The covid crisis was an actual event in physical reality not caused by admin policies.
This crisis is the admin taking a sledgehammer to international capitalism. No obvious intervention other than "stop doing that".
I'm sure at some point the fed would have some kind of response but inflation of tariffs is a huge risk and that limits what the fed can do unless they have co-ordination with the admin.
> The covid crisis was an actual event in physical reality not caused by admin policies.
Sortof yeah, but also sortof not. Basically any non-Trump president would have been briefed about Covid in January 2020, and most of the previous ones invested a bunch of resources into making sure that the disease was contained far away from US shores.
Even Bush II would have done that (and did, I believe for SARS).
It's a possibility. SARS II was much harder to contain though. The first SARS actually made it to North American hospitals, but was contained. It didn't spread in the populace.
Once SARS II made it out of China, only globally coordinated net 0 case policies could have stopped it. I think it would have been worth trying for but there was no appetite for it.
> It's a possibility. SARS II was much harder to contain though. The first SARS actually made it to North American hospitals, but was contained. It didn't spread in the populace.
Totally fair, but as I recall he didn't even try to keep it away from US soil (which had always been the CDC approach).
Buffett's position is the vast majority of people shouldn't time the market if they aren't full time investors. But that skilled full time investors can beat the market.
> both leaders claim their approaches have helped them this week avoid what Trump calls “liberation day” tariffs.. Mexican officials on Thursday said the strategy had borne fruit and they would focus on getting an even better deal. Economy minister Marcelo Ebrard said: “It's a great achievement, I’d say, from the point of view of where we started not long ago that there would be no exemptions.” .. Mexico remains upbeat, with [President] Sheinbaum on Thursday trying to lure companies to invest in USMCA-compliant production in the country. “We think that with the dialogue we’ve established there are the conditions to have a better deal,” she said.
You've completely ignored what I wrote. The formula the white house used to set tariffs would result in lower tariffs for Canada and Mexico. If both countries were included in the formula Trump would have to cut announced tariffs on both countries.
You're disagreeing with statements by the President of Mexico, describing the result of ongoing negotiations?
Canada and Mexico share a physical border with USA, which has already resulted in unique (i.e. unrelated to the math of 180+ other countries which don't physically border USA) tariffs tailored to border security goals, under national security emergency directives which overrode USMCA.
USMCA has been historically gamed by international manufacturers seeking more favorable terms for products destined to the US market. As stated by the leadership of both Mexico and Canada, USMCA will need to be renegotiated to address issues identified by all three parties, which would then reduce the need to invoke the emergency-power tariffs that have been deployed against 180+ countries.
> As stated by the leadership of both Mexico and Canada, USMCA will need to be renegotiated to address issues identified by all three parties
On the canada side, i think the issue identified that needs to be addressed is the US president being a dick.
(I'm not being sarcastic here, that is my genuine impression. If you disagree can you cite a source for what issues canada wants addressed? Obviously times are a bit weird since we are having an election and its considered bad form for the gov to do anything during election season)
> Some Members of Parliament have also advocated for increasing trade barriers on Chinese imports alongside the United States, which the Canadian government has recently begun doing unilaterally. Suggesting Canada could be interested in coordinating those China-related trade policy measures across all three USMCA members, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland recently said she sympathizes with US concerns that “Mexico is not acting the way that Canada and the US are when it comes to its economic relationship with China.”
That doesn't seem to support canada wanting to renogtiate usmca. The best way of handling that issue is probably not renegotiation (its way too specific of a situation to write a clause into the agreement for). Furthermore, Chrystia freeland hasn't been deputy PM for four months now, and the situation has changed a lot since then (not to mention we also have a new prime minister since then). At the time of that statement i don't think there was much appetitie for renegotiating usmca.
Compared to now where our current PM is straight up saying "The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations, is over"
> A broader change to the USMCA also looks likely, with Carney saying there had been “so many violations” that the free trade agreement needs “a renegotiation”.
Trump tariffs are based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977, overriding USMCA and other trade agreements. Any renegotiation of USMCA wouldn't stop the potential use of IEEPA to selectively override parts of USMCA v2.
It's more likely that USMCA violations referenced by Carney and Freeland were done by Mexico/China, at the economic expense of both Canada and USA.
All trade agreements are about surrendering some domestic power. What act or other domestic legal instrument is used is irrelavent.
In context it seems very unlikely this is about mexico, as carney is running on a platform of closer integration with mexico and strongly distancing canada ecconomically from the united states. Carney's ecconomic policies are not identical to the previous administration - it makes about as much sense to refer to trudeau/freeland's statements as it would to try and explain trump's policies by referencing things biden said/did.
Napkin math cannot apply to Mexico and Canada tariffs, because the USMCA (and preceding NAFTA) have long intertwined North American manufacturing supply chains, with components moving back and forth across borders.
Even the emergency border security tariffs and counter-tariffs announced earlier this year by US and Canada have since been carefully tailored for specific products and exceptions, as cooler heads prevailed on both sides of the border, to minimize immediate and catastrophic ripple effects across North American manufacturing.
The entire new tariff scheme is napkin math. Although it could also be napkin math done by some LLM.
If it was real math, it wouldn’t assume that there is some magical trade elasticity that is completely linear in the tariff rate. And real math might notice that the prices of goods that are subject to tariffs are an utterly absurd measure of value, cost, movement of money, or anything else.
Consider:
A US company does a bunch of R&D and designs a widget. They pay $10 each to a Chinese factory to manufacture it. They warehouse the widgets in Hong Kong. Each widget purchased by a US customer results in a “$100” item being imported. $90 stays in the US. $10 goes to China.
The same company does exactly the same thing except they ship in bulk to a US warehouse. The imported item is now “$10”. The tariff is 1/10 as much, the napkin math sees 1/10 as much trade imbalance, but the economic effect of the import is identical.
Or maybe they ship from Hong Kong to a French customer. This should be seen as an export from the US to France with $90 and an export from China to France worth $10. But I think it’s invisible to the napkin math.
Now consider that the US is home to some wildly successful companies with names like AMD and Nvidia. They sell chips for thousands of dollars each, worldwide. They pay TSMC quite a lot less to make them. If they warehouse in the US, they may be screwed now! If they ship from Taiwan to a buyer somewhere else, the US has, in effect, exported quite close to the full sale price of that chip, but no trade goods ever touched US soil. Can the napkin math sees that?
You can bet that several other countries use brains instead of napkins and will have no difficulty thinking that they could retaliate by restricting or taxing of these US-designed goods even if they’re imported from elsewhere. And China is working very hard to make their own alternatives, and they will surely be willing to export them.
(Don’t forget: The UK and Israel have CPU design expertise. ASML is dependent on tin zapping tech from San Diego, but they’re an EU company. And it looks like the successor to that tin zapping tech might be free electron lasers, and that technology come from US national labs and universities, but other countries also have FELs, and the nerdy physicists who fiddle with them are not happy with the US government right now.)
See the 2024 paper (40 pages) by Stephen Miran, current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which has influenced tariff policy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43589350
> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”
(c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order.
Lobbyists and trade negotiators can read 700 words of strawman "napkin math", or 40 pages by CEA chair, or interviews with administration officials, to inform their negotiating position.
This is nonsense. The “non-reciprocal trade arrangements” mentioned don’t obviously exist at all, and, to the extent they exist, they are certainly not measured in any meaningful respect by the formulas going into the tariffs.
Having spent a whopping ten minutes finding official data (and I have no idea how good this data is as a whole — probably mediocre but far better than whatever nonsense the USTR is doing):
(a) The EU seems to thing that they run a trade surplus with us in goods and a deficit in services, and they’re close to balancing out.
(b) The US’s own data shows a net surplus with some countries and a net deficit with others. See here, page 28:
If the US was trying to negotiate sensibly and to identify anything remotely non-reciprocal, they would be rewarding the countries with positive numbers in that table! The US should be delighted to trade with Australia, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc! By all means, we should buy more widgets and sell more fancy services!
As a silly analogy: if your housemate goes on a wild drunken rampage and starts trashing everything in sight while screaming “you need to reciprocate and wash the dishes more often and I will continue trashing things until you wash the dishes reciprocally,” the situation is not a viable negotiation tactic.
Someone calculated the formula used. They divided the trade deficit of each country by total trade of each country and assumed that was all a tariff.
So for example Indonesia and the US traded $28 billion. The US has a 17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. 17.9/28 =0.639, or 64%, which is assumed to be all caused by tariffs. So they divide by two and impose 32%.
Anyway no the US isn't matching tariffs they're dramatically exceeding them.
That's a bit of a messed up way to calculate things.
I also think the US deficits are hugely overstated because much of what the US produces is intellectual capital rather than physical goods and the profits are made to appear in foreign subsidiaries for tax reasons. Like if I buy Microsoft stuff in the UK, Microsoft make out it was made in Ireland for tax purposes, but really the value is created in and owned by the US. The US company both wrote the software and owns Microsoft Ireland. So much of the perceived unfairness Trump is having a go at isn't real.
You raise an excellent point that US corporate tax evasion is exaggerating the trade deficit. However, from the perspective of winning US elections, I think it does not change the issue that the trade deficit falls more on de-industrializing Midwestern states, and the corporations you are referring to are concentrated in Northeastern and Western states.
Secondly, if Microsoft or Apple makes the profit appear in Ireland, it cannot move that money back to the domestic US, right? So as long as the money sits overseas, it would not count towards US trade and thus the deficit calculation is fair.
They don't move the profit back to the US, but through Ireland and the Netherlands they move it out of the EU mostly to some tax havens in the Caribbean. From there they use them for their stock buybacks, which I think equals mostly flowing back into the US.
Again, not flowing back to the right people. All of this could have been solved by sane redistribution, but no. It'll still be redistribution but in a cruder, less apparent form.
If the profits went back to Apple HQ directly they would serve to raise the share price and allow stock buybacks and stock based compensation for employees. Same as they do now.
You may not like a tech company succeeding at exports and having a rising share price, but that is distinct from the overall point which is that properly considered these are US exports obscured by the US tax code which incentivizes profits abroad.
That's a great point. I checked into this, and if and when the profits are repatriated they indeed only show up in the capital account, not the current account.
However, in practice even if not repatriated those exports show up in the us economy. Profits raise the share price, which allows stock grants at higher values, effectively a wage as one example.
I wonder how big an effect this phenomenon you highlight has. Must be a fairly large overstatement of the US trade deficit.
If the US has a trade deficit, doesn't that mean the US is trading make-believe pieces of paper for real goods.
Like, if I scribble on a piece of paper and then trade you the piece of paper for an incredibly engineered brand new laptop, is that bad for me? Is this a sign of my weakness?
I know economics can be complicated, and probably "it depends", but why is a trade deficit bad? Why does the Trump administration want to eliminate trade deficits?
This kind of cynicism just encourages inaction. First, it frames the problem as only that of the powerful.
But largely, opinion polls are against the kind of action that would be useful. Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon. It is widely opposed and public pressure has led to regulations blocking it or even expanding it.
Second, a lot of ultra wealthy ARE funding research. Bill Gates contributed substantially (though pulled back recently).
Stripe notably has made Stripe Climate, which lets businesses contribute shares of revenue to carbon sequestration tech, which is absolutely vital to removing CO2 from the air if we somehow got to net zero. They promoted it heavily and made great UI to allow businesses to list it as a marketing expense.
The real block is us. Public opinion is very powerful. Now, specific companies have worked mightily to convince the public not to act, particularly from the oil sector.
But the convenient message of gloom posting is not to do anything not to believe in doing anything and fob it off to the rich.
> But largely, opinion polls are against the kind of action that would be useful. Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon. It is widely opposed and public pressure has led to regulations blocking it or even expanding it.
The only country that seems to be having an honest conversation about how to adapt to climate change is France. They've been having society-wide conversations about it over the last few years and support for nuclear has gone up substantially.
It's the Germans who are showing leadership in Europe. The French and Swedish have most nuclear, but not because of green policies. Just historical. Germany have had the "Energiewende", which everybody in the world should marvel at - but not enough know about. It's shat on, and public opinion even in Europe has been shaped against it. But it really is an 'energy turnaround'. It is leadership by taking unilateral action in the face of our common enemy.
Don't know much about that policy but I frequently monitor electricity usage via https://app.electricitymaps.com and Germany has usually the highest carbon intensity electricity in western Europe. Getting rid of nuclear seems to have made things worse.
That's awesome thanks. Would be great if it also show'd what the average residential customer was paying as well as the average industrial users cost per kWh so we could get an idea of the cost of manufacturing as far as electricity input goes.
> Germany phased out nuclear power in 2023 as part of the Energiewende,[4] and plans to retire existing coal power plants possibly by 2030
Why the fuck, when our biggest problem is co² emissions, would you close down nuclear first , increase coal and gas consumption and hand-wave to some future time when you hope to close coal plants.
I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.
>I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.
Anti-nuclear sentiment has always been transversal in Germany. At the time of the shutdowns, the conservatives didn't specially love the plants, but with Fukushima, it was electoral death to support them. Someone farting inside a nuclear plant would have been a political scandal, so they weren't going to wait. The future (correctly) was green energy, and Russian gas didn't seem like a bad bridge; after all, foresight is 20/20. You would have been seen as a cold war holdout nutter for raising fears of Russian dependence.
HN always finds public distrust of nuclear to be solely ignorance and oil propaganda, but that's reductive. My (pregnant!) mother woke up one day in the Soviet bloc and suddenly everything fresh in the stores was gone. No explanation, just hushed rumors and "don't eat anything not out of a can." The explanation came a day later. I imagine it wasn't very nice being on the other side and having minimal info during the first days. That's something traumatic that stays with people, not merely a Koch brothers psyop.
Sure, the Soviets were reckless, but the worst was avoided. A couple of decades later, the people who lived during Chernobyl are older, time has passed, and public opinion relaxes. Then Fukushima happens, minimal info again, and every bad memory comes back. We get the info? Just fuckup after fuckup: they knew the sea wall was too low, diesel backups were badly designed, staff wasn't trained correctly, HQ wanted to stop seawater cooling during a meltdown to save equipment.
This was not a technical failure but gross human error in famously detail-oriented Japan. Every reassurance since 1986 about nuclear energy rang hollow. The time for the fail-safe wunder-reactors was the 2000s with a wide rollout.
There are many technical arguments showing that further development and rollout of nuclear energy was the correct choice after Chernobyl, but the public's worries were never "nutty."
Whatever about "more nuclear energy", yeah it has long timelines and sky high price tags.. but decommissioning working nuclear plants decades early and leaning hard on the coal? Sorry, that's fucking asinine populist bullshit. The Russians didn't cause this.
There's been a lot of talk about more nuclear in France. But talk is cheap, and financial commitment to new nuclear starts has been notably lacking. The problem, as always, is very high cost and low dependability of the nuclear construction process. The EPR was a disaster, so France would have to go with a redesign. This adds to the risk and reduces confidence in yet another set of assurances that this time it will be cheaper.
I predict France will inevitably slide over toward a renewable dominated grid, just like everyone else.
You can order 1kW of panels with 1kWh of batteries as a plug-and-play system off of Amazon for about $1k.
Thats gonna generate >1MWh of electricity per year easily (probably closer to 2MW even), and with spot pricing for electricity at ~$100/MWh (Europe), this pays off within a decade easily.
Ah, the principle of "nothing can ever happen for the first time".
I have to love this sentiment, especially on HN. Because prices don't decline dramatically over time for any technology, right? Or if they do, then the safest thing to do is assume the future will see no continuing of trends of reductions, right? /s
A lot of Europe lies in northern areas where solar is simply insufficient, especially in winter.
Solar / wind + huge batteries + huge transmission lines would compare: capture sunlight in places like Bulgaria or Greece, feed places like Norway or Britain. But this is way more disruptive, and likely expensive, than a nuclear power plant.
That's just not true. But more importantly investing in nuclear now. As long as we don't even have sufficient renewables to constantly power us during the day, good weather... it has a much higher CO2 reduction impact to invest in renewables than building nuclear power plants.
What's not true? That Sweden or UK receive less solar radiation than Greece, especially in December? That building a huge transmission line from there (or, better yet, from Sahara) would be a very hard and expensive undertaking? That having enough batteries to sustain, say, 2 days of baseload supply, when it's cloudy and not windy, is hugely expensive, and has never been tried because of that?
Well, nuclear is also expensive, but it's partly regulation, partly nuclear being bespoke in many cases, while solar panels currently enjoy enormous economy of scale.
Nuclear is a total disaster recently. Enormous cost overruns, delayed operation. What reason in hell is there to pour money into that instead of wind? Wind works. Every turbine built adds power - no need to wait decades for the next screwed up nuclear install.
I'm a fan of the SMR idea although it turns out that it's less economic than people thought at the smaller sizes anyhow. I'm also very interested in the fusion startups............BUT we have to solve the climate problem now -- yesterday if it were possible.
China is installing two orders of magnitude more renewables than nuclear.
Judging by what China is doing, renewables have soundly defeated nuclear. It's not clear why they're building any new nuclear plants now. Probably organizational inertia?
I think preserving nuclear industry is a decent justification on its own.
Especially the whole steam turbine/generator tech is a huge synergy for them (because all their coal plants need basically the same), and gutting suppliers by scaling back nuclear ambitions could have highly detrimental side-effects there.
Coal power is still the back-bone of their grid, and provides basically all the dispatchability (for now).
I think the big incoming challenge for renewables will be surpassing the 70%-ish percent mark (of produced electricity), because at that point intermittency is gonna become much more challenging (it's an easy problem as long as you can just down-regulate existing plants-- buffering with batteries is significantly more expensive, and they don't have a lot of gas either, which works pretty well for this).
I'm pretty confident that battery progress is gonna keep pace, and other countries are already way further in the switch to renewables anyway; China will be able to get free lessions there (e.g. Germany).
I want to note that the intermittency problems for a 100% renewable grid are not significantly different from a 90% renewable + 10% nuclear grid. Nuclear does very little to help because to make economic sense it has to be kept running most of the time, and so not much capacity can be kept in reserve to deal with renewables dropping out.
I'll also note that if renewables have reached 70%, the residual demand will be so uneven that new nuclear won't make any sense, as it won't be possible to keep it running most of the time. Too often renewables will be delivering 100% of demand and nuclear will have no market.
As renewables grow, prices become spikier. So what's wanted is some source with low capex that can jump in an exploit these spikes. Gas peakers are an example, but eventually the gas can be something other than natural gas (if NG is taxed for its CO2). Green hydrogen may be the best bet for the 100% renewable end game.
We have no problem generating power with wind or solar. We have a problem of doing it in a dependable manner.
If there's something to pour money into, it's battery storage, both building much more of it, and developing cheaper variants of it. We need the cost of LiFePO4 batteries to fall as dramatically as the cost of solar panels did. Then renewables will make much bigger inroads into the grid in a lot of places.
"LONDON – 15 October, 2024 – Highview Power, a leading provider of long-duration energy storage (LDES) technology, announced today that its plans to develop four new 2.5GWh power plants in the UK by 2030, have taken a crucial step forward following the launch of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s (DESNZ’s) new investment support scheme. The scheme will use a “cap and floor” mechanism which will unlock the next stage of investment in the multi-billion-pound LDES programme, enabling the technologies vast potential to underpin UK decarbonisation.
Two of the 2.5GWh plants will deliver more storage than all of the UK’s existing battery storage, using 100% sustainable technology, with a 40-year lifespan. The addition of these four plants by 2030 means the government’s target to achieve a net zero grid by 2030 is achievable. Two of the 2.5GWh plants will be in Scotland and the other two in England. The first new plant will be located in Hunterston, Scotland."
Batteries are not the only storage technology, nor is it the case that only one storage technology would be used, as different ones are best for different storage timespans. Diurnal would be batteries, but seasonal storage would likely be something different (like e-fuels).
Whether it is "disruptive" doesn't matter. What matters is cost. Renewables + storage look to be much cheaper than nuclear in the best places and at least competitive in the worst.
There was an insightful post a little while ago about people liking nuclear because of a bias toward simple solutions. It reminded me of the adage "for any problem, there's a solution that's simple, straightforward... and wrong." The economy is quite willing to optimize for more complex solutions if this ends up saving money. "Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)" doesn't apply at the level of the whole economy.
Op said renewables, not solar. Both Norway and Sweeden have significant (renewable) hydro, which pairs well with the cyclical nature of both wind and solar.
It's certainly possible there's a backend flag on the site.
But from the comments I see on Reddit, I suspect there may be a simpler explanation: a lot of people for some reason really dislike John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly praises Apple.
I'm a big John Gruber fan, and I don't think this is true in the slightest. I think he thinks carefully, forms his own opinions, and is very willing to intensely criticize Apple as evidenced by his recent article on the State of Cupertino.
But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles.
I've seen this same pattern happen with other topics where an article doesn't match the zeitgeist, even it the article itself is not flamebait. I think the Something Rotten in the State of Cupertino should have been at the top of Hacker News.
But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs.
Dang would be the one to know, but it looks to me there's an innocuous explanation here. As for transparency, it's always frustrating to have it. But transparency in algo's invites gaming of those same algo's (and I don't mean by John). So I wouldn't expect the HN modteam to publish details about their algo.
Edit: since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis. I will say the mod team might consider a vouch feature for articles the way one exists for users/comments. I think it ought to take a lot of vouching to counteract flags, but there are clearly articles where this is warranted. The OPSec breach this week was one of them (and it was restored).
> But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs.
I don’t think so. From his follow-up:
> My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functions, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force of what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.
>Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
It's very plausible to me that there IS a negative site weighting to DF. But that it might come from the aggregate history of flags or angry/contentious comments posted on DF articles.
It certainly could be a personal moderator thumb on the scale, but at the scale of HN I'd expect they have some automated formula for site weighting based on the other factors mentioned.
If someone is putting their thumbs on the scale to suppress Gruber’s articles after he posted that Palestinian civilians being subject to war crimes, denied food, water and electricity was "fucking around and finding out"… well good honestly. Suppress this genocide apologist.
This is paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff. Or it's bait. It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."
Frankly, I find this submission and Gruber's followup insufferable and it makes me want to read him less. I say that as a regular reader of his blog who's purchased several of his t-shirts over the years. But really, these posts alone make me no longer a fan.
The treatment of Daring Fireball articles does feel inorganic to me, but if it is, no one who's talking can say whether it's because of mod abuse or a group of users who really hate the site and want to punish it.
And ... while I can understand frustration and disappointment on his end, the long post yesterday, let alone a second post, and apparently now discussion of it on a podcast where he was a guest, is overboard. He often comes across as a touch full of himself, and it's on blatant display here. Don't blame anyone for being turned off.
I can't comment of DF specifically, but as someone who uses the "flag" link when I think it's appropriate, I see people complaining all the time that their pet topic was flagged/downvoted, and then they instantly go to "the mods"/conspiracy mode, and I'm thinking "I'm just an average HN user, and I just thought the topic sucked or was inappropriate for HN. No 'conspiracy' needed, we just don't like your content."
All I can say is that I found this particular DF post annoying and narcissistic to the extreme. I'm glad it was flagged.
Gruber's There is something rotten in the State of Cupertino is one of the most excoriating Apple take in years, in large part because it comes from Gruber. Why was this not front page !?
And has been around everywhere else. It's not even defensible. Something is rotten in Hacker News too and unfortunately for the cabal, Gruber wrote a very popular article that shined light into their back room dealings.
Guarantee you it's more popular than the million "nautil.us" or whatever junk posted here.
It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."
If all Dang did was deny, then yeah, it would be quite reasonable to not trust him. But presumably Dang is able to provide a reasonable alternative explanation and has the receipts to back it up.
I don't think it is. The moderation guidelines explicitly say there can be site weightings. I think it's likely there is a negative site weighting on Daring Fireball and multiple other sites.
My guess would be it was algorithmically applied based on past tendency for them to gather early flags or flamewar comments, rather than personal animus. Why there would be a site weight rank is not falsifiable except by the mod team.
But whether there is one seems much clearer. Daring Fireball submissions perform very poorly, the notable one that should have been #1 by any measure was "Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino".
Might be the most notable Apple article of the decade. That it wasn't number one suggests negative site weight. Which, I'll repeat, is explicitly within the public guidelines for how the site is run. Not a paranoid conspiracy. I doubt the mods would comment on specific site weights as that would open a whole can of worms. Which is frustrating for sites, but I can't think of any social media algo that's public.
The paranoid part: "there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force."
What exactly does Gruber think this cabal has against him? He's not that important. The stuff he writes in the grand scheme of things isn't all that interesting. It's a niche within a niche.
There's not really even all that much to comment on about his posts, frankly. They are opinion pieces. Comments on opinions pieces usually take the form of flame wars or are simply too uninteresting to have much to say about. Same for the other bloggers he mentioned who think they are also being downweighted.
I don't agree his "something rotten" post was worthy of #1. After I read it (independently of HN), I sorta nodded along but never thought to submit it here.
There's only 28 comments on it, none very interesting;
It only got 176 upvotes. That said, it's clearly lower than other submissions from that day, ending in the 88th position. I can't find any lower ranked submission with even close to that score:
I think a simpler theory for this or any site not ranking high is that a small group of users consistently flag the posts, and flags carry a lot of weight.
We've seen this more blatantly with Elon articles. Almost any submission that paints him in a negative light gets flagged quickly and rarely makes the front page.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I don't think it's unique to DF. As someone who values design, I've noticing for a long time that it's become harder and harder for design-related content to gain traction on HN (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26901208).
I think the explanation here is that HN has taken a hard turn towards Linux/OSS. Not to say those weren't always popular topics, but HN used to be a place for software and hardware generally, with an emphasis on making things, OSS being an obviously important component of that. Now OSS is emphasized more. To illustrate, let's do a thought experiment: Let's say someone in the industry does a detailed explanation of the VFX pipeline for a blockbuster movie, and compare that with an someone doing the same for an indie side-project using Blender. There was a time both of those would have been popular on HN, today I'd only bet on the second making it to the front page. Note I'm not making a value judgment here, just something I've observed.
> I suspect there may be a simpler explanation: a lot of people for some reason really dislike John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly praises Apple.
I think you are right. Defending Apple's customer unfriendly policies that forced the EU's hand has turned a lot of people off.
I've been a long time reader of Gruber's, pretty much since he starts. And he's always favored Apple in a way that was reasonable. But the defense of the things Apple does that harms customers is not reasonable, and I think that turned off a lot of his former fans.
"But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles."
The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top." Sometimes the HN audience is very diligent about this norm. Reactions to Gruber's writing from the HN crown often show marked deficiencies in adherence to this norm. I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that by Gruber or HN's moderators, but I do believe that the problem is not located in Gruber's writing.
> The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top."
HN's "professed norms" (i.e., the guidelines) do not state that, and opinions, atypical or otherwise, have zero information content beyond the information that so-and-so holds such-and-such opinion.
Atypical opinions may be, on average, more likely to be accompanied by intellectually interesting arguments, but that's, at best, a loose correlation, not an iron law that where one thing occurs the other will also.
This is not at all weird if you are a HN user with somewhat unpopular opinions. The HN guidelines say flag something if it's egregious. People end up treating flagging as a stronger version of downvotes.
My most recent experience being flagged matches this up: I was presenting an argument that Chrome's manifest V3 is a good thing and it was flagged to death. I have no doubt that some users just flag this kind of opinion reflexively.
People openly admit[1] to abusing the flagging system as their own automated mega-downvote to try to steer[2] the topics towards ones they like and away from ones they don't like.
I agree with this explanation. There is a sizable contingent of commenters on here who are just extremely negative on everything Apple. I read most of the big Apple threads and they're just overwhelmingly negative toward the company and, honestly, not very thoughtful. I think this has been a developing trend since I've been on HN. Since Gruber is coming at things from a pro-Apple, but nuanced place, I'm not at all surprised that his articles don't do well.
That’s exactly a topic that I think HN is collectively unhinged about, so I don’t even bother commenting. But I spend a lot of money with Apple and I like everything about their ecosystem, especially the locked down, Disneyland-esque sterile experience on my phone.
I think most people would probably consider that acceptable as a specialty product, but chafe against it being half of a duopoly. And I think it's also grown less and less acceptable to people as Google (and Microsoft, for the other duopoly Apple contributes to) have also become increasingly anti-consumer.
I don't resent the existence of Disneyland, but I probably would if 90% of all outdoor parks I could visit were either Disneyland or Facebookland.
Which is the problem and why I would guess that there is an automatic downranking to the domain, and why many knee-jerk flag entries from the site. Not that you specifically are a fan, but that a big enough minority of HN users would describe themselves as such and would submit and upvote entries from the site.
The bulk of DF entries could best be described as opinion/my-take type content. What does John think about screen sizes (e.g. 3.5 inches is the "sweet spot"), or Mark Gurman, the EU, etc.
Opinions generally do poorly here, for good reason. It is the junk food of content. It's easy and entertaining to read, especially if it agrees with our own notions so it's self-assuring, and if I think Apple are great I love to read opinions on why the EU are wrong with their DMA push, etc.
I would also argue it's the laziest content to write. The whole blog-rush were millions of people spinning up blogs to give their hot take on Current Zeitgeist Thing, but then it turned out that more people want to write that than read it so it faded away.
But because there were numbers of fans here, every Gruber opinion would shoot to the top of HN. It takes a tiny minority of HN users to make a story hit #1 -- right now the top four stories have barely dozens of upvotes -- so it would happen again and again and again, and people would click through and see an opinion about some thing and click back and they'd have no down arrow. Nor does the site weight "click throughs but didn't vote up". So people flag. Eventually, I presume, a domain downranking was applied.
Daring Fireball isn't the only domain like this. There are various other "I'm a fan of this guy!" type personalities that would constantly top HN despite the content arguably not deserving it. Content that if it came from anywhere else would be considered blog spam. Content that could literally be just a comment on HN.
There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
It's also ridiculous how people keep trying to make this an anti-Apple thing. Apple product announcements and technology releases do extremely well on here. Those have a real impact on the lives of most users of HN, whereas DF opinion entries don't.
>since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis
Whines about voting/moderation on HN almost always do extremely poorly on here. In this case DF has had multiple multi-hundred upvoted submissions on here over the past couple of months, and the entitlement of actually complaining that every random post doesn't do numbers absolutely deserves to be flagged.
> Opinions generally do poorly here, for good reason. It is the junk food of content. It's easy and entertaining to read, especially if it agrees with our own notions so it's self-assuring, and if I think Apple are great I love to read opinions on why the EU are wrong with their DMA push, etc.
This perspective on opinions doesn't seem accurate to me, e.g., opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here. I also disagree with the junk food characterization, I think people taking a strong stance on why they like something is often really valuable.
> There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
For the record, I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing, i.e., it isn't because I want people to see something, it's because I want them to talk about it.
>opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here
Years and years ago, absolutely. There would be endless "Why I Love NoSQL" posts, then "Why NoSQL Sucks" the next day, each getting quickly pushed to the top by factions that don't even bother reading it they just agree with the title. That sort of thing gets quickly flagged to death now[1]. If you want that sort of content to do well it often has a lot of work, graphs, examples, evidence, etc, and even then HNers seem to actively detect when sites/authors are trying to use HN as an impression funnel and start to penalize it.
On your specific examples (emacs, neovim, blender) a quick search on hn algolia returns few opinion-type piece with more than single digit upvotes for years. I actually found none but wasn't looking super hard.
HN has shifted, and I would argue for the better. If you disagree with something on here, writing a hot take counterpoint blog entry and submitting it will likely flop. A few personalities using HN as their personal traffic funnel has faded.
>I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing
DF could add comments, though Gruber rejected them as a distraction from his own writing, so there's that.
[1] One of the flagged posts in /active is a "Why I'm Boycotting AI", which is basically a "take" piece. It can still feed that "that's my opinion" sentiment and see upvotes, but it broadly grows tiring.
This is the first thing I found searching for `vim` by date and finding something with enough upvotes to look like it made it to the homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168781
The former is fine, but says nothing that hasn't been said about Vim a million times before, the latter is a detailed analysis of the way Apple functions from a small angle with huge implications (e.g., acquisitions like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro continue to be industry pillars).
I don't like disparaging anyone's work the first piece is fine, but this comparison easily illustrates which piece is being treated with the kids gloves, and which sends some folks fuming.
Look to be clear, I love Vim, it's the main app I use to do my work everyday, but it doesn't have the problem where you can't have a rational discussion about it like with Apple.
Hacker News used to the place where you'd have a discussion about whether Apple acquiring Pixelmator has a chance to make it a Photoshop competitor, now instead it's the place where programmer's try to tell photographers that Photoshop peaked in 2007 and that they should really try Krita (so no I don't think HN has "shifted for the better", I miss those conversations).
I'm writing a "Why HN is conspiring against me: Earlier posts did well, but this one didn't" essay and will promptly submit it to HN. It had better do well!
I feel like Gruber fans are brigading this posts and the voting is very unfair. Stop the count!
EDIT: While I wrote this comment out of humour it turns out that Gruber is quite literally funnelling his readers to this submission from his blog. So...hint of truth.
I suspect there may be a simpler explanation:
a lot of people for some reason really dislike
John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly
praises Apple.
This is most definitely true but he, and Apple, have always been very polarizing. I don't think either one has become more polarizing? And if so, certainly not in some extremely sudden way that would explain DF's popularity on HN falling off of a cliff.
HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.
(FWIW: While I do generally enjoy DF, my interest here is primarily in understanding HN. I read HN probably 5-10 times a day, whereas I read DF perhaps 5-10 times per month. The near-absence of DF on HN doesn't affect me at all.)
He did start to write a lot about US politics,
which for me is enough to stop reading his blog.
That makes complete sense to me. It would take only a very few "major turn-off" articles to make me remove a blog from my feed and/or stop visiting it directly. Even a 1% incidence of such posts could cause that blog to lose 100% of my traffic.
However, that doesn't adequately explain DF articles' swift removal from HN's front page.
On HN's page front page I'd expect article links to sink or swim based entirely on their own individual merit.
> But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles.
I suspect this is it. A subset of users flag and/or downvote daringfireball on sight if it reaches the front page and the HN algorithm treats that as a strong single
I doubt you intended it, but your comment actually exemplifies why a lot of his articles likely get flagged and downranked. The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides.
Then you deliver an extended personal attack for some reason. And one that really doesn't seem supported on the merits. Gruber co-created markdown and published a reasonably well received app, Vesper.
I think you're in good faith, and I mean my comment in that spirit. I point out the features of yours to show why the articles may get flagged if they generate comments that go against the spirit of the site.
I think there's a strong case your comment goes against comment guidelines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7
I glanced at the rest of your comments. None of them are remotely close to this! You're a polite and interesting commentator.
My thesis is that for whatever reason John Gruber manages to draw this style of comment out of people, and that this has increased over time as anti Apple sentiment has grown.
That's not John Gruber's fault and that isn't your fault, it's just the dynamic that emerges.
> it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides.
Oh, you can definitely disagree. The problem is in good faith which Gruber shows none of. To the point of going from "why the hell would you want to change your Messages default app" to "oh, it absolutely makes sense to chaneg the messages default app but it makes no sense to change Photos, EU is bad" in a blink of an eye.
>The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith
Thanks for bringing my attention to the comment guidelines, I'll try to keep to them in the future. I assure you, I do write here in good faith.
I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and they certainly aren't oppressed rebels. That comparison was an editorial choice made by John Gruber in his coverage of tech news, including a link to a copy of the story he personally typeset. It rang loudly then of sentimental bias, and it's still ringing.
I don't have evidence of the makeup of the Daring Fireball readership, but many of them are at least adjacent to the tech industry, and so his words have incredible reach, Hacker News notwithstanding. But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience. Collaborating with Aaron Swartz twenty-one years ago on Markdown is respectfully not very relevant technical experience in the domains DF traditionally covers. Vesper was one ObjC app written by three people in 2013. I'm glad it was well-received, but again, what significance does Gruber's experience have? Why should the industry listen to him when he (admittedly not so often nowadays) discusses software development? If asked, I think he'd strongly agree that people in power should have considerable relevant experience.
PS— the article that began this discussion is, "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". As you can see, I've been eager, not afraid, to discuss the merits of Daring Fireball, though not so eager as to upvote it on HN.
> But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience.
Sure, but he doesn't actually do that very much, does he? Like, that is absolutely not the focus of the blog. He talks a lot about the business of Apple, Apple's products and their direction, and how Apple interacts with various communities.
I don't think someone needs to have an engineering degree to have a valid opinion about the things the EU is telling Apple to do.
Apple's business relies tremendously on its developer relations. If Gruber doesn't regularly navigate that wedge of the ecosystem, then I don't think he can speak with authority on its soundness. I mean I wouldn't!
It's about Apple. It's an opinion piece, where someone's saying that Apple should do a retrenchment OS release where they just fix bugs. It appears to be written by someone who is some combination of a pastor and a professional opinion-haver ("editor in chief").
I don't think there's any metric by which this person's article should be sitting unflagged at the top of the front page, but Gruber's recent something-rotten-in-Cupertino article should get promptly flagged and hidden away.
Thanks in turn for the thoughtful reply. I still hold to my own view, but you've dramatically raised the quality of argument I'd have to make to give a satisfying reply. Which is what I think Hacker News should aspire to.
My interest was largely to point out what I saw as the meta trend around discussion of Daring Fireball posts, so I'll leave the debate there or we could be here all night. But I wish you well
On a small point, from what I understand, I think full credits must be given to JG on MD it seems to be his own idea and implementation, my recollection of what I heard him discuss about it on his podcast in the past, was that Aaron Swartz helped him with some ideas and notes.
The parent's point stands. Their comment isn't lacking context, and fundamentally it sounds like we all agree with their argument; the sentiment towards Apple has changed, and the environment these blogposts exist in is not the same. Gruber started blogging in an era when people had hope for Tim Cook, a sentiment that has basically dried up entirely today. The starry-eyed optimism for local-first development is dead in the Apple Intelligence era, and Apple's vision for the future is muddled.
Yes, this is the dynamic that emerges. When trust breaks down over silly things like keyboard reliability and right to repair and third-party app stores and $99/year service fees, people that were once rooting for Apple start to question why we hold out hope at all. It's not Gruber's fault for remaining faithful, but many of his modern articles are out-of-touch with the reality of Apple's situation. It's like performative bewilderment at this point, which this OP article really seems to reflect.
> Case in point: just the other day, he equated the EU's rulings about Apple's ecosystem to the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Rah, rah, Goliath! Sis boom bah!
That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron" as a metaphor was uncomfortable but apt?
I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.
I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.
Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.
He defined markdown 2 decades ago, and the definition had so many problems (ambiguities, etc) that people felt the need to define better definitions like Commonmark.
Two decades ago. Does that mean his take on smartphone screen size or Blue Sky vs Threads is anything HN in general needs to hear? Probably not.
But I'll bet if he wrote a considered piece on "The Next Generation of Markdown" or something it would do numbers.
I mean, they compared him with Richard M. Stallman, who we know was extraordinarily consequential and influential in technology, but that doesn't mean his takes on oil or judges or whatever matters. I mean, RMS is still plugging away with posts and I've seen zero of them on this site.
What "criticism"? Yes, JG is a great writer (not a journalist, though, by any measure, unless I'm also a journalist for reading nytimes.com this morning and having opinions about things) and his contribution of Markdown was important. That does not mean, however, that his various takes-on-current-thing have relevance for HN.
Like looking through the recent submissions of DF entries, it's extremely thin gruel -
He thought Bluesky would beat Mastodon, and wants credit for his prediction. Neat, a million people have made this observation.
Apple TV+ is losing money, but Apple thought it would so who cares. Again, utterly irrelevant to this audience.
Siri is bad -- yes, everyone knows. Discussed on here endlessly.
iOS 18 updates re-enables Apple Intelligence -- yeah, we talked about it here a week earlier.
Some executive changes at Apple -- literally just quoting from a Bloomberg article. I mean, this is a pattern across DF where entries are him quoting Fortune or Bloomberg or some tweet and then adding some rejoinder or cheap thoughts.
And it goes on and on. None of this is HN material. It's someone summarizing or giving opinions on actual reporting after the fact. These are basically tweets.
If your content is basically reading tech news and then giving quips or thoughts on some of the news, that sort of stuff just doesn't do well here. And if a minority keep upvoting it, eventually the domain gets down-ranked.
He has had some entries that he put a lot of work and thought into, and they have done well here, even in the past few months. But I assume he looked at the analytics, realized that "blogs" are kind of a fading thing, and decided to try to juice this HN thing as an impression funnel. Which, it should be noted, is pretty funny when you read his posts on Mastodon/Bsky about this, where there his avowed fans saying that HN is just a bunch of poopy head wannabes and it isn't like it used to be, etc. The "it isn't me, it's you" method of self reflection.
If RMS or Gruber released code with any frequency, I think the HN community would be very interested. I wouldn't necessarily warm up to either of them, but it would lend a lot of credence to whatever their stances are.
Maybe. I landed on "shill" because it's a word he chose, and it seemed to fit when I read it. Let me try and define what it means, and how it's different from an advocate, an apologist or a sycophant.
A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.
Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.
Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.
A good shill won't always toe the line. That would be too obvious.
A shill should levy just enough dissent to retain some credibility among the most credulous. Usually by piling on to obviously losing causes. For instance if someone were an Apple shill, saying that the App Store review process is broken, the royalty split is untenable, XCode is shite and Apple's AI has been pretty bad are all obvious positions to take. These are blatant, undeniable positions.
Someone could have those public positions and still be a shill.
Is Gruber a shill? I mean, he seems entire dependant upon the Apple fanbase[1] for his income, and a lot of his credibility comes from access that Apple directly grants him. They give him products. He gets to host his "Talk Show" live at WWDC. He has done a number of interviews with Apple executives. He seems pretty firmly attached to the Apple teat and they serve up a supply of nutritious milk for him.
The base post was flagged, presumably because it used the shill label, but it's pretty hard to get away from it. And maybe that's perfectly fine, and the industry has a lot of shills for different things and we all factor in where they're coming from. Most HNers expect a "rose coloured glasses about Apple" perspective from Gruber, so it is weighted against the content.
[1] The Apple fanbase are a subset of Apple users. I'm typing this on an M4 Mac. My iPhone and iPad sit beside me. I'm a subscriber to Apple One Premier. Yet I'm not a fan. I don't, for instance, care at all how much profit Apple makes, much less excitedly gloating about what percentage of the market's profit they make. Nor do I get angry that Samsung copied some UI element or phone shape. Those are fan type topics.
This was in the WSJ on March 24th in an article about Canadian travel:
>"The administration has held firm on its messaging. “Canadians will no longer have to worry about the inconveniences of international travel when they become American citizens as residents of our cherished 51st state,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said."
I guess I should have been more explicit: no politician that I know of was talking about annexing Canada or Greenland before Trump, and the people you quote above are only endorsing it because they would never contradict anything Trump says.
This crisis is the admin taking a sledgehammer to international capitalism. No obvious intervention other than "stop doing that".
I'm sure at some point the fed would have some kind of response but inflation of tariffs is a huge risk and that limits what the fed can do unless they have co-ordination with the admin.
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