quiet_NaN
9hr ago
To that 1T$ of foreign held dollars, you want to add the foreign held portion of the US debt (which totals 36T$), which seems to be 7.9T$. Debt will just turn into freshly printed dollars at some point in the future, so it is kinda similar to holding currency.
Of course, the GDP of the US (in 2023) was 27.7T$, so from my naive point it does not seem to be that big of a deal -- if you owe a third of a year worth of productivity, it hardly seems that you are hopelessly over-debt. It might be that the valuation of the GDP is off by some huge factor (god knows what the worth of a finance firm should be), but then the valuation of the US$ is likely off by a similar factor, so this would not change the ratio all that much, I think. One of the merits of having your debt denominated in your own currency.
Of course, this is just the feel I get from five minutes of googling, so I could be terribly wrong.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"Trump is acting in a way which maximizes his ability to rip off the stock market through insider trading" is as good an explanation as any.
Him becoming not credible is only a problem for the US, not for him personally. If the stock market stops reacting to his announcements he can always order the US military to occupy Greenland to get their attention back.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think the fact that Trump would not go through with the tariffs were already priced in, and the share prices going up is just the world updating the probability that Trump will cause a worldwide recession.
Also, I think Trump comes across as an asshole in all of that.
- "You are all not listening enough to me, so I will stop talking with you, effective today."
- "On further reflection, you have signaled a willingness to discuss this with me, and thus I will postpone my not talking to you by 90 days. Except for Winnie, who is super-duper terrible, so I will not only not talk to him, I will not even look into his direction now. Also, if I see anyone still talking to him, I will possibly become angry at them and stop talking to them."
Given that, the rest of the world might think long and hard if they prefer to trade with the unhinged clown who will threaten them one day only to say "just kidding. OR AM I?" the next, or with a somewhat sinister power who at least pursues their own objectives in a rational, long-term thinking way.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am doubtful that a super-majority of Congress wants Trump to stop his tariffs.
For the Democrats who are convinced that the tariffs will tank the economy, stopping the tariffs would mean interrupting their opponent while he is making a mistake. The people voted for Trump, thinking his policies would only harm the liberals they hate, now they get to Find Out. If the Dems forced Trump not to wreck the global economy, he will go on whining how his tariffs would have made every American rich and how he was foiled by the evil Democrats, and if history is any guidance, half of the population will believe him. On the other hand, if Trump II goes down in history as one of the worst presidencies, the Democratic party will be considered the economically literate party for the foreseeable future. Sure, some Democrats will place what they consider the good of the country before party politics, but certainly not all of them.
For the Republicans who are convinced that the tariffs will tank the economy, there is a bit of a bind. If they do not oppose Trump, they could easily lose their seat in the next election when the people Find Out. On the other hand, picking a fight with a president of your party who has barely started his term and is known to have a vindictive strain is also a career-limiting approach. Ideally, you would someone else to sacrifice themselves for the good of the country. Also, if anyone can persuade half of the Americans that a recession is totally not his fault even though it totally is, that person is Donald Trump.
And then you have the MAGA true believers who believe that Trump is an economic genius who will stop the US from getting ripped off by other countries.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Consider Gaza. It is tiny: 40km by perhaps 10km. It has been blockaded by Israel (a first world nation on the same tech level as the US) for decades. After the Hamas attacks, Israel fought hard to reduce Hamas capabilities, with very limited concern for the civilian population. Years later, and the surviving militants still find the odd missile to fire in the general direction of Israel.
Realistically, stopping the Houthi attacks on shipping will require someones boots on the ground. The obvious choice would be to just give the opposed party in their civil war (the republic of Yemen) enough materiel to conquer their opponent, then turning a blind eye to the human rights violations which will certainly follow their victory (if they achieve their victory, that is).
Quite frankly, I am not sure if this is a good idea. A mixed strategy of limited suppression of launch sites, interception of anti-ship missiles and establishing a missile attack insurance system might be more reasonable.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Well, I think that mono-culture might have been reading more than three 500 page volumes of Perry Rhodan (an endless, German Scifi series of questionable literary value) in a row. I think there was just verbal disapproval, nothing coercive, I generally got to read what I wanted, and as much as I wanted. (There were some efforts to limit screen time, though.)
The idea was not so much that I should not read junk, but that I should not only read junk. I think a term which my father used to describe me was "literary garbage chute", because of my tendency to devour a wide range of books of highly varying literary standards and genres.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Yes, that Trump of all people insists that the US is spending a significant portion of their budget on "global public goods" is bizarre.
Now, as an European I am willing to concede that living under the pax americana has been much better than anything which came before that. But Trump's treatment of Ukraine has made it clear that Europe is not a military priority for the US any more.
And did his buddy not just gut USAID and any NIH grant which pattern-matched against DEI phrases? Is he not the one with "America first"?
Arguably, one of the (mostly) good things which the US did as the hegemon was to champion free trade. Which is another thing he is dismantling.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that the Mensa list has already been picked apart enough below, so let me pick on St. John's list instead.
Having clicked through their terrible web page, I went to wikipedia to check that Thomas Piketty is actually alive and well despite being on that list. Of course, his work is mislabeled "Capital", so he likely got confused with the more seasoned Marx (also on the list) by accident. It certainly feels that there are more dead Greeks on that list than authors who published in the last half-century.
In particular, I am amazed by the inclusion of a lot of original science publications. Sure, they are interesting from a history of science point of view, but very likely they are not the easiest avenue to understand a physical concept. They were targeted at the experts of the field in their time, which very likely uses a language different from what even the current experts are using. So to grok them, you first have to learn the nomenclature of their time (which was generally worse than what we have now, because they were lacking later paradigms). At least, one should read an annotated version which points out that "Radium D" is what we today call Pb-210 or whatever, and which of the claims of the paper actually turned out to be false.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I concur. It is depressing. Especially the last page.
By signing below, we attest that _____________________________________ has read a complete and unabridged version of all the books as recorded on the Excellence in Reading 9-12 grade list above, and that this record is true. Reader’s signature Adult’s signature
(Protip: always have people attest that what they is attest is true explicitly, they might lie otherwise. Also refer to 12th graders as kids, they really like that.)
30 pretentious books a year, for four years, and most of them don't exactly sound like fun. If a adolescent manages to read through LotR, good for them! If they read through this list, child protection should investigate.
From personal experience, reading is much easier than understanding and being able to appreciate a work. Just because I have read "The Catcher in the Rye", it does not mean that I can understand why it is world literature. (Granted, a few books are a bit more on the nose there: "all quiet on the western front" or "Uncle Tom's cabin" might also contain literary depth I did not fathom (and Kafka surely does), but at least they update your world view without you needing to know Greek symbolism or whatever.)
Also, from what I can tell, no science fiction. Fantasy is limited to Tolkien (and ancient Greece). Horror is only E.A. Poe afais. Telling a kid to read Thomas Mann is a good way to get a non-reader.
When I was a kid, the only thing which my father discouraged was mono-culture. But otherwise, I read all kinds of books: deep stuff which went a mile over my head, good stuff which was also fun to read (Asimov), trashy stuff.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think casualty tolerance depends a lot on the context. If your home land is on the line, (like in Ukraine, or with space aliens invading New York), people are willing to tolerate significant dents appearing in the demographics.
If you are fighting ten thousand kilometers away, in a country which is not a close ally, then your peoples appetite for dead soldiers is going to be much lower.
The occupation of Afghanistan was exceedingly bloodless on the side of the US. Over twenty years, they lost 2420 soldiers.
I think your assessment that the public needs to believe that the war (especially if overseas) is winnable is correct. But I think that the typical way the public notices a war is not winnable is if their boys come back in boxes and yet the front lines remain unchanged. With Afghanistan, nobody cared if the war was winnable because the costs to the US were mostly "just" taxpayer money.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The obvious conflict would be China trying to take Taiwan. I have a hard time modelling this as a shooting war between the US and China which does not have a significant risk of evolving into a nuclear war.
Basically, any invasion would be supported by assets in mainland China, and trying to fend it off without striking at them would be like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Of course, once you bomb military assets in a densely populated region, shit is going to happen. Sooner or later the Chinese will ask themselves why they should suffer their hospitals being blown up without also retaliating against the mainland US (though I imagine that the CCP is more resistant to public pressure than the US -- but even they are not immune, see the covid lockdowns).
Hell, we've been fighting the Houthis for over a year now, and we still haven't been able to completely shut them down.
I am surprised that you are surprised by anyone's failure to pacify a region through bombardments alone.
I mean, sure, the US could turn the area the Houthis control in a parking lot. However, this would kill tons of innocent civilians and we don't do that anymore. It is not that the Houthis have a single enormous catapult which you can destroy to shut them up. Presumably, the weapons they use to attack ships are man-portable, and likely hidden in their deepest cellars of the towns.
To really crush them while also leaving a few civilians alive, you would need boots on the ground. Given how previous US operations of that sort have turned out, I think it is correct to be sceptical.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
First off, I think increasing the US defense budget by 10% is surprisingly sane, as far as Trump ideas go. Of course, this is faint praise, given that my scale is "wrecking the global economy".
Second, while it is good to know that his administration is also cutting funds in areas of the military, you did not contest that the overall DoD budget will increase, which is the story here.
I am also kind of sorry that I don't get to see DOGE taking the chain saw to the military/defense/intelligence behemoth. But then, I did not really expect that to happen. To many MAGA jobs depend on building overpriced military toys on the taxpayers dime.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would like to add that the way trade works is not that the US magically pays China more than China pays the US. In trade, participants generally pay cash to receive goods of some kind -- resources like oil, consumer products like tamagotchis, ransomware keys to that data which you did not properly back up. If the seller and the buyer can not agree on a price, the trade does not happen.
Now, just because someone in country A and someone in country B agreed on a trade, that does not mean that both countries are happy with it -- if Mexican cartels are buying US weapons, Mexico will probably object.
Of course, if you are a normal country, you can not keep running a trade deficit forever -- you need hard cash to buy stuff from other countries, and that cash has to be earned somehow. The US is special in that it is a global superpower which controls the primary currency of international trade, and China is happy to sell them electronics for freshly printed US dollars.
Tariffs are useful in some situations: perhaps you want to protect your nascent car industry until it gets internationally competitive, perhaps you want to play Defect in response to another party playing Defect to discourage others from instituting tariffs, or perhaps you know that the other country is selling some goods at a loss in order to achieve strategic dominance and want to level the playing field.
But these are all surgical interventions, while Trump's tariffs are like operating the patient in twenty random places in the hope that this will magically increase their well-being.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The point I was trying to make, unsuccessfully, was that in my world model, an economic superpower trying to fix their trade deficit by applying tariffs proportional to that deficit would be considered a terrible idea by a broad majority -- basically everyone except for "destroy all corporations" radical leftists, and lizardman's constant worth of outliers (some de-growthers, some sourvereign citizens, some fringe isolationists who want to see America 100% autark, even if that means giving up on oil and coffee, et cetera).
Naturally, here at the motte we have a proud tradition of taking fringe ideas far out of the overton window serious, and I am fine with that. I just feel that "starting a global trade war will actually go great" was plenty discussed here already, and I would much rather discuss the next fringe idea, perhaps "legalize marital rape" or "build a sub-aquatic habitat in the Mediterranean Sea for the Gazans". In my mind, the fact that someone has just announced a fringe idea as the national policy of the US should not make it less fringe than if a random poster had posted it here. I am not a fan of the forced neutrality displayed by the original poster. If party A wants the living room thermostat set to 280K, and party B wants it to be set to 680K, setting one's preference to 480 Kelvin is not neutral, but just about as insane as 680K.
I grew up vaguely left-wing and peace-y. Then Putin happened, and suddenly I found myself having to defend the North Atlantic Treaty and mutually assured destruction. Now Trump has taken a turn towards economic authoritarianism, and I find myself holding up the torch for libertarianism -- not because I think taxation is theft, but because I recognize that capitalism leads broadly to better outcomes than all the alternatives which have been tried.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Oh, it was generated by a squishy neural network, but in retrospect I might have had the chatGPT bullet point format in my subconsciousness.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Wait what? The chambers of Congress can change procedure with a simple majority? And presumably, the procedural changes survive elections?
This seems ripe for abuse. Say party A currently has a majority in the House, but knows that it will lose its majority after the elections. They can simply make a procedural rule saying that the speaker has to be elected with a 2/3rd majority, and until he is elected, the House can do nothing else but try to elect a speaker. (Or they might simply change the rules so that the guy with the longest beard is the speaker, if they have the guy with the longest beard.) This would prevent the newly elected majority from passing any laws until SCOTUS intervenes. I think it is good practice to require a 2/3 majority for changing how a legislature operates.
As I understand it, under the current rules the House will have to vote on some proposal X. Now people who do not want to vote on matter X introduce a proposal Y which says "we will not vote on matter X".
What I don't understand is how this would change the substantial outcome. Either a majority would support X, in which case they will surely not vote for proposal Y. Or a majority is opposed to X, in which case they presumably might support Y -- but that does not matter for the outcome because X is lacking support anyhow.
The only way this matters is if the vote itself is the problem, not the outcome -- if their base would be enraged if they voted against X, for example. However, the optics of "we specifically changed the rules so that we did not have to vote on the Stop Puppy Torture Act" does not feel substantially different from "we voted against the SPTA" -- you might keep the support of your most stupid puppy-loving constituents, but in turn you lose support from anyone who likes clean, efficient legislature instead of messy spaghetti code.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Ideological benefits to tariffs:
- Exemptions. With the tariffs being as high as announced, a lot of companies reliant on imports will no longer be feasible in the US. This means that the leaders of these industries will petition Trump for exemptions, which gives Trump a lot of power. Musk wants to import cheap lithium for Tesla -- sure, he is on team Trump, after all. But if he was not, denying them exemption would be a no-brainer for Trump: electric vehicles are very much a thing for urbanites who care about climate change (and, by correlation, are woke), and breaking the EV industry is denying his political enemies a power base. Bankrupt companies do not payroll Democrats, after all. For more neutral industries, Trump might ask "I don't know, what have you been doing for me lately?" -- thereby gaining political leverage: campaign contributions, building a factory in the state of a Republican senator, whatever.
Of course, this is is the case with every regulation which has exceptions. If the Democrats had passed an environmental regulation which forbade the emission of carbon dioxide, and then crafted exemptions for all the industries aligned with them, that would be just as bad.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Okay, let me try too.
Dangers and downsides to having the US air force firebomb Kansas City:
- A lot of people will die in agony.
- A lot of housing and means of production will be destroyed.
- Refugees will increasing the housing crisis in other cities.
Economic benefits of the USAF firebombing Kansas City:
- Housing prices in KC will be much lower while it is an uninhabited wasteland
- It will incentivize other US cities to prefer non-burning building materials and invest in air defense, which will both increase disaster preparedness and be a boon to the some industries.
- It will open up avenues to redevelop the city.
Ideological benefits (for various ideologies):
- It will drastically lower the amount of immigrant crime at ground zero.
- Over a period of a decade, it will likely lead to lower GHG emissions.
In general, firebombing is much more acceptable than nuking because of (a) the lack of nuclear fallout and (b) it does not contribute to the normalization of nuclear weapon use.
In conclusion, there are good economic and ideological arguments both for and against firebombing random cities, and experts in law, strategy and economy disagree if it is net beneficial or not. The fact that every administration before president Harris has refrained from burning down KC does not mean that she is wrong to do so.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
There is a vast gulf between "it is the end of the world" and "it is no big deal".
For example, if I were to lose the use of my legs tomorrow, that would not be the end of the world. Wheelchairs exist, and my job does not strictly require me to be able to walk. However, it would be a big deal, on roughly the same order as if an economy is forced to rely on salvaging landfills for working computers.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I used Prussia because Bavarian natives have a tendency to use the word Preiß (Prussian) for Germans from the northern half of Germany, often in the term Saupreiß (pig Prussian).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, [...]
Sure. Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading. The basis for a prosperous nation is honest, back-breaking work, not fancy technology.
A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.
After all, this is kind of the program which turned Cambodia into a superpower when it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge, so it will surely Make America Great Again as well.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
So, it appears that Germany is following Trump's footsteps with regard to selectively removing foreigners for political speech:
The orders — issued by the state of Berlin, whose Senate administration oversees immigration enforcement — are set to take effect in less than a month. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.
Some notes:
- The four people to be deported are citizens of the US, Ireland and Poland. The latter two countries are part of the EU, as is Germany. One of the cornerstones of the EU single market is the free movement of people. It appears to be more of a privilege than a right, actually. For contrast, imagine if Bavaria decided to refuse entry to people from Prussia, or California decided to deport any people born in Texas -- both would be blatantly unconstitutional.
- This decision was made by the city of Berlin, which is ruled by a coalition of CDU/SPD (convervative/labor) -- the same constellation which will rule Germany in the future. The CDU is basically trying to rebrand itself as AfD light -- adopting policies suggested by the far right. (The AfD is of course very opposed to anything which could be considered pro-Muslim antisemitism. Not that they are overly fond of holocaust memorials, though.) The SPD is notorious for lacking any organ resembling a spine, so it is unsurprising that they went along with it.
- The targeted people were accused of participating in a pro-Gaza demonstration. Some where accused of shouting "From the river to the sea", which is illegal in Germany (and I am ok with it being illegal). However, none of them have been convicted so far.
Now, I am not per-se against deporting foreigners if they have been convicted of a serious offense, say if their prison sentences exceed 10% (or 20%) of the time they have spent in the host country so far. From what I can tell, most of the accusations here are very minor, though. Using immigration laws to sidestep due process is wrong, though.
Also, for EU citizens, expelling them should additionally be contingent on a separate court case in front of some EU court and subject to criminal standard of evidence. If Berlin wants to get rid of these people, let them argue why they are a hazard to their security in front of a judge.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I don’t buy the idea that tariffs are a net negative for everyone in an economy.
This is an exceedingly low bar to clear. 9/11 was not a net negative for everyone in the US economy. The spread of the automobile devastated the horse industry. Lumina might put half the dentists out of work. I am sure that there are a few people who fare better under North Korea's economic regime than they would in a more capitalist society.
Blue collar labor might have a niche in the future, but "unskilled American laborers" will not make a comeback. Even if Trump manages to bring back manufacturing by putting his hands on the scale in favor of more expensive, worse, US-produced products, modern manufacturing relies heavily on automation, and outlawing automation will just turn the US into some third-rate country when everyone does it (instead of just the fucking longshoremen's union).
The good news is that plausibly, AI will threaten the livelihood of the PMC too -- perhaps even more, a lawyer is easier to replace with an LLM than a plumber. So at some point, we might get some kind of UBI. But the days where factories were hiring tons of people to shovel coal into furnaces are not coming back, and good riddance -- these were never jobs which enabled humans to thrive.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
The truth is that incels are not hated because they are very murderous. Their crimes are much more serious than that:
- They are icky
- They made the mistake of being born straight cis-male, which marks them as oppressors in the woke mindset
- They might follow manosphere influencers with pretty antique views
- They presumably might not compete for money and status to attract a mate, thereby calling the natural order of society into question
- Presumably, they might not even treat every hot woman with the devotion which is her birthright
Women will put up with hot men who are not feminists, but if your sexual market value is small and you are also on the bottom of to woke oppressedness totem pole, then you are expected to be an Ally to your betters. See the Scott Aaronson saga for illustration.
Relevant Terry Pratchett:
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