contradict each other are about the effect of a market crash. On one hand, a shrinking stock market is generally good for inequality. The rent collectors in the stock market are affected more by a stock market drop than people who sell their labor. On the other hand, people who aligned themselves properly probably haven't seen a huge loss in wealth over this -- The Federal Reserve has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to just park money at the fed and get 5-6% returns with absolutely 0 risk because the fed is the money printer, so if you want to sit out a fairly high risk moment in the market, you're still able to roughly match or beat inflation. Anyone holding such assets when things hit bottom can become immediately liquid and pick up some bargains.
As for why Trump set the field on fire, it should be obvious: he's a mercantilist who thinks America can't succeed without having a current account surplus. In the short term he's totally wrong about that, but in the longer term he's correct, and the increasing overwhelming debt both the American state and the American people find themselves in are evidence of that. You can't keep borrowing money to buy stuff from the third world forever.
The left and the right both are of two minds on the outcomes of merchantilism. On one hand, the left has become pretty anti-borders and pro-free trade, and the business right obviously wants a nice calm environment where they can export their businesses to low cost jurisdictions. On the other hand, they recognize the potential exploitation from rich countries outsourcing work to other countries including not paying workers domestic rates despite domestic profits and avoiding things like environmental regulations by jurisdiction shopping, and the populist right obviously wants the jobs to be in the country because it isn't some 1950s distant memory that America used to have lots of factories.
Agree or disagree with his mercantilist attitude (and most establishment economists would consider it outdated and wrong), he's acting more like a Chinese emperor than an American president -- instead of thinking in terms of quarters or even terms, he's positioning the US over decades. A drop in the short term probably isn't that important through that view, because it's looking at a longer term future.
Consider this parallel. JC Penney is considered a textbook failure for something they did: They stopped lying about "sales" that were always going on and just focused on low prices every day. When they did that, business dropped massively, and quickly they switched back. That was considered evidence that companies shouldn't change strategies like that -- but the rest of the story is that JC Penney went bankrupt after changing back to their own business model. Changing strategies like that was going to hurt in the short term, but low prices every day is how companies much bigger and more successful operate so if they stuck with it they may have survived. Instead they returned to business as usual and had short term success at the expense of long term success.
Whoever won the election everyone should have been positioned as if something catastrophic would happen. Figures such as Jamie Dimon have been sounding alarm bells for a while now, and Berkshire Hathaway had been selling off securities at an unprecedented rate, having more cash in the bank than ever before.
Most indexes are double what they were in 2019. Does anyone seriously think businesses are twice as healthy as they were pre-pandemic?
Obviously Trump implementing global tariffs was the match that set the field on fire, but it is burning because it's filled with dead dry grass.
We've already seen something similar during a Trump presidency: in 2018, Trump implemented high tariffs on China amount many other things and it led the markets down 20% for the year, but the year after that saw markets rise nearly 30%. Now that's not going to happen this time because that was the largest stock market rise in history, but it shows that volatility in the short term doesn't mean low growth in the long term.
So two truths that contradict each other are about the effect of a market crash. On one hand, a shrinking stock market is generally good for inequality. The rent collectors in the stock market are affected more by a stock market drop than people who sell their labor. On the other hand, people who aligned themselves properly probably haven't seen a huge loss in wealth over this -- The Federal Reserve has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to just park money at the fed and get 5-6% returns with absolutely 0 risk because the fed is the money printer, so if you want to sit out a fairly high risk moment in the market, you're still able to roughly match or beat inflation. Anyone holding such assets when things hit bottom can become immediately liquid and pick up some bargains.
As for why Trump set the field on fire, it should be obvious: he's a mercantilist who thinks America can't succeed without having a current account surplus. In the short term he's totally wrong about that, but in the longer term he's correct, and the increasing overwhelming debt both the American state and the American people find themselves in are evidence of that. You can't keep borrowing money to buy stuff from the third world forever.
The left and the right both are of two minds on the outcomes of merchantilism. On one hand, the left has become pretty anti-borders and pro-free trade, and the business right obviously wants a nice calm environment where they can export their businesses to low cost jurisdictions. On the other hand, they recognize the potential exploitation from rich countries outsourcing work to other countries including not paying workers domestic rates despite domestic profits and avoiding things like environmental regulations by jurisdiction shopping, and the populist right obviously wants the jobs to be in the country because it isn't some 1950s distant memory that America used to have lots of factories.
Agree or disagree with his mercantilist attitude (and most establishment economists would consider it outdated and wrong), he's acting more like a Chinese emperor than an American president -- instead of thinking in terms of quarters or even terms, he's positioning the US over decades. A drop in the short term probably isn't that important through that view, because it's looking at a longer term future.
Consider this parallel. JC Penney is considered a textbook failure for something they did: They stopped lying about "sales" that were always going on and just focused on low prices every day. When they did that, business dropped massively, and quickly they switched back. That was considered evidence that companies shouldn't change strategies like that -- but the rest of the story is that JC Penney went bankrupt after changing back to their own business model. Changing strategies like that was going to hurt in the short term, but low prices every day is how companies much bigger and more successful operate so if they stuck with it they may have survived. Instead they returned to business as usual and had short term success at the expense of long term success.
We did the math on an airplane taking off. Even a relatively small plane during takeoff is something like 3 megawatts of power. That's enough to power a small town. And that's not some fancy jet, that's a prop plane.
That might not be such a big deal if you have a ton of people on the plane, and you are dividing the energy use across all the people on there, but if you have one rich retard on there, that one guy owns every megawatt his jet produces.
And by the way, a car at highway speeds is going to burn about 10 kilowatts.
The engineering types will note that we're not talking about kilowatt hours so total energy utilized isn't really being talked about here, but fuel cost for one flight can easily dwarf a single person's total annual fuel use for transportation.
That might not be such a big deal if you have a ton of people on the plane, and you are dividing the energy use across all the people on there, but if you have one rich retard on there, that one guy owns every megawatt his jet produces.
And by the way, a car at highway speeds is going to burn about 10 kilowatts.
The engineering types will note that we're not talking about kilowatt hours so total energy utilized isn't really being talked about here, but fuel cost for one flight can easily dwarf a single person's total annual fuel use for transportation.
I find that to be an innately hilarious statement. Forget about the politics for a second, it's just very amusing.
"Your cows are weak!"
"Your cows are weak!"