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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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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.