quiet_NaN
5hr ago
I think that for theguardian, such a story might simply be too good to risk ruining it with a fact check.
On the other hand, nothing in it seems implausible given my knowledge of the Trump administration. The only thing mildly surprising is that there is no allegation of excessive violence during the arrest.
The goons of ICE are likely working on a quota basis. Trump wants that many people deported per months, he does not care who it is. They know that Trump does not give a rats ass about following proper procedure, that guy had his mob try to stop the certification of an election before, and has shown a great willingness to pardon any deeds done by his side in the culture war.
If the courts overturn the deportation decision, that is still a win for Trump, because he can paint himself as following campaign promises to the best of his ability while being hampered by the cuddly justice system.
Deporting armed gang members who might prefer death to spending the rest of their life imprisoned without judgement in some hell in El Salvador is obviously a dangerous occupation. But luckily there are plenty of harmless immigrants which you can deport instead, and they will count just as much for statistical purposes.
Because of the CW, there is also zero consideration to the individual's case. Either you are MAGA and support all deportations, or your are left-wing and support none. The moderate position that deporting someone who came to the US age 15 and has served multiple sentences for assault is fine but that deporting an elderly man without a criminal record is bad is not shared by either side, because both see it as a slippery slope towards their enemies position.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Come on. That is a cheap rhetoric trick and you know it. Anyone can read Mein Kampf, find an unobjectionable quotation which which their current political opponent would disagree and thus prove that their opponent is literally less reasonable than Hitler.
I think English has the idiom that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am sure that if I were to dig through all the stuff Trump had said this year, I would be able to find plenty of sentences which sound reasonable, even insightful in isolation.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time.
This is a common misconception. For most things of life-or-death importance, people were usually at least vaguely right. The Middle Ages might have had a cosmology which was laughably wrong, but their farmers certainly knew what was the optimal time to plant grain, because no society which is wrong about these things can survive.
Would medieval Europe have benefited greatly from a time traveler infodumping all the actionable knowledge of our age, e.g. how the plague works, and how to bootstrap an industrial civilization a la planecrash? Sure.
But there is a difference between being wrong because you lack the tech to find evidence either way (e.g. microscopes and sterilization for germ theory) or because your epistemics suck (which to be fair they often did).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics?
Personally, I do not think that Jewish money is any worse than gentile money, and you would require significantly higher levels of antisemitism in the US before "I may be funded by billionaires, but not Jewish billionaires" becomes a selling point in US politics.
Even if billionaire money is a problem in politics (and it can be argued that it is -- look at the maximum marginal income tax and how it has evolved since 1950, not that I expect billionaires to pay even that), this is a coordination problem. Almost all of the present politicians are where they are because they are cozy with rich donors, cutting down on campaign funding would really disadvantage them over competitors. And unilateral rejection of funding would hurt your own side.
It is like going to medieval Europe and saying "if we all coordinated to disallow metal weapons and armor, wars would be a lot less bloody which would be better for everyone". Even if all the nobles could coordinate to accomplish that, no knight wants to be beaten to death by a peasant with a stick, so they would still not do it.
Also, there is this guy whose shtick is that he does not accept big campaign donations, but for some reason I think few of the "Jewish money ruins everything" demographic are going to vote for Bernie.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I get what you are saying, but I think that a not-insignificant part of the MAGA base is into the QAnon stuff.
In literature (in the widest sense), making a character a rapist or child molester is often done to drive home that they are a baddie. It is a bit crude, but it works. So when create a myth of a smoke-filled room where sinister figures decide the fate of the world, to exclude the possibility of someone saying "but what if this is actually a good thing?", you add "and after business was concluded, they relaxed by injecting adrenochrome harvested from children and also raping a few kids".
Epstein is the closest real-life thing to that trope. Sure, it does not match the trope perfectly, nobody is alleging that the fate of the world was decided on his island, and calling it "pedophile island" seems a bit of a misnomer when most of the victims (from what I heard) were female minors who had already hit puberty, but polite society is really big into age of consent (and for good reasons), so it still generates sufficient moral outrage (and for good reasons, again). I think the underage aspect was probably meant to celebrate that the participants were rich and powerful and beyond the morals and legal restrictions of ordinary people (and also, blackmail obviously, but Epstein could hardly tell his guests that).
Pretty much nobody ever believed that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump was into consent very much. I do not think he is into violent rape, but groping someone he has power over (e.g. some beauty pageant contestant) in a way which would upset the HR ladies seems very in character for him.
I can not imagine that his reaction to Epstein was "hanging out with (supposedly) powerful, rich people and illicit, transactional sex with Problematic consent are my two least favorite favorite things in the world, I will pass". I do not think he was really that much into the underage aspect of it (I think that few people really are -- but of course any sexual taboo is a also a kink, if the Aborigine had pornhub I think "Kumbo on Kapota" would be in the top ten categories).
In a way, I think one thing the QAnon crowd is disappointed about is that they saw Trump as an outsider who would clean up the corrupt and immoral DC elites. Who cares how many models he fucked, at least he is not part of the supposed sex and power shadow council which rules DC and the world. Except that they now find that to the very limited degree that their fever dreams were something real, he was in the fucking middle of it, much more than Biden or 'crooked' Hillary ever were.
Again, this should come as a surprise to nobody, Trump was already part of the elite the moment he was born, and his defection from the DC swamp was always kayfabe at least till J6. But it does surprise the QAnon voters.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Is that really what they are saying now? I'll be polluting their data by answering "99" in the future.
Probably not, I do not hang out with a lot of wokes. or people generally. :)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is a 2025 non-fiction book by the American journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It was published by Penguin Random House on May 20, 2025. It details the claims of a cover-up regarding Joe Biden's age and health during his presidency and reelection campaign, leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Act utilitarianism is not the only kind of utilitarianism there is. There is also rule utilitarianism and Two-level utilitarianism. Utilitarians can be against believing false things in the same way that they can be against child rape: while it is certainly possible to conjure hypothetical scenarios where the thing they are against has the better outcome, in practice these situations do not seem to appear.
Go and find some utility improving lie as an example
Hey, I am not the one who claims that there is such a thing as a false belief which improves utility. You seem to claim that such things exist, so you should come up with examples.
One example comes from Pratchett:
"For example, there was the Raddles' privy. Miss Level had explained carefully to Mr. and Mrs. Raddle several times that it was far too close to the well, and so the drinking water was full of tiny, tiny creatures that were making their children sick. They'd listen very carefully, every time they heard the lecture, and still they'd never move the privy. But Mistress Weatherwax told them it was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell, and by the time they left that cottage, Mr. Raddle and three of his friends were already digging a new well at the other end of the garden."
There are several defenses of Granny Weatherwaxes behavior possible: 0. Operating on simulacrum level 2 is fine, truth does not matter. Obviously I reject this.
- It could be argued that she wanted to transport the true belief that the distance between well and privy was to small (but I do not find that very convincing).
- It could be argued that this was the closest thing to the truth the Raddles could grasp. Consider:
Medieval peasant: "Where do you come from?"
Literally-truthtelling alien: "To understand the answer to that question, you first have to understand that your cosmology is all wrong. While you believe that your world is planar, it is actually a sphere, strike that, a roughly sphere-shaped body. You do not fall off from that sphere because there is a force called gravity which pulls you towards the center of that body, even though calling it a force is an oversimplification as in reality it is more accurately described as bent space-time. Gravity is also causing your world to rotate around ..."
Conceptionally-truthtelling alien: "We come from the stars."
Literally-truthelling alien: "We most certainly do not. The surface temperature of stellar bodies is much too high to support life." I would be rather sympathetic to the second alien here, because while he lies in a very technical sense, he is trying to answer in the most truthful way the peasant will understand.
- One might argue that both the Raddles and my peasant are not so much suffering from a false belief, but trapped in a whole world-view full of falsehoods. Where normally spreading false beliefs is like salting the fertile earth, replacing one falsehood with another one in an endless sea of falsehoods is like dumping salt into the ocean, so the lie is not morally wrong.
However, none of these arguments apply to believing falsehoods yourself or your epistemic peer community. The peasant who tries to understand general relativity, fails and ends up believing that in a vague way, the aliens come from the stars, but not exactly is more virtuous than the peasant who just goes "sure, you come from the stars. whatever."
quiet_NaN
4d ago
To the degree that gender is a useful concept separate from sex, it is exactly a belief. (We could also rate passing, on a scale of 0 (always read male) to 1 (always read female), but that depends on effort, situation and so forth and is probably not worth the cost of measuring.)
Consider a column named "religion" (which is something the government sometimes tracks, e.g. to put on dog tags).
Sure, I could put in
Name: Sarah. Soul: None. Auxiliary Note: identifies as ensouled / Roman-Catholic.
But that would be an asshole-atheist move. If I put in religion: RCC instead, then almost nobody is going to read that as "she has an eternal soul which she has pledged to the Roman-Catholic version of the Christian god and thus she will either go to RC heaven or RC hell, unlike the next guy who is Sunnite and will either go to that heaven or wherever bad Sunnites go" because nobody expects religion to work like in D&D.
Or take the column "name". Nobody will claim that "Sarah" is her eternal True Name objectively etched in her very soul. Perhaps her parents named her "Karen" and she really hated that name and got it legally changed. Should we write:
Name assigned at birth: Karen. Auxiliary Note: trans-named / Sarah-identifying
quiet_NaN
4d ago
"it's not about ideology, the bad (incorrect) term is polluting our data" seems pretty good
The problem is not the change per se. The wokes, the medical establishment and MAGA would agree that a column which tracks sex-assigned-at-birth should rather be labeled "sex" (with the wokes probably prefering "SAAB") than "gender". This is why this is such a non-story.
But I will not pretend that the thought process of whoever was doing the change was "oh no, if the Trump administration sees this, they will get really mad, because they really care about scientific accuracy. Remember what happened when someone confused atoms and ions in a grant application?" The thought process was more like "Trump clearly sees the word gender as the language of the political enemy, better remove it asap."
we are talking about a medical database here, peoples' sex is actually a thing that matters; gender not so much
Arguably, it depends. If I want to study breast cancer, then I likely want to select "people with boobs", which might be more closely related to gender than sex-assigned-at-birth. Ideally, I would use both columns and select for cis-women (or cis-men). (If the database contains detailed info on gender related medical interventions, I guess studying trans people might be a possibility as well.)
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think that the sentence is generally more understood to express a preference for true beliefs for oneself and in cooperative settings. "Of course I told the Gestapo where the Jews were hiding, and destroyed them with the truth" is very much not a standard interpretation. Nor is there an imperative to destroy any respect your coworker might have for you by blurting "whenever I see you I fantasize about your tits". Same for consumer service.
Nor is it imperative to rub the truth into the face of an unappreciative audience. A religious person is very likely already aware of the fact that agnostic atheism is a thing. Telling them they are wrong once a day is not helpful.
A better example of a seemingly benign untruth might be homeopathy. Obviously it is bollocks. But the placebo effect is real, and larger if the patient is not aware of the fact that they are getting a placebo. So from a utilitarian perspective, it might seem beneficial to let your community believe some horseshite if it improves their health outcomes, and as long as you consider only direct effects, this might even be true (if you outlaw homeopathic "cures" for cancer and the like).
But the indirect epistemic consequences are devastating. "You know that orthodox medicine is wrong to deny homeopathy, why should you believe them if they claim that vaccines do not cause autism? Or why should you believe some adjacent ivory tower autofellating scientists that climate change is a thing?"
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Meta: This is more or less a bare link.
Did you know that if you start a line with the greater-than character, themotte will show that line as a quotation? Also, most browsers allow you to mark text on websites and "copy" it by holding the Ctrl (or Command on Apple), then pressing the "C" key (Ctrl-C). With Ctrl-V, you can "paste" that text into a text field.
Using quotations and copy pasting together, you can do something like this (Click on the view source button at the end of this comment to see how it is done):
I LOVE DANGER ZONE writes:
Left-wingers tend to think of standpoint epistemology stuff, or various kinds of language policing, as a kind of consolation prize for minorities in an economically and legally subordinate position. Scouring grant proposals for non-inclusive language, pointing out microagressions, asking people to defer to your lived experience, these are tools for non-dominant minorities to begin to build the case for economic and legal equality. The dominant majority doesn’t need those things, the idea that the dominant majority would be jealous of those tools and want to use them is absurd.
[...]
I think to a very large extent left-wing culture in the US was totally unprepared for that kind of jealousy. Because they sort of thought of themselves as underdogs it was really hard to process the idea that right-wing culture contained a ton of people who desperately wanted to be underdogs in the same way, who didn’t view those things as scraps left over by the powerful, but instead thought of it as what power looks like.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Minor technical nitpick: I think something "open source" is carrying a bunch of connotations which do not apply to LLMs. It is a bit like if I called a CC-BY-SA photograph "open source".
To the degree that LLMs are like traditional software, the source code -- the human-readable inputs which decide what a program does -- would be a neural network framework plus the training data (most of which is crawled/pirated rather than open source licensed).
Compiling would be the process of training.
In normal open source software, almost all of the effort goes into creating the code base. Compilation is basically free, and you compile your code a zillion times in the process of building your codebase. With LLMs, training is really expensive. Nobody downloads your sources, everybody just takes your binary, the weights.
With a normal open source project, you can easily git clone the sources and compile. If you run into a problem or need the program to do something differently, you just edit the sources and compile again, and if you think your changes might be generally useful, you make a pull request upstream to start the process of getting them into the official version.
With LLMs what you git clone are giant inscrutable matrices. If you are really good, you might be able to tweak the weights a bit so that the LLM will talk about the Golden Gate Bridge all the time. But this is a gimmick, not a general improvement. If you want to actually make the model more useful for purposes you have in common with others, you need RLHF, which is computationally expensive again.
This is an important difference between how traditional open source software interacts with the users and how "open source" LLMs interact with the users. I would thus propose to use the name "open weights" for LLMs, which carries none of the connotations of "users will contribute bug fixes".
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Yes, seems like a storm in the teapot. Anyone doing statistical analysis and worried about the effect of trans people will want more information on what the column actually tracks. Simply saying "the column name is gender, therefore it refers exactly to ..." is always precarious.
but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
I think the steelman of the Republicans would be "there is only biological sex, and 'gender' is a word popularized by our enemies to imply that social roles associated with a sex are worth tracking separately".
But yes, that level of language policing is a bit funny. Not that the woke left has never purged Problematic terms when they were in power, but at least they had the fig leaf of 'it is not about ideology, but the bad term is hurting really people!'
quiet_NaN
6d ago
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
Myths work okayish even if most people do not believe that they are literally true. Most people who partake in the Star Wars subculture do not believe that there was a historical person named Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far away. They still can dress up as wookies and go to conventions or debate minor points of Jedi philosophy online, but they are much less likely to engage in harmful actions than a subculture which believes their myths are literally true.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Overzelous knocking down of 'perceived untruths' can produce a lot of collateral damage;
If someone says "those that are found guilty on good evidence should be punished" then that does imply some caution against not punishing the innocent on flimsy evidence. Here, the ideal is clearly not "do not hold any beliefs, for they may be false". If you kick out a true belief A and believe not-A or end up agnostic about A, then your map will match the territory less well than when you started, and this is very much contrary to the spirit of the saying. I mean, it does not even say "reject any beliefs for which on reflection you have insufficient evidence", it only asks you to abandon beliefs which have been proven false.
As a rationalist, I believe that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. A belief which can be destroyed by the truth, i.e. a false belief, will not be a reliable tenant.
Also, no beliefs exist in isolation, they form networks, and a false belief is more likely to prop up another false belief than a true one is.
Now you can carve out an exception for some personal things where the belief has other clear advantages despite being somewhat inaccurate. Believing your partner is a nine when a impartial analysis would determine that they are actually closer to a seven is probably permissible in most cases.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.
(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)
Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.
Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires?
Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
Most progress for women's causes came from what one would broadly call the left. The US suffrage movement has its roots in the abolition movement. Or consider the perspective on women by two extremist ideologies, fascism (extreme right) and communism (extreme left, after a fashion). In fascism, women are principally breeders to make new soldiers. Sure, they get honored if they are prolific breeders, but that was all, otherwise being a stenographer for some Obersturmbannfuehrer was as cllose as women got to power. Not a single woman in the whole Nazi Reichstag, from what I can tell. By contrast, the Soviets at least had the tiniest bit of sympathy for women, whose struggle resembled the struggle of the working class at least a bit. Of course, women's rights were not a big political agenda, but at least there was no principled opposition to women serving in the party, even though it remained strongly male-dominated.
I think no matter where you look, suffrage, birth control, abortion rights, protection from marital rape, the broad left was generally a (sometimes lukewarm) ally to women's rights while the right generally tried to keep the status of 1900.
The woke coalition, black/minority rights/grievances, women's rights/grievances, LGBT rights makes sense from a strategic point of view. The TERF's horror of a trans person using a women's bathroom are not worth blowing up the coalition over.
The Democrats have lost the last two elections in part because they backed unpopular female presidential candidates, while the Republicans got the women Dobbs, and yet somehow the left is throwing the women under the bus?
Sure, being a woman after the sexual revolution is not all sunflowers and unicorn farts, because the most attractive man willing to have a situationship with you is unlikely be willing to settle down with you if that is what you want, but compared to the time when marriage was for life it is a fucking picnic in the park. "So you marry a guy, and that basically means he owns you. He can beat you up or rape you if he feels like it, so better have a living male relative when he goes overboard. He is the head of the household and might be able to deny you getting a job or contraceptives. He is as stuck in the marriage as you are, but I am sure it will all turn out fine. Also, while you are still unmarried, guys will try to seduce you and then escape before they are subjected to a shotgun wedding. If you have sex with any of them, you are damaged goods, a fallen woman, a harlot and your prospects for a good marriage decline dramatically. Oh, and if anyone knocks outside marriage, your family might disown you, but you can always turn to sex work to feed your baby, no worries."
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Seems like LLMs can induce all kinds of failure modes in humans. Turns out that telling people what they want to hear will trap some of them.
Personally, I would prefer it very much if the shoggoth stayed on its fucking side of the uncanny valley, thankyouverymuch. Duct-taping a cute anime girl on the giant inscrutable matrix does exactly the opposite.
Even if THIS is where AI stops improving, we just created a massive filter, an evolutionary bottleneck that basically only the Amish are likely to pass through.
I think that we will be fine, eventually, PRNS. Life finds a way. The bubonic plague killed 70-80% in some places, and yet we survived.
People have long predicted doom for every tech and medium of expression which rears its head. Role playing games? Satanism. First person shooters? Will turn kids into violent psychopaths. Industrialization? Will turn wars into horrors beyond our ancestors wildest nightmares. TV? Will turn people into idiots. Social media? Will make us more isolated in real life.
(Okay, one or two of these warnings might have been correct, in retrospect.)
In a way, it is leveling the playing field. (Whole bag of not-too-carefully examined assumptions incoming in 3, 2, 1.) Women seem to be more into smut (i.e. narratives, situations, characters), while men are more into visual porn (i.e. tits). So far, LLMs have thus probably generally had more success with romancing women (also because from my understanding, "I want my partner to offer unconditional emotional support whenever I need it" is more of a feminine thing, and something which LLMs can obviously do great). If Musk now gives tits to the LLMs, more men will fall for them. He would not even need to spend a fortune on video generation, because most male fantasies are likely to involve the same elements. Few men will want to watch the anime girl painting a fence white while wearing a orchid blouse and then complain that the blouse shown was clearly heliotrope instead.
I am not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of regulating AI partners a bit, though, just like we regulate other addictive stuff, inconsistent as we often are.
Also, this reinforces my impression that rather than being on the forefront of the AI race, xAI is basically picking up the applications which are too icky for the big AI firms.
If you allow me a metaphor, xAI might not be the first company to develop surgical steel, but they clearly try to be the first company to use surgical steel to craft oversized butt-plugs.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.
For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.
Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.
Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.
These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills.
Sounds unpleasant. Personally, I came to believe that some HBD claims are true by reading Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. "HBD explains why there are many Jewish Nobel laureates without having to resort to conspiracies" is actually a major selling point for me. (Of course, I would also prefer if the left would give up to insist that any inequality of outcome was due to unfairness and in return people would shut up about HBD until we can CRISPR everyone.)
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think it really depends on how much pain it is to stockpile the goods in question.
For example, assume that when Trump announced his tariffs, market observers agreed that the price of Tamagotchis in the US would increase by 100%. Obviously, this would lead to people starting to hoard Tamagotchis, which in turn would cause the stores to increase the prices on their existing stockpiles, on which they had not paid any tariffs. When a few months later, the next container ship arrives, the prices will stay high even though supply might be far higher than demand, as the owners are just sitting on their supply and waiting for demand to materialize, knowing that more shipments of the goods will not be coming soon.
Now imagine the same situation for bananas. Even anticipating a price hike, customers will not buy their four-year supply of bananas while they are still affordable. While the banana-delivering ships which set sail in the pre-tariff era are still on the ocean, the supermarket price of bananas should mostly stay stable -- some importer is making a loss on them, but still not as much of a loss as if they left them to rot.
Of course, the banana importers will anticipate higher prices and thus lower demands and therefore order a lot less bananas. Unless they are mistaken about the shape of the demand curve, this will lead to a price hike roughly when the ships with the smaller orders come into port.
My estimate is that different factors affect how well you can stockpile a certain trade good. Food will rot. Any resource needs to be stored, many of them in a dry place. Fossil fuels have to be protected from going up in flames or escaping into the atmosphere or the ground, sometimes. Electronics become obsolete, eventually. Consumer taste and fashion changes, who knows if in two years anyone will still be interested in cheap Chinese "Alligator Alcatraz" merchandise.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I do not know much about international trading contracts either, but I assume that most Chinese companies would not guarantee delivery to your porch at a fixed price. I would guess that in most cases, it is the importer who will have to cough up the unexpected tariffs.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Because they're not paying the tariffs.
The tariffs would be paid in the end substantially by the US customers in any case, if for no other reason than the manufacturers being unlikely to have the profit margin to just pay for them.
Also, tariff evasion should be an expected consequence of having tariffs. To be fair, I think for most of the goods imported from China, enforcement is plausible.
Catching one container with cocaine in a harbor which processes hundred thousands of them is hard. Catching a container whose goods are priced to low on the customs declaration is easy if a significant fractions of the containers are undervalued. You just need to set up financial incentives which make it expensive to get caught (perhaps set up requirement that any importer needs to own a defined amount of seize-able assets per container they want to bring through customs per day), and your customs officers will pay for themselves.
I think this his is straightforward a "can you believe the bad thing $outgroup has done?!!!11" comment, e.g. waging the culture war. The reporting quoted is certainly partisan. There is a slim chance that the other side had a point for this deportation beyond "we have a quota to meet and non-Americans do not really have rights here", not that I will cut them much slack here, because the part where they could sell their arguments for deportation would be a court hearing, which they decided is too much of a hassle.
Still, this is the kind of story which smells like it could end up being fabricated or misreported (say my subjective p(substantially correct)=0.7). If BC had made more of an effort to aggregate similar stories to make the -- imho highly plausible -- point that ICE is just deporting anyone they can get their hands on, I think this post would be ok.
Still, I think that with no prior record BC would have gotten a warning for that post, but one straw has to be the one which eventually breaks the camel's back.
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