Voroxpete

Forget four years. When Trump just turns around and lowers almost all the tariffs just because bond markets "got yippy" it makes it very clearly that these are not a permanent thing even within this administration (assuming it does only last four years).

This has been their problem from the start. If the goal of tariffs is to encourage domestic production, then it needs to be clear that they are a permanent thing, not some momentary whim. Companies need to know that it's worth making four year, five year, ten year investments under this new regime.

But Trump and his mouthpieces keep talking about making deals. They describe the tariffs as a negotiating tactic, which means they're only intended to stick around as long as it takes to get that deal. So if you're investing in a new factory, the message is to wait until the deal happens.

Tariffs cannot be both a tool for encouraging domestic growth and a tool for negotiating better trade. Those two goals are mutually exclusive. But pretty much no one in the white house understands that.

OK, listen, I am always 1000% down for laughing at the stupid, self defeating damage being caused by Trump... But this ain't it.

Microsoft has been backing off of new data centre buildouts for a while now, long before Trump started getting serious about this tariff bullshit. They were doing this quietly, mostly allowing letters of intent to expire and doing other stuff that makes it very clear that they have lost all confidence in this mythical AI revolution that they were piling money into. Of course, admitting that the tech rapture isn't coming will be disastrous for their stock price, so they're trying to avoid actually saying what they're doing.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, research by TD Cowen picked up what was happening, and it was recently verified by reporting from Bloomberg. So Microsoft have lost the ability to make these pullbacks quietly, and they're desperate for any kind of cover. The tariffs are exactly what they need; instead of admitting that they set billions of dollars on fire trying to make magic beans real, they can blame the government.

Trump's idiotic tariffs are doing massive damage to the global economy, but this particular wound is very much self-inflicted on Microsoft's part.

Exactly. He's been holding onto this notion for decades, and no one has ever disabused him of it. Now he's a mentally declining old idiot and it's too late to teach him that he's wrong.

This is why Bessent is trying to bail. He's never been a fan of this "tariff everyone" approach, and it's now finally occurred to him that he's going to get the blame to cover Trump's ass.

Trump's aides love tariffs because Trump loves tariffs. He's been obsessed with them his entire life.

Rafael isn't criticizing Trump, he's giving him an escape hatch, trying to pretend that this is all "bad advice".

I can't stress to you enough how little this distinction matters to the rest of the world.

America elected Trump. Again. Knowing exactly who he was, and what he would do, because it's just more of what he did the first time.

We don't really care which specific Americans are to blame for that. The existence of good Americans is as meaningful to us as the existence of good cops.

This is why the relationship between America and its allies is never going to be the same again. We can't trust you. Sure, maybe in four years Trump will be gone. Maybe he won't. But, to paraphrase a French senator, we can't put our security in the hands of a bunch of voters in Wisconsin every four years.

America held a trusted place in the world. That can't happen anymore, because the American people have proven themselves incapable of living up to that trust.

Doesn't need to be more. Most of what China imports from the US is relatively easy to source from elsewhere. For example the biggest category of imports is fuel, and the third biggest category is plant based oils, grains, seeds, fruits, etc. The US doesn't have a particular monopoly on those kinds of products. Last time this shit happened, China started sourcing all their soy bean imports from Brazil, for example. So China only has to make the US products uncompetitive in their market. And of course, China isn't in a trade war with the entirety of the rest of the planet, so it's a choice between an 84% tariff, or something in the region of no tariffs, so it doesn't really take all that much to make the US product more expensive than any other option. If anything, these additional tariffs are largely performative; just at the 34% percent level they were at, most US producers were probably already completely shut out of Chinese markets just by cost differences alone.

The US, on the other hand, largely imports things that China is highly specialised at making. Electronics, injection molded plastics, that sort of thing. Stuff that you can't just magically source from somewhere else, because even if another factory could make the product, they have to set up production runs, create specific tooling, run prototype batches, etc, etc. So even at a 100% markup, a lot of companies will have no choice but to continue to source those parts from China, especially since anywhere else they might have them built is probably also subject to an exorbitant tariff. The cost of importing from China isn't actually 104%, it's 104% minus the tariff one whatever other country you might get that part from. Trump's deranged theory is that they're going to choose between 104% vs 0% for making it in the US, but there simply aren't any production facilities in the US that are set up to make the stuff that China makes, so that choice doesn't exist.

(in case you're wondering about the second biggest category, since I obviously skipped it, it's machinery, including engines, turbines, nuclear reactors, boilers, taps, valves, etc. That's the sort of thing that's harder to source elsewhere, but in the long run China is much better equipped to start producing it domestically because they at least have the kind of broad manufacturing base needed. It'll hurt them, but not nearly as much as this stuff is hurting the US, and they can also issue specific exemptions if needed).

Oof. Yeah, that one really hits. Great start, then creative differences collapsed the whole endeavour and it just went to shit.

And it's not like I can even recommend the book anymore given, well... y'know.

Just a fucking mountain of disappointments on disappointments.

Picard lost me the moment they had a scene where a bunch of down on their luck blue collar workers were complaining about shitty rations and being forced to work on a holiday.

WHAT PART OF POST-SCARCITY LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNIST UTOPIA DID YOU INBRED FUCKING DOGSHIT FOR BRAINS MORONS NOT GRASP?

I swear to god, Picard is a Star Trek show written by people who have apparently never watched a single episode of Star Trek in their entire lives. Unbelievably poor grasp of the basic concepts of the setting, and of Roddenberry's core thesis. And it's not like you can't make Star Trek grimy if you want to. Deep Space Nine did it frequently, playing with concepts of liberty vs security and so on. But the writers of Picard were just too lazy to engage with the core ideas of the setting and instead just wrote a bunch of generic, broadly science fiction filler and then slapped the Star Trek logo on it.

Discovery I feel more kindly towards, even though it was also terrible. It at least makes some kind of an effort to be Star Trek, which automatically puts it above Picard, but god that is such a low bar. It still has the same basic problem of being written by people who seem to be deeply embarassed about the idea of writing Star Trek. They had to go in and try to retcon in a bunch of crazy tech, rewrite huge parts of the setting, throw out everything about the Klingons and start from scratch, all out of some kind of weird hatred for the universe in which they were telling stories. Also, dear god it was just incredibly slow and dull. Some of the worse pacing I've ever seen.

Thank the lord almighty for Strange New Worlds. If you're soured on all the new Trek and skipped it because you were worried about it being more of the same, holy fucking shit go watch it now! Strange New Worlds is perfect. It's a Star Trek show written by people who absolutely adore Star Trek. It's a love letter - a love anthem - to the original series. And it manages to somehow find an unearthly balance between being one of the most campy and fun takes on Star Trek, and one of the darkest and scariest. There's a musical episode, and there's an episode that's basically "What if the plot of Aliens happened on the Enterprise?" and somehow both of them fit in the same show perfectly. Also, THE KLINGONS ARE FUN AGAIN! They're loud and boisterous and drink blood wine and yell "Qapla" while they headbutt each other and it's fucking great.

Again, this is all just missing the forest for the trees. You've gotten so caught up in sophistry that you can't begin to comprehend why you're failing to express your ideas, and why your statements come off as completely detached from reality.

I'm not going to bother completing the coursework you so desparately want to assign me. I have better things to do with my time. If you don't get it by now, I'm not the person to get you there.

This is why these "zero for zero" offers are going to go absolutely nowhere.

By their own admission, the administration is simply inventing these numbers for "tariffs applied against the US". What they are, in actually, is the US trade deficit against that country as a percentage.

But the thing is, you're never going see an even trade balance between the US and Vietnam while still having trade between those countries, because nothing made in the US is affordable to the average person living in Vietnam.

The only way to get that fictional "tariffs applied against the US" number down to zero is for Vietnam to stop all exports to the US. That means that a whole lot of clothes, electronics and other consumer goods will need to be made in the US instead of being made in Vietnam.

No version of this works out well for Vietnam, and even for the US it either involves prices increasing to reflect the higher average wages and cost of living in the US, or US wages decreasing to the point where you've basically got all these goods being made by utterly impoverished workers in American sweat shops.

I'm not going to say that American consumers exploiting poorer Vietnamese workers to subsidize their own cost of living is a morally good system, but it sure is one that was working pretty well for the average American consumer.

It's also worth noting that even the administration's own formula assumes a tariff pass through rate of 25%. Obviously this is much, much lower than the 95% Cavallo calculates, but even taking the administration's numbers as being accurate, they're still saying that prices will rise by 25% of the tariff rate.

The average weighted global tariff across all affected goods is now 40%. By Cavallo's numbers that means a 38% average increase in the price of all imported goods. But even by the administration's incredibly sunny numbers, they're still saying that all prices on imported goods will rise by at least an average of 10%. That's, effectively, a new 10% tax on most of what you buy.

(Also, because of how much of what the US buys comes from China, that 40% weighted average will go higher if Trump applies additional tariffs on China, as they apparently intend to, to the order of over 100%)

Trump: Wait, no, you can't do that!