It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex.
Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products.
It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
This is a fun "boots theory" bit from Terry Pratchets discworld. I don't know where it started but discworld is where I first read it described this way.
idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because
1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen
2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years
3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do
i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it.
i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
This might be true once in the past but even the "quality" brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same factories with the same materials, with the same business magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
>But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
The question is not "is it a bubble". Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment. The question is "will this bubble lay the foundation for growth and destroy some value when it pops, or will it only destroy value"
I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
From my lived experience you are an outlier. Potentially an extreme one at that.
Where I grew up the people who didn’t work almost universally turned into consumers of everything and creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much output for society as a whole.
I think if you offered the entire population the ability to do no work other than what they felt like doing, exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like create art and otherwise contribute back to other people but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.
I think our future if we ever figured out automation and UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.
I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare necessities provided by the government. It was easy to play the odds and know which apartment was which the moment you stepped foot into one. It’s not a perfect correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons, but it’s closer than the average upper middle class suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the opportunity.
What projects? You are starting from a completely different baseline than the average hypothetical UBI recipient.
I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3 generations into some sort of UBI system. But bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people will revert to do nothing of value to society, no projects, nothing.
I generally agree, but I think for some of the most interesting problems in computer science you need resources that only companies can provide and thats basically work.
After free UNIX and Linux became available on affordable home computers, I found it was no longer necessary to be at a company to do interesting projects. That was before 1995.
People can find other things to do than work for a wage. I don’t get what your original objection is about when you yourself work even though you don’t have to.
Some local volunteer organizations seem to only have people 60+ years of age.
I'm sure there are. Doesn't mean most people are like that. Consider retirees. Some find meaningful activities, many just rot away out of not having a purpose.
What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?
According to google: "Some reports indicate that 26.8% to 28.6% of households on welfare have earned income, which sometimes reflects a focus on households with no work-eligible adults (elderly, disabled)."
According to google, "approximately 57% to 67% of American adults are living paycheck to paycheck."
This doesn't mean they are poor. As their income goes up, so does their spending.
Also according to google, "Approximately 60% to 80% of professional athletes face severe financial distress or go broke within a few years of retirement, particularly in the NFL and NBA. Data suggests 78% of NFL players experience financial hardship within two years of retirement, while about 60% of NBA players are broke within five years."
and:
"though often debated, statistic suggests that up to 70% of lottery winners go broke or face financial distress within three to five years, more conservative estimates indicate about one-third (roughly 33%) declare bankruptcy."
Personally, I think that high schools should have a required course in finance and accounting.
Always such glowing recommendations of human kind from techies.
People devolve like that when they have no purpose or opportunities. Which I’m sure would happen with the real goal of UBI: barely subsistence support in order to grow a larger pool of reserve labor while the rich (who are not degenerate at all[1]) live large.
America offers a free education for all. People are free to move to anyplace in the country. Historically, people migrated to where the opportunities were. Americans are free to start a business any time.
There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.
I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.
> Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.
I'm not aware of any realistic UBI tests. Could you point me to any?
The ones I'm aware of were either or both:
1. Time limited, so participants were aware that they needed to still have a job or at least be employable after the experiment has concluded.
2. Were funded externally, so participants only reaped the benefits of UBI but didn't incur the drawbacks (i.e. didn't have to fund the program by much higher income taxes) which could have discourage them from working.
It was basically a supplementary source of income - money for nothing for a limited time period, not an actual UBI program.
So you believe that the entire driving factor of the consumer goods market would mysteriously disappear if people had enough money to not worry about missing rent?
Rent is defined as unearned income attracted by a dominant market position. If we wanted people to afford rent it'd be more efficient to set rent to zero by fiat.
Hard working billionaires famous for succesdully working devolved into abuse island, real saltiness over anyone saying sexual harrasment is wrong and basically conspiracy to end democracy.
UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as harmless in comparison.
UBI doesn’t mean people don’t work. It means work is partially decoupled from basic needs.
People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The second is to… do things that are meaningful. If people derive meaning from work then that’s why they’ll work.
Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit jobs that don’t really produce much value.
I’m not totally sold on UBI but there’s a lot of shallow bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.
governments will collapse before we are at a moment where UBI is needed. Billionaires and companies hardly pay any tax and if white collar jobs die down, there is no guarantee that government will even have money to wipe their butt.
Nothing happened to them, they're still around; just consolidated into industrial operations.
The "twist" is they rot as e-waste every 18 months when newer models arrive, generating roughly 30,000 metric tonnes of eWaste annually[0] with no recycling programmes from manufacturers (like Bitmain)... which is comparable to the entire country of the Netherlands.
Turns out the decentralised currency for the people is also an environmental disaster built on planned obsolescence. Who knew.
If the power was used over the whole year (and not just one hour)
(2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296 kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)
Why are you even trying to argue energy consumption when the topic is eWaste due to bitcoin ASICs?
Even if we continue down this route, its something like 15% of global stock transactions going through NYSE, per transaction its extremely efficient when compared to Ethereum; but thats not the argument anyway- its that the hardware used for mining is barely useful outside of that use-case, and the shelf-life is very low to boot.
If there was a use-case, we’d have found it by now, since 30,000 Tonnes a year of it ends up in landfills, surely someone would dig it out or buy it if it had utility.
AI, obviously! A bubble doesn't mean demand vanishes overnight. There is - at current price points - much more demand than supply. That means the market can tolerate price hikes whilst keeping the accelerators busy. It seems likely that we're still just at the start of AI demand as most companies are still finding their feet with it, lots of devs still aren't using it at all, lots of business workflows that could be automated with it aren't and so on. So there is scope for raising prices a lot as the high value use cases float to the top, maybe even auctioning tokens.
Let's say tomorrow OpenAI and Anthropic have a huge down round, or whatever event people think would mark the end of the bubble. That doesn't mean suddenly nobody is using AI. It means they have to rapidly reduce burn e.g. not doing new model versions, laying off staff and reducing the comp of those that remain, hiking prices a lot, getting more serious about ads and other monetized features. They will still be selling plenty of inferencing.
In practice the action is mostly taking place out of public markets. We won't necessarily know what's happening at the most exposed companies until it's in the rear view mirror. Bubbles are a public markets phenomenon. See how "ride sharing"/taxi apps played out. Market dumping for long periods to buy market share, followed by a relatively easy transition to annual profitability without ever going public. Some investors probably got wiped along the way but we don't know who exactly or by how much.
Most likely outcome: AI bubble will deflate steadily rather than suddenly burst. Resources are diverted from training to inferencing, new features slow down, new models are weaker and more expensive than new models and the old models are turned off anyway. That sort of thing. People will call it enshittification but it'll really just be the end of aggressive dumping.
There may not be that much demand at a price that yields profit. Demand at current heavily subsidized “the first dose is always free” prices is not a great indicator unless they find some way to make themselves indispensable for a lot of tasks for a lot of people. So far, they haven’t.
Yes if/when prices rise there'll be demand destruction but I think demand will keep rising for the foreseeable future anyway even incorporating that. Lower value use cases like vibe coding hobby apps might fall by the wayside because they become uneconomic but the tokens will be soaked up by bigger enterprises that have found ways to properly integrate it at scale into their businesses. I don't mean Copilot style Office plugins but more business-specific stuff that yields competitive advantage.
You’re just repeating their predictions. Investors are starting to get nervous that there’s no real proof these things could justify burning a Mt. Everest sized pile of $100 bills to achieve.
Yes it's only a prediction based on what I'm seeing. And I'm not disagreeing with the investors that there's overinvestment right now. Prices need to rise, spending on R&D needs to fall for this stuff to make economic sense. I'm only arguing that there's plenty of demand, and assuming price rises happen smoothly over not too short of a period, any demand destruction at the lower levels will be quickly counter-balanced by demand creation at higher value-add levels.
It's also possible non-tech industries just have a collective imagination failure and can't find use cases for AI, but I doubt it.
I know there is demand — I even know a few people in high-level dev roles, one easily in the 99th percentile for pay, that were taken from their regular, important dev tasks to make agents for paying clients.
I’m not worried about the technology flourishing. I’m worried about my fucking retirement, know what I mean? The question isn’t whether there is demand, it’s how much demand there is, because they’re betting on having all the demand. I don’t have a ton of money. People getting this wrong in a way my financial advisor can’t outmaneuver is an existential threat to my ability to not live in crumbling public housing in a few decades.
We’re talking about this needing to meaningfully move towards making whole digit percentages of the US GDP, soon. Not only are these initiatives largely unprofitable, they’re increasing their expenses based on hopes and vibes. I think a whole lot of people are so focused on short-term gains and being king of the hill that sustainability is a distant afterthought — just like it was in the .com era. I have zero faith in the current cohort of tech leaders to get this right.
Anyone who regularly tries to rent GPUs on VPS providers knows that they often sell out. This isn't a market with lots of capacity nobody needs. In the dot.com bubble there was lots of dark fiber nobody was using. In this bubble, almost every high-end GPU is being used fully by someone.
We can use the GPUs for research (64-bit scientific compute), 3d graphics, a few other things. We programmers will reconfigure them to something useful.
At least, the GPUs that are currently plugged in. A lot of this bullshit bubble crap is because most of those GPUs (and RAM) is sitting unplugged in a warehouse, because we don't even have enough power to turn all of them on.
So if your question is how to use a GPU... I got plenty of useful non-AI related ideas. But only if we can plug them in.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
> I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
That's my fear.
The problem is these GPUs are specifically made for datacenters, So it's not like your average consumer is going to grab one to put into their gaming PCs.
I also worry about what the pop ends up doing to consumer electronics. We'll have a bunch of manufacturers that have a bunch of capacity that they can no longer use to create products which people want to buy and a huge backstop of second hand goods that these liquidated AI companies will want to unload. That will put chip manufactures in a place where they'll need to get their money primarily from consumers if they want to stay in business. That's not the business model that they've operated on up until this point.
We are looking at a situation where we have a bunch of oil derricks ready to pump, but shut off because it's too expensive to run the equipment making it not worth the energy.
> As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2
I predict there's going to be a niche opening up for companies to recycle the expensive parts of all these compute hardware that AI companies are currently buying and will probably be obsolete/depreciated/replaced in the next 2-5 years. The easiest example is RAM chips. There will be people desoldering those ICs and putting them on DDR5 sticks to resell to the general consumer market.
A technological arms race just occurred in front of your eyes for the past 5 years and you think they're going to let the stockpile fall into civilian hands?
In 2 years the next generation chips will be released and th se chips will be obsolete.
That's truly e-waste. Now in practice, we programmers find uses of 10+ year old hardware as cheap webhosta, compiler/build boxes, Bamboo, unit tests, fuzzers and whatever. So as long as we can turn them on we programmers can and will find a use.
But because we are power constrained, when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released (and when those chips use 30% or less power), no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.
In what sense? Not competitive for chat bot providers to use? Is that a metric that matters?
> when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released
What if they don't get released? You don't have a broad and competitive set of players providing products in this realm. How hard would it be to stop this?
> no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.
You have lived your life with ready access to cutting edge resources. You ever wonder how long that trend could _possibly_ last?
As in: the 1.5nm or 1.8nm GPUs will use less power and therefore can actually be plugged in.
We are power constrained. The GPUs of this generation can't even be plugged in yet because of these power constraints.
When power is a problem, getting lower power GPUs in is a priority. The 1.8nm and 1.5nm next generation is already in production, and will likely launch before these massive GPU stockpiles are used.
And then what? Why plug in last generations crap when the next generation is shipping?
--------
Todays GPUs have to actually launch and be deployed while they are useful. Otherwise they could fully be obsolete and lose significant value.
I assume even really out of date cards and racks will readily find some use, when the present-day alternative costs ~$100k for a single card. Just have to run them on a low-enough basis that power use is not a significant portion of the overall cost of ownership.
It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to get conventional scientific computing workloads to work on 16 bit or smaller data types. I think there’s some hope but it will require work.
> Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."
This is not the definition of a bubble, and is specifically contrary to what i said.
A good bubble, like the automobile industry in the example I linked, paves the way for a whole new economic modalit - but value was still destroyed when that bubble popped and the market corrected.
You may think its better to not have bubbles and limit the maximum economic rate of change (and you may be right), but the current system is not obviously wrong and has benefits.
The trouble is, you can only tell what was "detached from reality" after the fact. Real-world bubbles must be credible by definition, or else they would deflate smoothly rather than growing out of control and then popping suddenly when the original expectations are dashed by reality.
That seems like sarcasm because it is an overused excuse that republicans give for the bad usa economies under republican presidents.
I never once heard a reasonable explanation why policies only start to have an effect at the end of a year that is divisible by 4 or 8. It makes no sense if you think it through.
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.
Vaccines are not perfectly safe. All medicine can harm, and vaccines are no exception. Mandating dozens of vaccines to billions of children is forcing parents, under threat of state-sponsored violence, to injure their children.
There are 10s of thousands of VAERS cases in the US per year. Now multiply that by 20 and we're in the ballpark for number of children youre so cavalierly arguing to force harm upon.
Now, there are diseases where vaccines make sense. However, the blanket statement "inject into your newborn whatever the government tells you" is pretty obviously stupid in my opinion; there are plenty of cases of known-toxins taking years to get removed from market with no corporate repercussions - the incentive structures arent perfect. See DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, Teflon, uranium mill tailings, cases too numerous to mention. However much you trust the government to do their best, there are agile corporations getting paid handsomely to outmaneuver them.
For my children, we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older.
I generally support vaccination and there is an argument that public health can sometimes trump individual rights or even health. That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease. The other example is chickenpox where we are trading off a potentially mild disease (everyone I know had it as a child) to the risk of getting it as an adult where it is more severe. These tradeoffs are not straightforward and the health authorities are also not transparent about how they weigh the risks.
I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.
> That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease.
Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids, including blood. In this, Hepatitis B is particularly insidious: there is generally a large viral load in the blood relative to other diseases, so even microscopic amounts of blood are sufficient for infection, and the virus can remain active for up to a week on exposed objects.
Perhaps your children are different, but blood is a pretty common sight with most children.
Worse: when you contract Hepatitis B, it may become a lifelong infection.
Sadly, screening those people who have contact with your child is thwarted by the fact that roughly half of those infected don't realize it.
My daughters were born at home. Me and my wife do not have Hepatitis B. They did not go to daycare, my wife stayed at home with them.
I think the burden of proof is on you (or the health authorities) to have some conclusive evidence based story here how them getting this vaccine is a net plus, or at least that not getting the vaccine is a high enough risk in the big picture. What I read online borders propaganda, it is just the natural reflex to defense the existing practices, there is no evidence that I have seen that has real world data comparing the risk that proves what needs to happen here. Because hard evidence is the enemy of bad policy.
> the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease
Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.
Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.
> we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older
This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.
So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.
Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).
What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to? You can't go to jail for refusing childhood vaccines in the US, as far as I'm aware. But you also can't expect the rest of us to let you inflict violence on our children, by exposing them to deadly communicable diseases which you could easily vaccinate your own children against.
The Trump regime murdered a guy for protesting them today, so I'm not interested in engaging with sophistry about mandates that might hypothetically lead to violence at some unspecified point in the future. Rules are rules and violence is violence, they're not the same thing and I won't waste my time talking to people who can't see that.
The confusion is that your statement is not true. Many laws, including school vaccine mandates, aren't backed by state violence. They don't require nor anticipate the deployment of state violence to enforce. They're just rules about how a certain program ought to be administered.
Even for the laws which are "backed by" state violence in some deep theoretical sense, I think it's misleading to the point of nonsense to characterize them that way. When the government says "the speed limit on this stretch of the road is 65 miles per hour", they do not mean and the public does not understand them to mean "we will commit violence against anyone who drives 66 miles per hour". It would be ridiculous for driver who's stopped by police and gets a speeding ticket to claim that they've been subject to violence.
To me, it seems clear that this kind of equivocation is an attempt to minimize the actual ongoing campaign of literal state violence by the Trump regime. I'll take you at your word that you're not familiar with that campaign, but please remember that the concept of "state violence" is inherently political. Talking about it implies a position on the actual state and how it actually deploys violence, whether you intend to or not.
What about the trillions of dangerous and live viruses that are cultured in order to make vaccines in the first place? Would those be harmful if they escaped into the wild? Or what about if they were ... deliberately released somehow?
Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?
>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards
This argument has always seemed obviously false to me. You're sure acting like theres a moral truth - or do you claim your life is unguided and random? Did you flip your hitler/pope coin today and act accordingly? Play Russian roulette a couple times because what's the difference?
Life has value; the rest is derivative. How exactly to maximize life and it's quality in every scenario are not always clear, but the foundational moral is.
In what way does them having a subjective local moral standard for themselves imply that there exists some sort of objective universal moral standard for everyone?
I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin.
Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart.
And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.
Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
Tariffs are a mid-long term strategy to encourage onshoring business, for reasons including military, national security, and political influence on foreign powers.
This is a complicated topic involving the global economy and evolving intercountry landscape. All these slam dunk takes are incomplete to the point of being wrong - and inflammatory.
The use of tariffs as a mid-long strategy, in my view, would require a stable, long-term communication that the US government will implement careful, strategic tariffs alongside incentives to strengthen chosen domestic industries where they believe a domestic alternative is feasible. We haven't seen anything even close to that at any point in this tariff rollercoaster - tariffs for products that cannot be produced at scale domestically (coffee, bananas), tariffs for grudges, tariffs that only exist for a week, tariffs that are written post-hoc after a Truth post to fit what the president said. There's an argument to be made for domestic protectionism, but the people currently at the levers are not serious policy-minded folks.
Because it's a layer too rudimentary. You also don't see people commentating that "taxation is when the government takes a cut of a transaction or of property."
The only people who need to back up to "industrial policy requires consistency and transparency" are those who are either incapable of or willfully deciding not to understand what's going on around them.
This is the real problem with the US tariffs. There is no strategy and no confidence from businesses that their investments will pay off. China can do it because everyone knows that the CCP will stick to their plan but Trump changes his mind every hour and no policy can ever last more than an election cycle.
We never accurately measured effect of pedal on the gas trade with China caused with WTO admission nor even NAFTA, the no on ramp was huge shock that didn’t show up in traditional measures. So trying to go full gas reverse with no real strategy is almost mindless.
That argument seems completely nullified by the fact that the president unilaterally changes his mind on tariffs every other day and setting up a manufacturing basis can take 10+ years.
Seems safer for many business to just continue to operate outside of the US and get a more consistent business relationship with every other country in the world.
There were many explanations given by the administration to justify the tariffs. One of them was that it would improve domestic manufacturing; another was that it would improve national security. The tariffs are (so far) not advancing either goal. Tech is getting so many tariff carve-outs that I am suspicious they ever will.
Oh dear. There is zero chance there was anything resembling this sort of semi-plausible logic behind the tarrifs. What you said above is sane washing invented by people who operate on logic, trying to find some reason-based logic. No such logic exists. It's all insanity, sadism and tribal performance.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts my family her unfiltered thoughts all the time.
She absolutely thinks that tariffs magically make the US economy better in a very short time period. She thinks that the governments of the countries that she hates are paying them and that the tariffs are solving the deficit problem. She thinks that the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has skyrocketed.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
This is a person who is deeply involved in the mechanics of writing legislation supported by GOP legislators. I do not believe that she is uniquely dumb amongst right wingers who have access to the levers of power.
would explaining that Tarrifs are supposed to create comparative competition rather than get other countries pay fees dramatically change her world view?
Are you saying that my aunt would suddenly change her mind about the nature of the Trump tariffs to understand that they achieve a totally different outcome than she thinks over a totally different time frame?
She already thinks that Trump has saved american manufacturing and that the deficit problem is gone. Why would she change that opinion?
My understanding is that if she was corrected to the proper understanding of Tariffs, she would not change her support of the tariff. Therefore debunking what "dumb people think" is still pointless. Because they aren't really advocating for a particular policy, they are advocating for a direction which is well represented by a whole family of policies - in particular the strong form.
You have correctly identified how tarriffs work, congratulations! You have not correctly identified how the administration thinks they work or how they've told constituents they work.
People do believe this because that's what they were sold. Whether the line they bought has any connection to objective reality is irrelevant.
> Tariffs are a mid-long term strategy to encourage onshoring business, for reasons including military, national security, and political influence on foreign powers.
Do you take their arguments at face value? The arguments don't even work because the US clearly had better security, was in a better situation militarily (due to relationships, including with allies), and more influence without the tariffs. If you don't trade with them, they won't be interested in what you have to say.
It does fit an attempt centralize vast power in the current White House, which now controls trade, has shares in several large companies, great influence over many other companies, influence in large media organizations, and claims virtually uninhibited power in many domains.
Many people in Trumpistan do believe tariffs magically make the US economy better.
Then there are the sanewashers who try to act like there is a grand strategy behind taxing uhhh... bathroom vanities... then removing the tax a few months later.
Both are wrong, just different flavors and with different moral and intellectual culpability for being wrong (the latter are worse).
Yes, and also tariffs are a strategy to appeal to nationalists. This group is fine making the tradeoff of a worse economy if it means putting your nation's people first
Its an interesting point you end up raising - does it still count as a strategy even if you are doing something patently impossible given the knowledge and intelligence at your disposal?
If someone decided to come up with a strategy to do something fanciful, like find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow to solve their debt problems, would it really be worthy enough to be called a strategy?
If we take the absolutely narrow scope of just Tariffs - Elementary economics, and history from far and wide. We know exactly what tariffs achieve and fail to achieve. It’s the stuff of 101 Econ classes.
You're not wrong, but at the same time, any discussion around this subject that remotely resembles a truth bombshell promptly gets flagged, so the only way you're going to see anything about this subject is if it states the obvious in the most bland way possible.
This means that to the subset of HN crowd that don't have alternate sources of political news, this indeed looks like a bombshell.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
> “She is a liar. She makes up crap … I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
> Vance said in late August that as a result of tariffs Trump imposed during his presidency, “prices went down for American citizens.”
Yes, it’s still wrong to take things but the guy should get like community service teaching white hat techniques or something. The CEO should be charged with gross negligence, fraud, and any HIPPA/Medical records laws he violated - per capita. Meaning he should face 1M+ counts of …
What does "the crime is less egregious" even mean?
Morally, you burglarized a home.
Legally, at least in CA, the charge and sentencing are equivalent.
If someone also commits a murder while burglarizing you could argue the crime is more severe, but my response would be that they've committed two crimes, and the severity of the burglary in isolation is equivalent.
Classic lenovo. Some models have FN as the most bottom left key, instead of ctrl. Gotta be the worst design decision ive ever seen. Everyone copy+pastes and finds, whoever thought that was a good idea really needs relieved of decision making power.
You've got history backwards. IBM Thinkpads did it that way 30+ years ago, when there was no consensus in the industry. Do you switch it now, and anger every lifetime Thinkpad loyalist, or keep it and annoy just the folks who switch back and forth between different vendors' laptops?
In a brief survey of laptop photos from the early 90s, IBM, Toshiba, Zenith, NEC, Packard Bell, Compaq, and Fujitsu all put Fn on the outside.
Epson, Apple, HP, Panasonic, and Sony put it as the second key.
A handful put it as the third key. Heck, one Toshiba machine had Ctrl left of A, Alt on the extreme lower-left starting out the bottom row, followed by Caps Lock and Fn and backslash and finally spacebar.
Only in the last 15-ish years have most of the Fn-Ctrl keyboards died out and the majority of the industry is now using Ctrl-Fn. Thinkpads are the last major holdout, but they didn't decide to buck the trend, the trend bucked them.
Idk, I find it easier to press control on a Thinkpad because it's closer. It being in a corner would be farer away.
Anyway, control should be (and traditionally was) where CapsLock is. Just remap it - everything is suddenly easy and ergonomic.
Shouldn't have been using a free product anyway. Committed the crime of convenience and paid with my telemetry. At least I stopped.
HN, you my only fren.
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