Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Procedurally, it's relatively simple. As long as you can see / monitor the area you'd shoot in, you just advertise by any means that anyone who goes through that area may / may not be shot. The risk alone is what drives most people away- for insurance reasons if nothing else in the modern era.
From there, you just also communicate that you won't shoot at people who buy your pass. In exchange for money, you give some sort of authentication measure tied to the sale. This could be anything like 'broadcast this code at this time when sailing through this area.'
Then you have your sensor-people look for the authentication measure. If a ship has it and matches the ledgers of who paid, don't shoot. If a ship does not have it, shoot. If a ship tries to broadcast a 'I paid' code, but isn't on the ledgers, shoot.
Dean
Flairless
9hr ago
#Resistance is over a decade old at this point, so more of 'already costed in.'
Dean
Flairless
9hr ago
I forget who said it at the Reddit, but the first-term Trump advice of 'wait a week before forming a strong opinion about anything Trump does or is alleged to have done' remains sound advice. It typically takes a few days to separate the statements from the coverage from the actions, if any, that were being claimed / insinuated.
Dean
Flairless
23hr ago
Chinese manufacturers will have to find some country, somewhere, that has a GDP roughly comparable to the USA, a growing middle class of hundreds of millions of people, and room to shift from savings to consumption.
The effects you highlight are real and interesting, but the country that will absorb most of the displaced exports is China itself. And that is going to be difficult and straining, even destabilizing.
And questionable. I agree it would be the ideal solution for China, but it runs into the issue of the implications of the Chinese property market earlier this decade: the population does not have the room to shift from savings to consumption, due to the literal rooms the household savings were being invested in falling out due to the property crisis.
This was an economic issue that was particularly affecting the middle-class, which had the spare money to try and invest. Hence the relevant policy decision during the post-COVID period to double-down on export-led growth post-COVID, which has somewhat contributed to already-ongoing deflationary pressures that will get worse if no-longer-exported products further suppress prices, feeding into the 'prices will keep going down, might as well hold out' dynamic that creates deflationary spirals.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
After an actual coup attempt would probably have been more fitting.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
The tiktok ban talk also increased in earnest after notable Democratic-aligned media reported it was favoring Trump during the 2024 elections. Particularly after Trump's formal emergence on the platform surpassed the Biden campaign's results.
Now, correlation does not imply causation...
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Two questions. With the second question being-
'When the Trump tariff rollback doesn't happen over the next two years, what next?'
The old-guard GOP establishment helpfully defenestrated itself when Liz Cheney led her failed useful-opposition ploy with the post-Jan 6 hearings. That may have been courageous by a certain standard of courage, but it was also foolish by the standard of remaining politically relevant within the GOP, and led to both a direct diminishment and further party-base skepticism of the neo-liberal wing that she was a part of.
Wrong box copied from for the intended argument, thank ye.
But France can, and only France can, and thus it remains a form of European protectionism even if it privileges part of the EU over others.
'Everyone is under the same restriction that they can only use [brand recognition name] if you produce from my market' is simultaneously a 'same' requirement and not-same impact. Which is why 'same' requirements for all is a common form of contract corruption- you write requirements into a contract that you know only certain favored applicants will be able to reasonably meet, and thus you have the 'same requirements for everyone' and can dismiss accusations of systemic bias.
The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times. One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'
One of the limits of a lot of the recent discussion has been that it focuses on the Trump tariffs as a bilateral or even unilateral effect, i.e. how bad this will be for the US specifically. Part of that is understandable- the way you generally try and end a trade war is to sap political willingness from the pursuer, and convince them it's worse for them than pursuing. Totally normal, and I'm not implying that's necessarily wrong on any sort of factual or ethical level, though such arguments do have an incentive to exaggerate. (You can probably find plenty of online threats of, say, the EU cutting the US service exports at the knees in retaliation- instead, the EU so far as gone after certain red state good exports, a fraction of the fraction. This is a strategy tailored for political effect, not maximizing cost, which is what discussions/threats over the service economy exports would have been. However, those are focused more in Blue states, so...)
But what those types of arguments don't address is that the mountains of trade goods and oceans of trade flows will go elsewhere, and when they do that will cause second and third order trade conflicts that don't directly involve the initial party.
Take the US goods exports to China. On page 5 it breaks down various categories by share and volume of trade. While no category measured in the billions of US dollars should be considered 'small', note what some of the larger categories are. Food products. Oil and gas. Basic chemicals. Other forms of input products.
A lot of these are relatively fungible goods, but also where global demands itself is relatively static. If China refuses to buy, say, oil and gas from the US, that doesn't mean that china does without and stops all things that previously used the US export. It means China pays for an equivalent amount of oil and gas from somewhere else, possibly outbiding other market equilibriums for the privilege. Which takes that oil and gas off the market, and leaves the customers who would want them available for... the US oil and gas not going to China.
Now apply this to other categories. If you price-out, say, medical equipment via tariffs, then either you go without or you go elsewhere. If you go elsewhere, then you're taking from that status quo. The American goods are, nominally, available to fill the void. There may be complications- quality standard disputes, language and labeling barriers, etc.- but the underlying fundamental demand (the people who had been willing to buy Good X before China came in and bought it), and the potential supply (the American goods no longer going to china) exists.
At the end of the day, economic actors don't either produce to make maximum products or not produce at all. They will continue to produce as long as even decreased margins are preferable to no income. As long as it makes economic sense for the producers to keep producing rather than shut down, the goods will continue to be produced for the market while substitute transactions are sought. This is why input-producers, such as Russia, are often able to survive disruptions with major established trade partners as long as they have the ability to get their goods to global markets. The former-importer still needs to import something like the no-longer imported [thing], and the former-exporter can now export to whomever the former-importer is buying up the [thing] from.
This substitute process is generally not economically efficient. It costs more, in absolute and opportunity costs. It often gives less profit due to higher transaction costs (though politically-influenced deals are a wild card). This is less beneficial to most people involved, though the intermediaries who can make the connections can make a killing. There will be all sorts of compliance costs to try and access the demand that opened up when China bought out [thing] from [elsewhere], whether it's relabeling to new languages or trying to regulate regulatory approval or whatever else. Not all businesses will be able to survive that transition, and will be bought up or close down when they otherwise would have carried on. The people who say this entails high economic costs are not lying.
But that economic inefficiency does not change that an absolute mountain of goods are about to be redirected and crash into national markets that are magnitudes smaller in scale, and upset the political-economic equilibrium in different ways.
It also is not an argument that is specific to the US. A point was made that the US goods to China were in some respects relatively fungible. People gonna eat and put gas in cars to go to work or fuel factories. Demand for these is relatively inelastic. If China buys food and gas from elsewhere, then elsewhere will want to buy food and gas to make up what they would have been consuming but China purchases.
But if the US isn't buying from China due to the trade war...
Above I linked a product to show the US exports to China. If you looked at it, did you notice anything that ought to have been there, but wasn't? I'll link again. Can you spot it? It breaks down exports by type, exports by US state sending to China, exports volumes...
Can you find the word 'import', and find where it is used outside of the context of what China imports from the US, i.e. US exports?
Here is another (Biden-era) product of exports and imports by category.
Three of the top US import from China categories include-
- Machine appliances ($268.5 billion)
- Textiles ($50.3 billion)
- Misc. Manufactured Items ($69.4 billion)
$388 billion dollars, or $388,000 million dollars, is a significant-but-not-overwhelming amount to the scale of the US economy, which in 2023 the world bank estimated was over $27,360,000*... million USD.
*Edit: used wrong box in first post, corrected. Same point to argument.
But if you sort that wiki-list by size and scroll down, that $388,000 million starts to match and then even exceed, by multiple magnitudes, the GDPs of the smaller countries in the world. Which- if the China-originated formerly US-bound trade flow of manufactured goods has to go elsewhere- are not going to be the only places that good surplus will redirect. After all, countries can't subsist on nothing but machine appliances, market saturation will be reached, which means going to the next markets and so on.
Except, some of those countries like having their own manufacturing economies of their own. And would want to protect their own markets from Chinese dumping. When even the EU is in internal conflict over the implications of the forecasted wave of Chinese products no longer going to the US...
Manufactured goods aren't necessarily fungible in the same way that production inputs are. Arguably if the Chinese had the same sort of tariffs overall as everyone else, they'd keep (or even slightly grow) the same general market share of American imports for these categories as long as it remained a roughly even playing field with everyone else. But the nature of the US-China trade war in particular vis-a-vis the rest is that as the US and China put higher tariffs on eachother, then every exporter-to-the-US isn't hitting the same impact. Americans will still buy goods, even if at higher prices, just not as efficiently. Which also means that those manufactured goods that previously would have gone to [place] because China had such a share of the US market are now subject to go to US as the China market share in the US is up for grabs.
Which also means that there's fewer goods in [other markets] even as China's manufactured goods are looking for a place to go.
Anti-dumping practices exist for reasons, but it's less obvious that it isn't the US most at threat of price-dumping. And while the World Trade Organization has historically tried to discipline anti-dumping practices, the WTO dispute resolution mechanism (i.e. judges to make rulings) wasn't exactly resurrected before Trump came back. Which is to say, there's no WTO authority to make a formal and binding judgement against you, the national politician, taking actions in your national (and domestic political) interest.
None of this is an argument that the US will 'win' a global trade conflageration. Whether you think that's because there is no way to win / that Trump won't cut any deals / whatever reason, this isn't an argument about what will happen for the US. The US outcome is separate from the point.
The point is that the more that China's trade-to-the-US is diverted by the US-China trade war, but still produced by the economic incentives within China to keep producing, the more that will put China into its own trade tensions / conflicts with other states, as it seeks to have them absorb the consumption of China exports that the US no longer is. It's not like China has no cards to play- the rare earths mineral supply chain has been a topic of concern for years, as China has used it to coerce and punish neighbors on various issues.
And that will have its own interesting follow-on effects, both for the success and political dynamics for pressuring countries to accept the export flood not going to the US, but also the impacts to states that resist those pressures. But also the impacts on relations between those countries who took the Chinese exports and their neighbors who might not want the same sort of deal and now face overflow from their neighbors who they previously had a tolerable equilibrium with.
That is the sort of global trade issues that I feel have been under-recognized in the last week's focus on arguing about the American-specific element of the Trump tariffs. It's not all about the United States, and the longer the trade system upheaval goes on, the less proximal the US (and Trump) will be to future, predictable, trade conflicts.
That is not what the face-eating leopards meme is supposed to be about.
Then it would seem the face-eating leopard meme should not have been used as the framing device.
That bad metaphors break down when subject to context is a merit for using them accordingly to demonstrate their flaws. If the metaphor breaks down because, as @TIRM notices, the previous party happily engaged in the use of face-eating leopards against others, then this is a very relevant use of the metaphor beyond it's intended role. If this discredit's the original proponent's base of argument, all the better.
You may dispute whether there was an intent to eat the faces of tech types, but 'Those idiots supporting the other party never thought the leopard would eat their face' loses a bit of the sting if preceded by 'After a sustained campaign by my party to send face-eating leopards against politically unfavored businesses, which by the way totally wasn't the point or grounds for business leaders to look at the other party...'
Now, you could argue the accuracy of the counter-accusation. Intent alone isn't particularly compelling, but you could dispute whether TIRM's charge of leopard-like conduct is fair or not. But 'you can't the pejorative metaphor against the sender, it's not meant to be used like that!' is not particularly compelling.
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.
The point would be that the raise in the overall DoD budget without the additional context of the structural reorientation of the DoD is a misleading boo-outgroup story rather than the story. It is fodder to insinuate corrupt motive, as opposed to a policy shift consistent with years of bipartisan consensus that had been delayed by the middle eastern wars, and later the focus on the Ukraine conflict.
I don't deny this is a common dynamic, but I disagree that what I talked about can be discarded as belonging in this bin. This isn't Americans gracefully outbuilding others, but Americans looking to extort and suppress.
I struggle to think of a time where 'Americans' and 'gracefully outbuilding' were characterizations that went together outside of anachronistic self-flattery.
Extort and suppress accusations, however, has plenty of historical occurrences, including the Iraq War (Bush invaded for oil), the earlier Iraq War (Bush intervened in the muslim world for oil), the Cold War (capitalist-imperialist exploitation), the Vietnam War (fighting as an extension of the direct imperialist-capitalist exploiters), WW2 (naked exploitation of the British before the war, the post-war dismantling of the allied empires), and many, many more.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Given that the US and Ukraine coalition didn't provide older helicopters, I doubt they would have given it a cutting-edge helicopter either. And that decision wasn't simply for a lack of helicopters- it was consistent with the relative(ly low) utility of combat helicopters in the war after the very early period.
Which phase?
This line typically gets used to accuse the US of aiding Iraq... after the US had spent time aiding Iran. It was kind of the context of the Iran portion of the Iran-Contra affair, which admittedly most people now adays haven't a clue about.
On one hand, perhaps alliances are whoever you helped last. Alternatively, perhaps there was a consistent preference that neither conquer the other.
Either way, very effective at making people root for US humiliation. If not reflected at the top of US hierarchy, I'd think it an astroturfing campaign ran by US adversaries.
'Making' implies the willingness to root was not already made, present and widespread. I can remember similar rooting / schaedenfreud/ etc. during the first Trump administration. I can also remember it from the early 2000s and the war in Iraq. From what I've looked at, it was also discernable in the Cold War in conflicts like the Vietnam War. As much as many Americans I've known like to believe they were at some point in the glorious past universally popular across the world, they, uh, weren't.
There is always an audience to root for humiliation. That audience also grows as the power of the one being rooted against grows. It especially swells when a powerful actor moves against the specific collective group. This is just a human nature dynamic, and not so different from the human nature that flows the other direction from people who feel they are being taken advantage of wanting to see others struggle without their support.
More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 million to about $1 trillion. Source.
Unsurprisingly, Politico doesn't mention that the administration mooting an up-to 90,000 reduction in the active-duty component of the Army, out of current US Army size of about 450,000 active-duty.. This is about 20% of the total size of the active-duty US army. It is also in the ballpark of the total number of US forces in Europe in 2025. That doesn't imply an intent to withdraw every last soldier in Europe, but it does create a Europe-force-sized-hole in the US army.
Nor does it factor in how the US navy is advancing some long-mooted concepts of buying warships from allies and leaning into foreign shipyards for naval shipyard capaacity, like the South Korean shipyard MOA signed... today. Which has implications for things like the multi-year backlog in the American naval yards mentioned in the linked article.
In other contexts, 'we are looking at cutting the Army by the size of peacetime forces in Europe and want to re-orient investments towards the neglected Navy' might be considered a notable defense policy adjustment worth acknowledging. It reflects a substantial cut in status quo capacity in some fields (current Army activities globally), with potentially relevant implications for the next conflict- say a naval conflict.
On the other hand, Trump bad, and here is a Politico article to encourage that sentiment.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
'More distorting' is a difference of degrees, not a difference in kind, for how consumer- end impacts shape demand, which affects the rest of the trade system.
If you want to argue that tariffs are worse than a VAT, that is not what is being argued against. The argument above is that VAT does not affect trade, only the end-consumer, which is a fundamental misunderstanding on how the consumer affects trade.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
VAT does not affect trade and VAT affect only the end consumer,
If it affects the end-consumer, it affects trade, because that's where the 'demand' part of 'supply and demand' registers as a signal for the market. At the end of the day, trade exists to meet an unmet demand, which is signaled by the willingness of people to pay at a certain price point. When you affect the consumer final payment, you are effecting all trade upstream of the consumer as well, because that trade process exists to deliver to the consumer.
There is no difference in kind whether increased costs for the consumer are a result of multiple price-hikes along the way (your critique of tarifs) or one-off taxes along the way (your defense of VAT). There might be a difference in degree. There might be a difference in political costs associated with applying it. But the consumer is making their judgement on the final cost, regardless of how it comes about.
In the spirit of 'what American culture war development aren't we talking about because of the Trump tariffs,' might I offer...
Trump Goes After the (Largely Democratic) Federal Government Labor Unions
On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled the "EXCLUSIONS FROM FEDERAL LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS PROGRAMS." That is pretty vague, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't recognize what it says inside either.
The (very) short version is that this executive order formally determines various executive agencies "to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." This is the criteria that allows an exception to normal public sector union formation rights and so on. (You don't want the military or CIA to form a union in case it decides to strike, after all.) That might make sense in principle. What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.
Newly added agencies determined to have a 'primary function' as national security work or otherwise, include-
- 1-401. The Department of State.
- 1-403. The Department of the Treasury, except the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
- 1-405. The Department of Justice.
- 1-412. The Environmental Protection Agency.
- 1-415. The National Science Foundation. *etc.
...and you hopefully get the gist. A number of not-usually-considered-national-security departments and agencies have gotten determined to be so. Which, by the law as written, the President can do. Which means also that the public union rules and rights don't apply.
Who does this matter?
Well, for one, public sector unions political action committees (PACs) donate overwhelmingly to the democratic party. $12.5 million vs. $1.6 million in 2023-2024. That's small in absolute political money terms, but shows a significant difference in union institutional support.
But more importantly, about half of all union members in the United States are public sector union members. That's about 7 million public sector members versus 14.3 million total. Further, the ratio of unionization is completely lopsided. Only about 5% (1-in-20) of the public sector employees in the US are unionized. About 33% (1-in-3) of public sector employees are unionized. That's all public-sector unions, mind you, not just the federal government. There are only about 1 million federal public union employees, so 1-in7 of the public sector employees. That's about 14% of public sector employees, or 7% of total union employees. And not all of those will be caught in this recategorization.
Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...
Well, not everyone likes public sector unions. Arch-MAGA personality Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned against public sector unions, on grounds that the government couldn't negotiate with itself. The case against public sector unions has been made for many decade. I'll let people read those takes and have their own opinions. What's more important is that these arguments are not new, but have never made significant traction... until last week.
Reactions have broadly been overwhelmed by the media coverage of last week's tariffs and other Trumpian news cycles. The right-leaning City Journal lauds the effort thought it conceeds some of the classifications are a stretch.. The left-leaning Jacobin calls on unions to make a "militant" response. Somehow, I don't think that will exactly dissuade trump, but we will see.
Will this go to court? Already has. Are plaintiff unions liable to find sympathetic judges in the DC district court, where 11 of the 15 district judges were appointed by Obama or Biden? Probably.
Will they win? I don't know.
But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
The reason it's not relatively simple is because states, and more importantly corporations, don't use TOTAL_TARIFFS_PAID / TOTAL_VALUE_OF_GOODS as the basis of evaluating tariffs.
For one thing, that's a retrospective evaluation (how much you did pay) as opposed to the forward-planning factor that comes with things like quota-steps (first X amount receives Y tariff, second X amount receives Z tariff, etc.). Companies are looking at their marginal gains for continuing to ship more product to the location. When the marginal costs exceed the marginal gains, the rational members stop, regardless of if they'd still 'average' a net positive overall.
Even the premise of 'Total Value' is totally gameable. What, specifically, is a particular country using for the value they are using? The cost of the product at time of purchase? At time of entry into the market? Value-added tax at a particular point in assembly? At time of sale to final customer?
Further, how are you combining categories? Are you biasing the data with mean averages, or median averages, or are you- more likely- mixing the two methods?
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Kind of.
'Overall effective tariff' is always a bit of a shell game that depends on how you calculate averages. It is basically always in your interest to present your 'overall average' as low as possible to look better than the opponent / disqualify critiques. This in turn leads to incentivizing constructing a standard that lets you average things in a more favorable way. Note the dispute over formal tariffs and informal trade barriers, which were factored in to the trump tariff claims. Or how media on EU vs US cartariffs emphasize the US pickup truck tariff versus an EU automative tariff. How you gerrymander the boundaries matters. Which numbers you draw attention to matters. As they say, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Because there is no single standard on how to calculate such an 'overall effective tariff,' it is a claim that requires either perfect transparency, or trust. And since governments tend not to be perfectly transparent even at the best of times, let alone when money is at stake, this comes down to trust. Critically, this is both trust in the other side (who you know has an incentive to present their best face), but also a trust in your own side's negotiators to actually meet that 'fairly.'
Part of the issue in the current trade war is that the American foreign trade establishment, like much of the rest of the political establishment, has broadly lost trust / credibility. This has been part of the dynamic since the neoliberals were forced to concede major policy negotiating mistakes, such as the deindustrialization of the rust belt due to various trade concessions with, say, NAFTA, or Europe, or letting China into the WTO. Some of these were explicit tradeoffs 'for a greater good', where economic forecasts of 'we know you'll lose these jobs, but we're sure you'll get better jobs' never materialized. The regional-specific dynamics of free trade were somewhere between under-recognized, dismissed, or actively mislead by interests with their own priorities. (See the favored trade policies of city-based service-industry establishments that tend to prioritize, well...)
What this means is that 'niche industries are well protected but relatively small' is a bounding argument whose bounds relies on trust. Trust in those numbers, trust in the people providing the numbers, and trust in the judgement of people who helped create those numbers, i.e. previous institutional elites caught up in the anti-establishment political movement.
Depends if you believe the UN report last year alleging around €169 million a month.
Though that article does cite more concrete examples of Somali pirates as well, such as paying them by dumping suitcases of cash.
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