Electronic warfare is pretty effective against drones that are using radio waves for their communication. Earlier in the war you could see a lot of drone footage that would become washed out with static as they got closer to tanks so it's much more reliable to use spools of fiber.
Using Aider with o3 in architect mode, with Gemini or with Sonnet (in that order) is light years ahead of any of the IDE AI integrations. I highly recommend anyone who's interested in AI coding to use Aider with paid models. It is a night and day difference.
With aider and Gemini Pro 2.5 at least I constantly have to fight against it to keep it focused on a small task. It keeps editing other parts of the file, doing small "improvements" and "optimizations" and commenting here and there. To the point where I'm considering switching to a graphical IDE where the interface would make it easier to accept or dismiss parts of changes (per lines/blocks, as opposed to a per file and per commit approach with aider).
Would you mind sharing more about your workflow with aider? Have you tried the `--watch-files` option? [0] What makes the architect mode [1] way better in your experience?
I use o3 with architect mode for larger changes and refactors in a project. It seems very suited to the two-pass system where the (more expensive) "reasoning" LLM tells the secondary LLM all the changes.
For most of the day I use Gemini Pro 2.5 in non-architect mode (or Sonnet when Gemini is too slow) and never really run into the issue of it making the wrong changes.
I suspect the biggest trick I know is being completely on top of the context for the LLM. I am frequently using /reset after a change and re-adding only relevant files, or allowing it to suggest relevant files using the repo-map. After each successful change if I'm working on a different area of the app I then /reset. This also purges the current chat history so the LLM doesn't have all kinds of unrelated context.
I use Gemini in VScode via Cline and also in Zed. I like Aider, but I'm not sure how it's "light-years ahead IDE AI integrations" ubless you only mean stuff like Cursor or Windsurf.
Aider has a configuration for each supported LLM to define the best diff format for each; so for certain ones they're best at diff format, Gemini is best at a fenced-diff format, Qwen3 is best at whole file editing, etc. Aider itself examines the diff and re-runs the request when the request when the response doesn't adhere to the corresponding diff format.
Edit: Also the Aider leaderboards show the success rate for diff adherence separately, it's quite useful [1]
The new AMD chips in the Framework laptops would be a good candidate and I think you can get 96GB RAM in them. Also if the LLM software is idle (like llama.cpp or ollama) there is negligible extra power consumption.
This seems super amateur and your privacy policy sucks compared to OpenRouter. Also it's weird you have time to respond to trivial questions but not questions like "why would I use this over the entrenched leader in this space".
No docs or info without signing up, confusing Grok and Groq, and claiming you have access to o4 models which haven't been released makes this look like an incredibly unserious offering.
You are correct, of course, but do you think your comment would be better received if you presented it as constructive feedback? e.g.
Consider enhancing your privacy policy to match industry standards, similar to OpenRouter. Focus on addressing significant questions, like how your product stands out from established competitors. Ensure there’s no confusion between Grok and Groq. Also, verify the availability of features like access to o4 models to avoid any misunderstandings.
Who cares if it’s better received? They are lying about model access and incorrectly identify the producers of AI models. This business seem to be made by unserious people and sounding the alarm is the correct thing to do.
I considered being polite but the fact OP had already chosen to not answer these actual questions makes me question why anyone would trust this site with their payment data or even personal data.
You know the craziest thing about watching this as an outsider in Canada is that we as a nation are losing one reliable trading partner (and obviously losing an ally but that's another conversation). Germany - losing a trade partner. Japan? And so on. But the US has lost 180 reliable trading partners. You're already seeing in the first week burgeoning trade alliances between nations who wouldn't have cooperated before, and the amount of resentment against America from this is going to take a generation to heal.
Of course I'm sure some people would claim this is 4D chess or what not but.. sometimes the person doing something crazy is just crazy at the end of the day.
Very well put. Alliances take years to build but can be broken in just days.
I'm tempted to think (hope? dream?) that the markets and trade will rebound if all this chaos makes American politics swing back towards an interest in global stability, but I think anyone partnering with the US would do so VERY carefully and right now the entire world is plotting how to remove US dependencies.
I was bringing this up with a guy yesterday who was genuinely supporting the policies and somebody chimed in that they were not worried at all, because everyone wants to trade with the big boy in town. Trust is not important if they are afraid of you (I'm paraphrasing). Quite a different perspective, but it is consistent with an observation I made about a lot of US comments, people are quite happy for their country/government to engage in tactics (e.g. bullying, industrial espionage even against partners...) that they are enraged if others (E.g. China) do it. Europeans seem to be much more susceptible to an "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others" argument.
> "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others"
Doesn't work. We opened trade to China in the '70s. They took advantage of us, stealing IP, manipulating currency, paying their people terrible wages, crapping all over the environment. We let their companies freely in the US, they very severely restricted US business ventures in China.
Detroit, a former shining city in the industrial heartland, is now a bandit infested ruin.
In the US, a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support owning a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, a car, and multiple children.
For me, coming from the Rust Belt, it's incredibly, painfully obvious that globalization's basically destroyed the US economy. I'm constantly amazed to meet well-meaning, intelligent people who don't seem to understand this fact.
The Rust Belt's just one part of the story, not the whole US economy. Globalization actually created tons of wealth for the USA, but that money hasn't been spread around fairly. It's all piled up in coastal cities and with rich folks while factory towns got left behind.
Cutting off global trade wouldn't fix anything - it would tank the overall economy while only helping a few powerful players pulling the strings. The real problem isn't trade deals; it's that the USA never properly invested the profits back into the communities that got hit hardest.
The US economy is the largest in the world, disposable income, both average and median, are highest and second highest respectively. Median income is 30-40% higher than comparable developed economies, and significant higher than China.
And supporting a whole family on a single income well was a very narrow window of time, and it required the US to have no real economic competitors. Where US workers had no competition on the world stage, but their output was sold on the world stage. So even if the US go isolationist that's still never coming back.
A lot of this is just social change from the womens liberation movement. Women went to work and the market adapted. Now, in the main, you need 2 incomes to run a home.
It's worse in a lot of countries where tax policy disadvantages the pre-1960 norm like the UK.
Some places relied on other ways to make money (here in Australia it was comodoties). A lot is just social change to two income households, and it's main contributor to living costs was housings. Two people bringing in money ,means that households can pay more for a mortgage or rent, driving up costs.
That's what drove up housing costs after we switched from single to double income households. But before that, but before that, people in lots of countries could afford a house and a family on a single income, despite competition from other countries.
It's not that this situation was unsustainable or only attainable for the US; this situation should have been the norm, with the additional income just providing extra luxury or time off, but instead we got screwed through artificial scarcity and more money going to the very rich instead of the working and middle class.
>In the US, a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support owning a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, a car, and multiple children
A lot of the change there is not down to China but limiting the ability to build a cheap house through nimbyism and regulation and then competition from other dual income / high earners bidding everything up. You could fix it by allocating everyone a bit of land and letting them build whatever on it even if it was just a shack. It's not really trade that's the main problem.
What? No; the problem is vastly more attributable to the tremendous transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy that has occurred over the past 50 years.
Look at any graph of earnings by quintile over time, or of income or wealth inequality today, and you'll see that the fact that builders can't cut corners and sell us crappy houses and apartments that will fall down around our ears is far from the primary reason we have trouble affording things today.
Wealth is not zero sum though. LeBron James being great at basketball doesn't make you any worse at basketball. Jeff Bezos starting a company in his garage selling books online that became one of the biggest in the world worth many billions doesn't make me any poorer. Financial transactions are win-win. That is why there is a mutual thank you when making a purchase. The cafe owner would rather have my 2$ instead of coffee in their pot. I would rather have coffee in my cup instead of 2$. If neither of us thought we would not be better off the transaction would not happen
For the people who want ^this guy to shut up but haven't engaged.. which part of the above is wrong? I can see hyperbole of "bandit infested ruin" pushing some buttons but otoh it's seems likely that crime is connected to general economic health.
Rust Belt isn't the entire US economy. Blaming where the US is today on globalization is probably 30 years too late.
The US economy has created enormous wealth. Domestic policies on how to spread around the prosperity to all citizens is where the US failed. Think more of what Sanders and AOC talk about, not bringing back factories that will be 99% automated anyway. For one example, how can the most prosperous country in the world have a majority of its bankruptcies tied to medical debt? And somehow people want to blame China or globalization or some other boogie man?
It’s right and wrong. Globalisation has hurt the rust belt, but it’s also allowed for much cheaper goods, which many people have enjoyed. It’s also made other economies much richer, which has allowed them to purchase U.S. goods (China being an immense iPhone market, for example). It’s not zero sum. If the world economy grows, and the USA holds onto a massive slice of that growing pie, then the USA wins - as it has been doing.
And the part about life just being totally unaffordable now isn’t really to do with China stealing from the US - housing is catastrophically expensive in many countries, and is more to do with how it has evolved as an asset class than trade relationships.
Doesn't that balance out in the end though?
People in Detroit go from working at an automobile factory to working as a service worker at a local restaurant or retail store and their incomes go down massively, meaning all they can afford to buy is cheap crap from China sold at their local dollar store or discount retailer. They would rather have the old purchasing power and old retail options, especially since inflation has eroded a lot of those low prices.
For me the idea of "stealing IP" in a society like China seems to miss the entire point of what they're doing and seems to fall short of having respect for cultural differences. What we think of as "respecting intellectual property rights" can also be seen as "hoarding property" which is antithetical to communist ideals.
> In the US, a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support owning a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, a car, and multiple children.
That was never sustainable in the long run and no one can bring that back.
Well, we can't count on the entire rest of the world having all their factories bombed and being the only nation with reasonable manufacturing capability all the time.
The US was not an export-focused economy in the 50s and 60s. In fact trade as a percent of GDP bottomed out in those decades. Arguing that the prosperity for the average person was only "sustainable" in an environment where there wasn't foreign competition is an argument for tariffs.
In what way would the citizens of the US have been worse off had the rest of the world had reasonable manufacturing capability? I'd have thought that either it'd be the same, or better, because same production + trade.
It was the US benefiting from its position on the world stage as to why that was possible. The US was never and is not going to retain it's position on the world stage, and indeed under Trump it is radically declining.
The US is going to normalize with other western nations as we enter a multi-polar world.
The problem is Republicans don't accept that and think they can return to the 1950s.
I agree that the Rust Belt has had it rough, but it is not the entire US economy. I won't argue that people saw the future in the 70s, but those jobs were/are going away to automation regardless (and they are certainly not coming back). It's better to not be reliant on them now. In hindsight globalization was right move. And even if it wasn't, trying to blame the current US issues on globalization is 30 years too late.
Statistically the US manufactures more than it ever has on a $ amount, and is the #2 manufacturer in the world. Until recently, the US economy was the envy of the world. The trade situation the US setup did and does work, and along with other policies, led to enormous prosperity that was just unevenly distributed.
Where the US failed, and mostly around GOP and now Trump policies, is not spreading the growing prosperity to more of its citizens. Given this enormous prosperity where is universal healthcare, free/low cost college, UBI, etc...?
Unfortunately, the people who really need these policies have mostly voted against them for decades. Their anger is legitimate, but it's misplaced. Being angry at "globalization" or "illegals" or pick a group is a misdirection fed by years of AM radio and Fox News. Now we are seeing the cycle continue, but this time the US economy may really be destroyed.
Since your comment is comparing the US with China, maybe a bit of "whataboutism" is warranted here.
> stealing IP
Edward Snowden's leaks reveal that the US engages in wide-scale economic espionage. Additionally, the US also uses extra-territorial means of coercion to acquire cutting-edge technology -- see e.g. the Alstom case.
> manipulating currency
For many decades the US has been able to print money like a madman while the rest of the world absorbs the costs by virtue of the USD being the primary reserve currency globally. The US is also not above strong-arming its allies into appreciating their own currencies to boost American exports -- see the Plaza Accord, which partly contributed to Japan's subsequent Lost Decades.
> paying their people terrible wages
China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty in the last 20 years. In the US wages have remained stagnant for the working class over the same period, if not longer. Frustration among the working class -- which is entirely justified and understandable, by the way -- is probably one of the reasons why Trump was re-elected.
> crapping all over the environment
Chinese cities today are mostly clean and quiet, increasingly powered by renewable energy with more and more electric vehicles driven on the roads. The Chinese are also undertaking massive greening projects, such as the Great Green Wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) On a per-capita basis the Chinese emit far less carbon dioxide than Americans do.
The US, especially when compared to almost any other developed country, is in no moral position to be sanctimonious about environmental issues.
Don't blame other countries -- China or not -- for America's own catastrophic, chronic failure in leadership and subpar policymaking, especially when America has enjoyed so many entrenched advantages for so many decades (and still does).
> Trust is not important if they are afraid of you .. Europeans seem to be much more susceptible to an "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others" argument.
I've noticed this also, having spent a lot of time in both places. Some would say this is part of the American national character, and it's the darker side of hard-nosed individualistic cowboys, etc. The famous opening speech of Patton comes to mind here:
> When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. Now, I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed.
There's at least some truth to this and the mean-spirited arrogance/strength in the rest of the speech being in line with national character, I think it has to be admitted. This seems like the guy was certainly never cut out to be a diplomat or act with moderation, and maybe most Americans aren't. That said though.. maybe a deeper issue is that suffering (economic or otherwise) changes people. Makes them merely hypocrtical in the best case, aggravated and mean on average, or in the worst case positively cruel. A lot of America has not been ok for a long time now.
Respectfully, I am suggesting that OP has an intellectual disability to think deriving notions about the 'American' national character from Patton is some tocquevillian insight and he may find it profitable to watch Downfall to try and figure out Brussels' next move. Don't forget the dousing rods.
Americans are taught at a very young age about Manifest Destiny, the notion when starting in the East that America has a right all the way to the West. While events like Trail of Tears are mentioned, they're downplayed during early school years and not brought up again later when kids may be able to form an opinion. Essentially, winning is ingrained into the American mindset and is the driving force behind almost everything - this helps when making companies big and even bigger, but also mutual growth hard to fathom. Current US policy does feel very American. Seems like a make-or-break moment for the American model itself, and if it breaks there'll need to be a change starting from the early age education/propaganda.
When people say that China will replace the US as the world's largest buyer of exports, I always wonder what planet they're living on.
China does not WANT to do this. They have tons of protectionism. They give tons of preference to their own firms and protect their domestic market from foreign companies. This enables their firms to grow strong. This is a strategy which has been practiced by many many developing nations. They can't live without it and don't want to.
Why does gmerc think that China is going to rewrite its entire economic policy in order to take "market share?" We usually use that term to mean, you are selling stuff and want to sell to more customers because you make more money. In this context however we are talking about BUYING more stuff - why would it be sane for China to dominate the act of buying everything it can on the planet? (At the inevitable erosion of its manufacturing base - just like what happened to the USA when it opened up its markets.)
I mean you can think whatever you want about Trump and his actions, but it just makes zero sense to think that China will step in and fill the old role of the US here, when doing so is a polar opposite from their current trade strategy and would probably collapse their economy. And that gets to the real elephant in the room, which is that no one wants to do America's "old job" anymore. No one else wants to be the ubiquitous buyer of everything with big trade deficits all over the place, the vast majority of countries on earth defend their domestic markets and preference their local firms more than pre-Trump America did - exactly what are these new alliances that are going to arise, when everyone wants to sell to other countries, and no one wants to buy?
I happen to live in a country whose #1 export market was the USA and is being slapped with some of the largest tariffs. Time will tell of course but at the moment they pretty much just seem to be fucked and all they are saying is they are ready to come to the table and negotiate with the US as soon as possible. There just doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for their exports elsewhere - it's not like every country on earth isn't out there pimping its exports to anyone who will listen, pretty much all the time. If China or the EU had a burning need for a couple hundred billion dollars more of shellfish or textiles or what have you, they'd already be buying it.
I understand that argument I've never seen it spelled out by anyone other than me. I only brought it up as a last effort to explain the possible thinking behind these actions. It still won't make sense because even if you believe that you are the top dog and you can effortlessly bully others then you'd have to realize that you won't be the top dog in every situation all the time everywhere at the same time. There will be many instances where others who previously leaned your way for free will now look to get paid for leaning your way.
cycomanic says>"Europeans seem to be much more susceptible to an "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others" argument"<
While they may "talk the talk", Europe doesn't "Walk the walk"! Europe has strong tariffs on imports. The USA is now simply equalizing the situation. Here's an example:
Automobile Tariffs by Country 2025: put your cursor on a country to see its automobile tariff. European tariffs on autos are roughly four times those of the USA. While you're there you can look up the "sales tax" too!
European companies have had tariffs on USA products for decades. Those tariffs protect and maintain industries within a country. The USA failed to maintain that protection: the USA lost jobs and harmed industry which guts an economy. Meanwhile, for example, Germany protected it's auto industry with tariffs on cars from abroad.
My feeling is that "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
There's no doubt that the "Law of Comparative Advantage"(LCA) in economics is a valid argument for trade. However, the LCA is almost always argued in the absence of externalities: costs generated by use of the LCA are usually not taken into account when examining a full economy: job losses, industry shrinkage and failure, etc.
The US has benefited massively from soaking up the best brains globally. That's not going to keep happening; I have plenty of colleagues already who are refusing to travel to the US. We may well even swing into brain drain as Trump et al move closer to executing their cultural revolution.
Meanwhile, all those other countries will start trading more with each other. The US stands to be left out. Won't happen overnight, but Trump is pissing away the advantages. When the dollar isn't the global currency anymore things will really start to hurt.
It's an idiotic take I agree. However, I don't think the US has benefited massively from soaking the best brains globally because of its foreign or trade policies. Most dominant voices about US foreign policy and foreign business interest has always been characterized by aggression and exploitation.
I highly doubt people were ok with that because the US had low tariffs on their countries exports to the US.
I heard people saying BLM and Covid were cultural revolutions that would lead to brain drain under Joe Biden. It was hype. Politicians who marched with BLM in the summer of 2020 by 2023 were saying they were never in favor of defunding the police
If you (the US) massively subsidize the world order through your financial markets, military defense, and foreign aid, it’s only fair that you get to take advantage of your position.
Historically, the US has done this at the expense of its working class. Now there is a populist feeling that we are owed a long due “payback” for our generosity.
The Bernie/AOC left believe the payback is owed by our elites, who enriched themselves by austerity and hollowing out our industrial base.
The Trump/MAGA right believe the payback is owed by other countries — freeloaders that have benefited from our technology, military defense, and foreign aid while simultaneously being net exporters to the US.
To the latter crowd, the kind of “bullying” behavior you describe is actually the equivalent of a gentle giant who never stood up for himself finally deciding that he won’t take any more shit.
Edit: To any downvoters, please comment with where you think I’m wrong. I’m not defending any policy, just providing what I believe is an accurate representation of the populist American mindset described in the parent comment.
> To the latter crowd, the kind of “bullying” behavior you describe is actually the equivalent of a gentle giant who never stood up for himself finally deciding that he won’t take any more shit.
Assuming this generous interpretation is accurate, then it's a problem of ignorance of the people holding this view. Characterizing other countries as 'freeloaders' is exactly that - ignorance.
America is the richest country in the world. That is the payback. Yet somehow the working class is screwed.
People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists". It's an emotional response. I'm scared how far they take it.
Whether or not the “right wing working class” are right in their root cause analysis, the domestic situation in the US is catastrophic enough to demand explanation:
“If we are the richest country on earth, why can’t I afford a house and healthcare?”
Answer 1: You are being taken advantage of by wealthy elites within your country!
Answer 2: The whole world has made Americans front the bill for a regime of global peace, security, and a trusted reserve currency, at the cost of you, the American worker!
Depending on which answer you choose, and which camp you ally with, your worldview will differ.
I know. There is no reason to believe in #2. Its an emotional response. And so you cant change it. Just like you cant use logic with a flat earther. And that's scary for the rest of the world. I just hope no wars happen.
Housing and healthcare are the two things that have little to do with trade. Housing affordability is almost entirely policy driven. In a "free" market (quoted because the definition typically doesn't take into account the necessity of a functional society to maintain property rights and values, just ask Detroit), housing affordability is entirely dependent on one's relative income and propensity to spend, i.e. you can have high absolute income (say in NYC) and still find you desired housing unaffordable. I think people intuitively understand this. Healthcare costs are more complicated but is also almost entirely a domestic issue.
"People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists"."
If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'. There's nothing emotional about a methodology that has failed over and over again.
Well, we’ve been going through wealth redistribution towards the “elites”, and no one batted an eye.
China popped the real estate bubble, collapsing entire industry giants and making the “elites” swallow the financial downturn. Literally allowing the “poor” to refinance their homes on the back of the “rich”, because they believe housing isn’t for speculation, but for living in.
Tariffs without windfall profits tax will be further wealth redistribution, from the poor to the wealthy
That is begging the question. The question is not "Why are some people poor" that is the default state of humanity, and has been for the past 100,000 years Homo Sapiens have existed. The question is what are the succesful doing right. It is not because of "hoarding wealth infinitely" that a doctor has more money saved up than someone addicted to drugs and living on the street. It is their decisions that lead to their current circumstances. The doctor spending a decade in medical school and residency has delayed a lot of gratification getting their, while the drug addict likely had some issues with impulse control or delayed gratification.
Politicians should just come out and say this to the people. Oh you can't afford a house? Oh you cant afford healthcare? But we are the richest country in the world. And the system is fair. It means you didn't earn it. Duh.
Communism is control of the economy via government owning the businesses. What you are describing is taxes in a free market system. They are not the same thing, and being convinced they are is the majority of the problem.
> If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'.
Like taking money generated by the labourer and giving it to the company owners to share with their idle families? And threatening unemployment and precariousness/homelessness for those who disagree? This seems to have failed again indeed
Indeed. Taxation is as old as civilization. Civilization is built on taxation. The first writing systems, the first numbers, the first money, it was all invented to enable taxation. People should finally quit being so childish about this. Unless you want to go back to the stone age, taxation is unavoidable.
> freeloaders that have benefited from our technology, military defense, and foreign aid while simultaneously being net exporters to the US.
I'm not trying to jump on you for having captured it, but the problem is that this is wholly nonsensical - the repayment for benefiting from our technology and military defense IS the net exporting to the US (via holding our currency). That "logic" is still based on having one foot in the paradigm of the financial engineering puppetmasters where getting real physical goods is somehow a liability rather than a benefit!
For sure, this enviable position has had a corrosive effect on our economy. But the inability to deal with that has been wholly down to self-inflicted policy wounds of previous decades - chiefly led by the Republican party marketing a game of fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the government is prevented from taking deliberate action to mitigate the displacement of industry and workers, while the increased (but now centralized) wealth from offshoring (and other technological/economic gains) was merely handed over to the banksters in the form of low-interest loans that went into driving up the asset bubble.
The US has always been incredibly mercenary with their investment. If there was a way of squeezing more blood from the stone a previous president would have done it. You learned about economic policy yesterday. Now you think that picking tariffs by throwing darts can do better than seasoned economic expert trying to maximize benefit to the US. It's just laughable.
Did I ever defend a particular industrial policy? No. You misread my comment.
My comment was intended to give the GP poster insight into the mindset of Americans who revel in the “bullying” behavior they described.
But one point of inquiry — how are foreign aid programs like USAID mercenary? Even if they are CIA fronts, it’s hard to argue that they are in any way economically extractive.
Supposedly they have a seasoned economic expert on staff, Stephen Miran. Is this guy a kook? It wouldn't surprise me, Trump had Laura Loomer at the White House and 1/2 an hour later three members of the National Secure Council had been fired.
A central problem with this administration is it's headed by a psychopath, who has a long track record of being an untrustworthy liar. Could he pick an economics team that can actually make hard choices that are generally better for America? It's possible. But it's also possible these are just more kooks, or corrupt people looking to grift, or people who think like Peter Thiel, that democracy is over and needs to be replaced by a monarch.
My take? Impeach and remove Trump from office. Do it now. If the country wants these kinds of policies, they need to do it through the Congress. Not through a president, sane or insane.
> Currently a senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital Management LP and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, Miran holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University and his dissertation advisor was Martin Feldstein, an eminent American economist who chaired the CEA during the Reagan administration.
> 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.”
We don't actually know if Trump's tariff strategy is Stephen Miran's strategy, nor do we know what Stephen Miran thinks of the strategy.
What we do know is that Trump disproportionately attacks people who criticize him, withholds security protection from them, and sometimes even sends mobs to have them assassinated.
It also took some time before Mark Esper told the public that Trump ordered that protesters be shot.
Therefore, I think it's possible we won't get Stephen Miran's honest assessment in the near future. We'll just have to wait and see.
> The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the president of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.
It's clearly the Bernie/AOC left who are correct here. The US forced this world order on the rest of the world, and massively benefitted from it, so the payback is not owed by the rest of the world who had this forced on them (though they benefitted too) but by the wealthy elite, who benefitted by far the most from it.
Look at the number of multibillionaires the US has acquired over the past 40 years. The trillion dollar megacorps. The many millionaires in Congress. Those are the people who owe payback to the American public. But those are also the people who control the American public, control their news, and feed them misinformation.
> Europeans seem to be much more susceptible to an "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others" argument.
I mean, in the specific realm of trade wars, that’s probably more correct, because the game theory of the thing tends to make retaliating against the aggressor nigh-inevitable, particularly in a “country v world” situation.
> I'm tempted to think (hope? dream?) that the markets and trade will rebound if all this chaos makes American politics swing back
The pump'n'dump scheme against Ukraine will forever change how small countries see the US support for democracy, even if it changes back to the previous status-quo.
The US treatment of Ukraine is having a massive impact on how everyone thinks about security.
All the US had to do was supply it's old weapons to Ukraine whilst replenishing it's stock (creating jobs in America) and things would have been fine. Now we're all in a world were Europeans are openly talking about developing nuclear weapons. Taiwan is totally on it's own, and Greenland is worried about being annexed.
> All the US had to do was supply it's old weapons to Ukraine whilst replenishing it's stock (creating jobs in America) and things would have been fine.
Well, no, it's not fine, partly because we can't replenish our stocks fast enough. Ukraine is consuming nearly the entire planet's production capacity of Patriot missiles, eating enough of our ATACMS stockpile that it makes Combatant Commanders nervous, and more. To say nothing of the argument "supply Ukraine for as long as it takes, even if that means indefinitely" never made any sense; actions taken without a clear, achievable end goal in mind are just a waste of resources.
Europe is openly talking about its own cooperative nuclear umbrella. Trump is correct that he deserves 100% of credit/blame for that, taking the heat for Putin.
It will be done by your friends the French, even if not to everyone. Poland is very keen on it.
In fact they are reopening and massively developing an airbase that will be hosting nukes near Colmar, 200 km from the German border. That's a 6 minute flight for a Dassault Rafale.
It sounds like you’re arguing for the military industrial complex.
“The Ukraine war is great because it creates US jobs through weapons manufacturing. Yeah, we might get our hair a bit mussed with the hundreds of thousands of deaths, but net-net it’s a win!”
In the end, countries are nuanced enough to understand American political dynamics. They see Orbans, they see Le Pens, they see Trump, and they know what is behind it. I am quite sure that Ukraine did not expect anything else from the Trump faction of the Republican party. His victory was not unlikely and he is a simple creature. If different factions win, they will be eager to work with America again, with less trust and reliance.
Realistically, it is for the best if countries are resilient to US failure. It will make Americans generationally poorer, but the world will be better off for it.
You are just assuming Attention craving/seeking Trump types don't exist in every country in the world.
If Trump and the rest of his podcasting/influencer buffoon class, can rise to power in the US riding on what is valued by Attention Economics, then the same can repeat in every country in the world.
The root cause is not changing cause the Algos have created a game that favor those who love Attention and will do whatever it takes to get it and keep it.
> No new tariffs were announced for Canada. Canada and Mexico’s exemption for USMCA/CUSMA qualifying goods was maintained. However, 25% tariffs on non-USMCA compliant Canadian goods, Canadian steel and aluminum, Canadian autos and parts, and the 10% tariff on Canadian energy exports remain in place.. there are signs that negotiators on both sides are trying to steer Canada-US trade to a more productive process of an expedited renegotiation of the Canada-US-Mexico Trade Agreement (CUSMA).
> 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.
To the extent markets recover it will be because there’s confidence that exposure to bizarre and unpredictable behavior from the US has been reduced.
EU / China trade pacts, China / California, Mexico / EU. People have to patch around the mistaken over-reliance on sanity from the US. It’ll happen, not sure if it’ll take a few weeks or a few years though.
The people who voted for these policies have to feel a sufficient amount of pain from them to be sure they won't just vote for them again as soon as they get the chance. Most people who voted for Trump in 2024 would vote for him again if he ran for a 3rd term. Nobody can consider America a reliable partner until that isn't a laughable possibility again.
I think that those in command are also waiting for the next President to undo all that but it is going to have a tremendous effect for a decade or more. Hopefully for the US they won't go in a similar crisis like the UK is going through...
Cutting off countries like Japan or Taiwan like that when we know their geopolitical situation with China and how critical their economy is to the US is quite crazy.
Things are easier to break than they are to fix. The next president, if there will be another, will not be able to easily glue the pieces back together.
Yeah, this is the core issue. How can any ally fully trust the U.S. when major foreign policy commitments can be reversed every 4 years? One administration signs on, the next tears it up.
It's starting to look like U.S. agreements aren't really with the country, but with whoever happens to be in office. US allies is isolating itself and it's allies are going to hedge. The trend is already starting and it's going to be hard to reverse. Restoring that trust isn’t just a matter of electing the "right" leadership, either, at this juncture, I think that it would require institutional reforms and a consensus on foreign policy that transcends the electoral cycle.
I'm not going to cheer for the "downfall of US", but America is doing it to itself.
Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked.
I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine.
Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
What? The didn't happen, or it's not how it happened. Are you pretty young to remember Brexit?
The UK voted for Brexit in 2016, but it was up to the UK itself to invoke it with the EU. They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. It wasn't a surprise and "no one knew how imports worked". Yeah people online made all sort of wild hyperbolic scenarios, but trade was unaffected until the end of 2020. There were shortages in the UK around that time, but I wonder if you remember what happened shortly after January 31st of 2020?
The prescription drug shortages is still a problem in the UK. It's not because no one still knows how imports work in the UK, 5 years after Brexit. It's because the overall imports and exports in the UK has been falling since Brexit. Because the UK economy hasn't been doing great. Brexit, COVID, and then Ukraine/Russian energy dependency came in a pretty bad time for the UK.
> They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020.
Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure.
While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)
Reading the parent's comment I was expecting the UK GDP to have been plunging since Brexit, but that's not the case apparently[0]. Some sectors clearly profited from it, compensating for those who went down the drain.
GDP isn't everything and from the outside the UK feel like in a very bad place, but I wonder what's the metric that really captures that status. Inequalities aren't getting that much wider as well.
There is a lot of data to talk about that's why I linked the video directly in the other comment. Maybe check it out. For the GDP it may not look bad but compared to other countries and especially the US, the UK is going through what we call a "lost decade". Their GDP should be +25% higher than right now... That's just one (huge) metric talked about in the video.
Yup. Sadly, discussion of Brexit on HN is trash tier. Almost every claim about it you'll find here is completely wrong. Not in the sense of differing values or priorities, but in a "this is totally made up" kind of way. It's really concerning that so many people's understanding of the UK and Europe have suffered such a huge rupture with reality. The map is not the territory!
Leaving the EU had no effect on the British economy. Not positive, not negative. Even the trade balance with the EU merely continued along its long term trend, so apparently the single market wasn't delivering any value in the end. The closest thing you can find to an economic impact was the currency dump that happened the moment the result was called, but the economy did fine in the post-referendum years and so those traders who panicked just took a bath and the currency recovered later. Not that a currency devaluation is such a bad thing for the UK anyway, its exports could use the help.
Even some non-economic impacts failed to materialize, in both directions. The UK rejoined the Horizon research programme (supposedly a "cherry" that would be lost), but also the reduction in immigration that voters were promised didn't happen either, in fact immigration went into overdrive.
A lot of people who support the EU don't realize any of this, partly because the news doesn't report on things that don't happen so they never hear about it. But mostly it's because they conflate predictions with reality. For example, there's someone saying in this thread that "the narrative was pretty catastrophic" followed by "I don't know how things panned out". And when I pointed out this lack of impact less than two weeks ago here, I got a reply that cited another pile of predictions as a refutation:
It's a systemic problem that crops up in other areas too. During COVID modeling predictions were regularly repeated as if they'd already happened, and you see the same mental slippage in climate change discourse. The line between "we think this might happen", "this will happen" and "this has already happened" blurs to nothing.
Can you provide some citations / documentation of your claims about "no effect"?
As a non-EU / non-UK reader I went searching for more detailed analysis after reading your post. The first detailed analysis I found was the UK Office for Budget Responsibility's Brexit Analysis. [1]
The OBR's analysis suggests outcomes like the following (all quoted from that assessment) that seem to suggest some degree of negative economic impact:
* The post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and EU, as set out in the ‘Trade and Cooperation Agreement’ (TCA) that came into effect on 1 January 2021, will reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to remaining in the EU.
* Both exports and imports will be around 15 per cent lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU.
"Contrary to initial concerns, Brexit has not had a major detrimental
effect on UK–EU trade.
● Trade data doesn’t support the Office for Budget Responsibility’s claims
that Brexit has caused significant negative impacts on the UK economy.
● Data from 2019 to 2022 indicates that the trade in both goods and
services between the UK and EU hasn’t shown a discernible Brexit
effect."
You can look up more recent numbers but the story hasn't changed.
I'd really like to understand the psychology of this phenomenon better. I don't mean this as any personal criticism because it's good that you're asking, but the fact that every time I bring this prediction/reality conflation up I get a rebuttal with more predictions in it is fascinating.
● The analysis you link to is exactly the same sort of analysis the OBR provides -- i.e. a synthesis of current and past data and updated projections of what that means looking ahead
● The OBR report links to detailed "Economic and fiscal outlook" (EFO) data that includes the actual data the conclusions are based on. I haven't tried to look at the linked data for many of the analyses in the OBR report, but for those I have I find data in the cited EFO documents that seems to backup the statements made. For example, Box 2.6 of the March 2022 EFO report: https://obr.uk/box/the-latest-evidence-on-the-impact-of-brex...
● The director of the IEA was apparently recorded by an undercover reporter telling funders that his organization was in "the Brexit influencing game" [1]. Why should I thus trust that the IEA isn't trying to spin Brexit outcomes to their funders advantage? This applies to the government too of course, but many of those OBR/EFO reports seem to have been prepared when the Conservatives were in power.
I'm only citing the IEA report for the opening commentary on trade data. I know it has other stuff but that's not germane to the point.
That the IEA is right wing is neither here nor there, because the statements it makes are factual and true. If for some reason you suspect foul play you can just look up the data yourself instead of digging up irrelevant quotes (the Guardian is also very much in the Brexit influencing game, so what?)
I'll do the work for you. Here's a report from Parliament with the relevant data up to 2023. See the graph in section 3.1
Thanks for linking to the parliamentary trade data! I think we both agree that's useful data on which to have a discussion.
Since you were so kind as to "do the work" for me, I'll also "do the work" for you (LOL!):
● From the text and tables in 3.1 (text from the report included below) I take it we both come to the same conclusion that post-Brexit the EU has lost ~£40 billion in export trade?
● To be clear how I'm getting that number -- NET LOSS in Exports for 2023 vs values cited for period 2017-2019: ~£20 billion to EU + ~£20 billion non EU
Is £40 billion a little or a lot? From the text below that seems to be about a 10% hit on exports.
How much is attributable to Brexit vs other factors (e.g. impact of COVID) really is the domain of forecasting and analysis, which you seem uncomfortable with. So perhaps we'll leave it there. EDIT: For readers who are interested in the performance of forecasting models, the OBR includes an analysis of the performance of their models here: https://obr.uk/box/how-are-our-brexit-trade-forecast-assumpt...
--
From the Parliamentary report "Statistics on UK trade with the EU":
> UK goods exports to the EU have not recovered to pre-Brexit levels. Goods exports to the EU exceeded £170 billion in 2017, 2018 and 2019 but have not done so in any calendar year since and were £153 billion in 2023 (see table below).
> It is worth noting that UK exports of goods to the EU were growing quite slowly before Brexit and the pandemic, being only 9% higher in 2019 than 2010 in real terms
> Goods exports to non-EU countries also remain below pre-Brexit levels. These exceeded £180 billion in 2017, 2018 and 2019 but have been below £170 billion in every calendar year since then. They were £162 billion in 2023.
--
EDITS: added some clarification re: source of export values; wording of text.
We seem to have reached the maximum thread depth, which is probably a strong hint to us to end this discussion. We're way off topic anyhow as this thread is about the impact of current US tariffs.
But to your last comment, post-Brexit the UK is pretty significantly under-performing the rest of the G7 in terms of goods trades (prior to Brexit the UK seemed to mirror the G7 average).
Sure. I think we both agree at least that the UK isn't suffering some kind of crisis, doesn't have plunging GDP etc, which is where this sub-thread started.
We can tell there is no impact of Brexit because UK exports fell to both EU and non-EU countries by about the same amount, probably due to COVID impact. They would need to diverge for there to have been an impact of Brexit specifically. This doesn't require forecasting to see, you can look at the graph and see that there's been no divergence.
Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now...
If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content.
- The UK has one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe, with about 1 in 50 Londoners experiencing homelessness.
- The UK economy stagnated for 10 years following 2008, resulting in a "lost decade"
- The median disposable income in the UK was slightly lower than the US and Norway before the GFC by 6-8%, not it's 16-20% behind.
IDK if I'd call this a crisis, i.e. people aren't rioting in the streets. That said, this is not the direction you want to be moving in as a developed country. The trend of people in formerly dominant countries electing leaders who keep making stupid own goals (increasing economic inequality, Brexit, gutting the NHS, gutting US foreign aid, tariff-pocalypse) is very worrying.
Hey, so I was wrong in saying the UK has 10x the homelessness rate of the US. I used a stat from the video that "approximately one in fifty Londoners are now homeless." That's London, not the UK. Thanks for catching that -- I will update my post.
But also, uh, you're wrong too! Your numerator for the UK figure is actually an estimate for homeless people in England, while your denominator includes the whole UK.
Homelessness is a housing issue first, a poverty issue second. See housing as a game or musical chairs. If you don't have enough, the one getting stuffed first are the slowests (in that case, the unemployed poor, then the working poor).
If you can't give me any words that indicate what kind of crisis the UK is facing, while there's general agreement on 'Trump', 'tariffs', '(especially US) equities', 'the US dollar', 'global recession fears'... then I don't have time for your video recommendation.
Brexit was pretty bad for the UK proportional to the size of their population/economy, and is still causing problems even though the initial dislocation is over. If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that. I haven't done the numbers to make an exact comparison, but they both have the qualities of being being abrupt, severe, and self-inflicted.
> If you think it's a lesser crisis, you could just say that.
I do, but the principal reason I didn't say that is that I had no idea it's what the commenter I replied to was referring to.
'Brexit' feels mostly completely irrelevant / not a topic of concern or debate since at least the beginning of the pandemic five years ago. The vote was almost a decade ago. 'If bdelmas thinks it's like Brexit, they could just say that', to paraphrase your own comment.
Britain took 4 years to negotiate and prepare for the new trading arrangement with the EU. It wasn't all smooth, but they did things like massively expand customs facilities at sea and airports to allow for the new inspections, train up inspectors for animal and plant imports. It gave time for people to move, companies to move their HQ, set up new warehouses, etc. Both sides were clear that the arrangement wouldn't be changed back with a change of government — the EU had no patience for that, opposition parties in the UK said they wouldn't aim for it either.
The USA hasn't done any of that, so the situation at this stage isn't the same.
Weeks after Brexit happened, when Covid started, EU governments quickly moved their focus to the pandemic. Since then, they've continued to tell Britain they aren't interested in reopening discussions so soon after new treaties were signed.
That's changed slightly with Russia/Ukraine/Trump, as the UK has positioned itself carefully between the USA and the rest of NATO.
All that time though, it remains a topic of debate in Britain since they haven't seen any of the promised benefits of Brexit. Some things have got worse, but I'd say it's generally a problem of stagnation, compared to improvements in comparable neighbouring countries.
That's a good summary, I basically agree. It's hardly describing a current and ongoing 'crisis' that the US hopefully doesn't deteriorate from its present position to the level of, though, is it?
I think if I were American I would be longing for the day that <insert Trump thing> 'remains a topic of debate because we haven't seen the promised benefit of it'!
The vote didn’t implement anything. Britain didn’t actually leave the EU until 2020. Brexit is as of much concern in Britain, still, as Trump is - because it underlies their entire shaken economy. You think some tariffs are bad? Ok now what if Trump simultaneously tore up every trade agreement? And cancelled the visas of every European citizen in the country, who happened to make up 10% of the medical sector?
Alright take 2020 then: year started $1.32/£, ended at 1.37. The world was shaken by SARS-nCoV-2019, but I do not remember us feeling particularly extra shaken by Brexit crisis.
That is not really relevant anyway, the up-thread suggestion was that there was some current ongoing crisis more significant than anything happening in the US. That user didn't even mention Brexit, but if that is what they meant, no, I assure you it's predominantly Trump and tax year end stuff in our news.
How is this related to brexit? Well, it's mentioned several times in that page, but here:
> Brexit has permanently diminished trade efficiency in the UK...weakening the UK’s international competitiveness.....intensified the UK’s longstanding productivity issues...imposed lasting structural constraints on productivity ...Brexit’s negative impact on productivity is enduring and structural. Additionally, Brexit has produced effects akin to a negative supply-side shock...An analysis conducted by NIESR colleagues, published in November 2023, suggested that UK business investment could have been about 12.4 per cent higher in 2023 if Brexit did not happen.
Funnily enough, one thing that gets called out a lot is the rising wealth inequality that allows the shrinking group of well-off types to be completely ignorant of the worsening conditions at the bottom. You must be doing ok for yourself - but I am genuinely curious what kind of news sources you follow that you are not aware of the very serious levels of poverty and fear rising around the country, and the economic troubles underlying them.
Thing is, Brexit didn’t _really_ happen in 2020. The UK was, for practical purposes, in the single market until 2021 under a transition arrangement, and even after that, it kind of petered out over years. Some special arrangements are _still in place_: https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-brexit-border-checks-dela...
Ok. I'm still awaiting to hear how it's currently a situation of terrible crisis that the US would not want to sink to.
If there are any crises in my UK news, they're in the Ukraine, Israel, USA, and perhaps Greenland & Canada by extension. To the extent there's crisis in the UK that I'm aware of, it's the same USA-inflicted event that the rest of the world's dealing with too.
This. There is no reason why any country should trust us anymore if entire trade relations can be destroyed by a presidential whim.
Even if Trump fell out of a window today and we got a pro-trade president tomorrow, we’re not fixing this damage for a very long time.
We probably would have to amend the constitution to insulate foreign policy from the whims of a single person if we want any chance of fixing this in our lifetime.
It's already there in the Constitution - Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Unfortunately other countries chose not to require things in writing and were happy with pinky promises that could be reneged.
We (Canada) literally signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement for trade in 2020... with Donald Trump. Trump this February said "Who would ever sign a thing like this?" and proceeded to make up the story about fentanyl coming from Canada as a pretense to ignore this deal. So there was certainly more than a pinky promise.
Additionally your senate just signed law to repeal the tariffs against Canada specifically so I don't know what other receipts or paperwork you'd like here. Not that I expect Trump to adhere to that of course, but I've never heard the perspective of "well these weren't signed agreements" for things that clearly were.
> Additionally your senate just signed law to repeal the tariffs against Canada specifically so I don't know what other receipts or paperwork you'd like here.
That bill won't pass the crazy house, but yes, CUSMA was signed law.
It doesn't require a constitutional amendment, we can just repeal the law [0] being used, which would ironically involve the same number of votes as keeping the law but slapping down Trump's particular usage of it. (That's now how it originally worked, but the easy-slapdown route got ruled unconstitutional.)
Military alliance stuff might be harder. Some stuff like NATO is supported by actual legislation, but other stuff was set up as a kind of gentleman's agreement with the US President-du-jour on the assumption that successors wouldn't be crazy.
Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive. Even if he threatens to veto, Congress should still do it. Not doing obvious things because they might run into opposition/problems is a recipe for more and worse of the same.
> Maybe, but vetoes are politically very expensive.
As are felony convictions, top secret docs in a bathroom at your house, sexual assault settlements, and the hundred other career-ending scandals the guy has survived without a scratch so far.
Agreed, but maybe Congress takes action on one thing they'll find it in themselves to take action on a second thing. Having been in a lot of real fights, standing there and doing nothing is almost invariably the worst choice.
Congress is 55-ish% Trump’s party and 45-ish% everyone else. Nobody in the Trump party would ever, ever, ever do something Trump didn’t want. The entire party platform is basically “whatever Trump wants”. Anyone who disagrees was primaried out of existence long ago.
There is no congress any more, not as an independent body. There is Trump, and there is a body of people who will, in the majority, do anything Trump wants them to do, and is not independent in any way.
Yes, just like I said: "which would ironically involve the same number of votes as keeping the law but slapping down Trump's particular usage of it."
Originally it wasn't veto-able (only needed a Concurrent Resolution of 50% in each house, no Presidential signature) but the Supreme Court ruled that part unconstitutional in the early 80s.
The president constitutionally doesn’t actually have this authority - the power to set tariffs is supposed to be exclusively the prerogative of the legislature, but Trump declares pro forma emergencies and the Republicans in power aren’t willing to check his power.
The rest of the world would still be at the mercy of an untrustworthy government that is largely incapable of any semblance of long term thinking. To say nothing of the weirdos who regularly vote for that government and who they tend to elect.
I don’t think that would matter at all. Pass all the laws you want, when the head of the executive branch orders the CBP to collect tariffs, they will. We’ve long since left the rule of law.
The US wasn't even in a crisis until 2025. We weren't in a stellar position (high deficits and debt, low unemployment but high underemployment). It was all recoverable before Trump started this trade war and doing things like cutting departments that actually brought in revenue.
Well, I disagree but the current policies guarantee it's not recoverable so a debate would mostly be around hypotheticals. We're reducing revenue but not spending (or not enough to offset the reduction in revenue so the deficit will rise), so the debt will only continue to rise at an increasing rate.
Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history. He's on track to beat it though and with a reasonably strong economy when he took office (again, not an ideal economy, underemployment is a major issue, but not a weak economy by any stretch).
> Ironically, Trump has the record for the highest deficit ever in US history.
hardly relevant comment since all presidents left and right have been pushing the button to increase deficits (and congress is completely responsible as well for not trying to balance the budget) so this is a systemic problem that will bring the downfall of America no matter what. It's just a matter of time, and with that level of debt, the time bomb keeps ticking faster and faster.
It’s relevant because republicans campaign on it. If neither party claimed to be fiscally responsible I’d agree. However one does and isn’t. That makes the relative debt load under that party compared to the other fair game.
The next president is going to be Trump. If people don't think that's at least a serious possibity they are extremely deluded about the situation the country is in right now.
We have repeatedly seen Trump say something that sounds ridiculous, and his supporters say "that won't actually happen, and if it does I won't support it", and then he does it and his supporters support it. He has recently said he may try for another term as president, and confirmed "No, no I'm not joking".
If you don't take his threats seriously by now, and the willingness of the GOP to get behind whatever he wants, then you are not paying attention - it has happened over, and over, and over.
On NPR they ran a response quote from Ryan Zinke that was nominally against it, but if you read between the lines you can see them laying the foundation. It was something like “I draw a hard line at violating the constitution, that’s something I’ll never support. But also right now there are leftists and activist judges who think they can violate the constitution by taking power away from the executive”
He never directly spoke against a third term, just “violating the constitution”, and then named some enemies. It’s a long way off still, but you can see the groundwork being laid for something like “emergency measures to protect the constitution” if they decide that’s the way they want to go.
Wouldn’t he have to get on the ballot in all the swing states at least? What if some states refuse to let him run? I can’t see California registering him for example, but that wouldn’t really matter of course.
Only if he tries to get a 3rd term by a fair election. The more realistic way to it happening is by hijacking the electoral process. There are a number of ways to do this, such as by claiming there was fraud and thereby having the justification to modify how "electors" [0] should cast their vote. This is exactly what was tried in the 2020 election.
Really, it's just an "if enough people in power and in general go along with it, then it works" kind of thing. The current trend in the GOP is to whip and/or expel those who do not fully support Trump. What happens if half of the elected politicians, most of their constituents, and most of the appointed government officials, decide that Trump is staying in office? No one knows. The power of words on paper only goes as far as people let it.
> We have repeatedly seen Trump say something that sounds ridiculous, and his supporters say "that won't actually happen, and if it does I won't support it", and then he does it and his supporters support it.
Attempting to overturn an election, putting tariffs on the entire world, deporting legal US residents without due process, passing a record-breaking number of executive orders, ending birthright citizenship, removing a pillar of the free press from the White House press pool.
Trump's father lived to 93, and mother to 88. He doesn't have any serious medical conditions (that we know of). There isn't a high chance that he's going to die of natural causes in the next 4 years.
>
> He doesn't have any serious medical conditions (that we know of).
He hasn't disclosed his medical records, which is something presidents are normally expected to do. You have to wonder why he disclosed his records in 2016 and not in 2024
> There isn't a high chance that he's going to die of natural causes in the next 4 years
Of course there is, he is Seventy Eight and Visibly Obese
His parents living longer is not a strong predictor
Sure, on paper, but who will enforce it? He’s already attempted a coup. He has 4 years to prepare for the retry. He’s already putting loyalists into law enforcement and military spots. He’s immune to all lawsuits and has the congress cowed.
When the markets are down, they are on sale for the rich. Eliminating competition via tariffs is good for those who want to compete where they couldn't before. They would let everything burn to further enrich themselves or push their ideology.
Why are they only on sale for the rich? I thought everybody could buy it. When Wall Street Bets was buying GameStop was that an investment "for the rich"? And if not why can only rich people invest when markets are down, and only not rich people can invest in GameStop when they are being short squeezed?
I think the combination of malice and incompetence remains the most credible theory:
Trump believes that the he/the US has the more powerful position in all of these relationships and wants to impose his will on the rest of the world and make them submit to his/US superiority. Which might actually work if he picked one target at a time. But you can't beat up the whole school at once. The fact that he can't do this to everyone at once, combined with his utter misunderstanding of what trade imbalance actually means, will lead to an outcome that is bad for everyone, but worse for the U.S. than most.
There are two other theories that I think have some shred of credibility, and they're both worse:
1. Trump intends to use his apparent ability to unilaterally impose or negate these taxes at will on a granular level to force countries, companies, and individuals to come groveling to him for favors, allowing him to use the presidency to further enrich and entrench himself.
2. Trump is divesting of dependence on allies because he thinks they might soon be adversaries. That's the most harrowing potential interpretation, but it relies on the notion that he has any kind of foresight. This is really only credible if you genuinely believe that it's Putin pulling his strings. Which is a possibility that's hard to dismiss.
@2) I don't see Putin behind this. The current situation is most likely a death stroke for Russia. Russia's war economy was already on the brink and running on borrowed time. With oil prices cratering that's it.
When he started with a limited set of tariffs on Canada/Mexico/China it sort of made sense as a bullying move. The administration at least had the bandwidth to conduct three sets of negotiations.
But it’s essentially impossible to negotiate 180 deals simultaneously. No way does Tunisia get even five minutes to pitch a deal - the simultaneous imposition of tariffs effectively DDOS’d the negotiation team.
I’m not advocating for or defending them, but he bullied some immigration related concessions out of Mexico back in February in the first round of this stuff. You could plausibly call it a negotiation tactic. The latest is just pure madness any way you look at it.
Also for many countries it can’t be remedied because the tariffs are based on trade imbalances (not reciprocal, that is a lie). What does the US make that Cambodia needs/wants? There’s no way for them to close the gap on trade other than to stop selling to the US.
When the bully gets too ambitious the large number of bullied gang together for revenge, or at least effective countermeasures. The world will route around USA, find they can manage ok without it. The USA will be iced out, lose its reserve currency status, nobody will buy its military technology, making the USA unable to recoup large outlays for ambitious military projects, and the USA will lose its military dominance.
Also, the future of warfare and terrorism is autonomous networks of drones. Mexico and Canada won't be disposed to care what passes through their borders with the USA, and like Zelensky said ... we had the oceans and friendly neighbors, but that won't help us anymore.
The USA may get the metric system out of this. The only reason the USA can hang on to its ridiculous "imperial" units has been its economically dominant position.
Totally agreed! But bulling 95% of the class room... That doesn't work. New alliances would emerge, like Canada and the EU. No more new pipelines for the US but more upgrades to Canadian ports to ship oil to the EU. New economic routes will be created, new partner deals, etc... Without the US.
Trump just locked the US, kinda did the finger to the earth, and hopes people will come begging for trade.
>Bullying people in inferior bargaining positions has somehow worked thus far.
Has it? To who?
Canada hasn't, and won't, negotiate a single thing. We increased border patrols for a made up problem and thus far it has entirely served to catch guns and drugs and illegals coming from the United States.
The United States has lost tens to hundreds of billions of sales to Canada. They are never, ever coming back.
Trump sabotaged a critical trading relationship in a way that Americans just cannot comprehend, through his laughably stupid "bullying".
Similarly, supposedly Vietnam has come "hat in hand". Vietnam has literally nothing to offer. It has negligible tariffs or blocks on US trade, it just happens to be a poor country. The bullying is utter stupidity.
Mexico thus far has taken being pissed in the face because they're 100% of Trump's purported problem -- from drugs, to migrants to cartels to funnelling Chinese goods, and the likelihood is that Mexico ends up being the biggest beneficiary.
Wasn't appointing a fentanyl czar and agreeing to spend more on border enforcement a form of concession?
https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1886529228193022429
This doesn't seem like Canada isn't negotiating a single thing. What am I not understanding here?
There’s still a way out, the US Congress could convene over the weekend and revoke the President’s ability to impose tariffs. Restore it to Congress as stated in the constitution.
Of course they won’t do that. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I started wondering if there's a way for citizens to push the issue that these tarrifs are unconstitutional. Like a lawsuit that got escalated to the Supreme Court or some thing if congress isn't going to.
Some of the senators are breaking away though.
If the country survives this though the next thing through executive order could be just as bad or worse. There doesn't seem to be any realistic way out of this insanity.
are they unconstitutional? i imagine, like many things, congress has constitutionally saw fit to cede its authority to the executive many many moons ago
They could be unconstitutional. The ability of Congress to delegate its authority to the President does have limits. If companies (the ones in a financial position to do this) sued, they'd have standing and could make their case. Whether it's successful or not would take a while to find out, and this is an instance where judges would likely leave the tariffs in place until the suit was settled in a court (before appeals) if the plaintiffs won.
they could be unconstitutional, but does that matter? the executive gets to enforce whatever it wants however it wants. nobody has to listen to congress or the courts when the executive is all aligned on what theyre gonna do
No, if it were ruled unconstitutional and the President continued to enforce the policies then Congress would be justified in impeaching and removing the President. This is unlikely to actually happen with the current Congress, however.
Could the President remain in office after an impeachment? Ask again in 2-3 years, but today, no. He'd be removed, no federal employee (civilian or military) would continue to take orders from him except perhaps his Cabinet and the DOGE boys. They all swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the man. In 2-3 years, though, could be a different culture.
> I started wondering if there's a way for citizens to push the issue that these tarrifs are unconstitutional.
Anyone who imports and is assessed a tariff would have personal standing to sue, arguing that the tax is illegal. I think there are some procedural requirements first to e.g. formally complain, but the dispute would eventually get its day in court.
However, these tariffs are being applied at least under a thin veneer of law regarding declared emergencies. It's clearly beyond the intent of the law for Trump to do this, but it's hard to draw a bright line between this and (e.g.) ambitious environmental regulation.
> Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”
> At the most basic level, Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. Yet Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.
This is likely why Elon Musk--who in 1989 emigrated from Apartheid South Africa at the cusp of Apartheid ending in 1991--is convinced there is widespread fraud in social security benefits. He never culturally integrated with a post-Apartheid South Africa. He comes from a legacy white supremacist culture that sees non-white citizens getting social benefits as ripping off white citizens.
If anyone thinks a claim that Musk is a literal white supremacist is biased, remember that he did two Nazi salutes at the president's inauguration and endorsed Germany's AfD party.
The "4D Chess" is that some powerful internal people doing a lot of manipulation want America to be an isolated very independent fascist state, and some powerful external people want to destabilize America and reduce its foreign influence. They're both making solid progress towards their goals.
The majority of the American people who voted for the current regime are being taken advantage of but like many they'll progressively more and more identify with wanting whatever outcome "their" team achieves.
Sparking the local industries needs to happen with incentives, not a tsunami.
You can't swap the supply chain to a local-first instantly. Many things aren't done locally. The factory buildings are gone. The labor isn't there or trained. The basic materials aren't local and need to be imported. The machines needed to produce the parts don't exist locally and need to be imported themselves; sending margins to unrealistic numbers and making it a non-starter environment.
What it is, is another flip of the table, an upset, to cause chaos and feed a positive environment for more chaos, which only suits those who benefit from chaos.
The episode of the Search Engine podcast “The puzzle of the all-American bbq scrubber” goes into detail on an example of this, is very interesting and makes the same points you’re making here.
Sometimes your best mates go a bit mad. Cut them some slack.
They will need a shoulder to cry on when they re-discover how well a trade war works out. The last ones seem to have happened at roughly 50 year intervals.
The US seems to be incapable of learning from the past. The worrying thing is that Mr Trump is old enough to remember directly or what his parents told him about the last fucked up trade shit storm or trade war.
You do not get to dictate how the world as a whole works ... ever. It has its own ideas about that.
Even Britain at its most imperious could not do that and the US can't even stop itself from trying to impose tariffs on its own air base in .io!
The best we can do from outside is to hope that the US does not collapse completely and that the downward trend stops at some point. If, somehow this all pans out that we will all benefit or even that just the US benefits then fine. Let's pick up the pieces and crack on.
I do not hate Americans nor their rather odd President. We are seeing change happening. It might be for the good eventually but I doubt it but I'm not an expert. In the meantime I suggest we continue to act as friends towards an old friend. When you go barking mad, you might need your mates to stand beside you whilst you dribble and widdle.
>Of course I'm sure some people would claim this is 4D chess or what not but.. sometimes the person doing something crazy is just crazy at the end of the day.
It is crazy and it does have some crazy logic. The US trade deficit is well pronounced only on material goods. If you add services, the deficit is much less, if any. The services are produced by the people and states mostly voting Democratic. So, Trump with his tariffs may succeed in causing the EU and others to retaliate against US services, thus damaging blue states and helping (well in his mind) the red states. Trump already did similar hit against blue states with SALT deduction for example, yet it was just a small preview.
> I'm sure some people would claim this is 4D chess
There is some regular 2D chess going on here, but it's not being played by anyone in the US admin. Putin wants to weaken NATO so he can continue expanding. America is a linchpin holding together much of the European alliances and not coincidentally the candidate he helped get elected twice is destroying the US's global standing and weakening the US dollar.
The rebuilding going on in Europe, the increase in European military spending, and the talk about nuclear weapons in Europe is a direct consequence. I don't know if Putin just expected Europe to run around incompetently like the Keystone Cops, but it kind of feels like they're acting quickly and competently without the US.
At any rate, all of this is bringing us much closer to a WWI or WWII style global military conflict.
If that really was Putins intention and doing he makes Trump look like a stable genius. Crude is already down to 62USD/barrel. If this goes on for any amount of time Russia is dead.
In the case of Trump, never attribute to ineptitude what can be explained by greed.
He is tanking the US economy so he and his billionaire cohort can buy things (businesses, real estate, stocks, etc) at a low price. Thus amassing more control and capital.
This is how the Russian oligarchy came into power.
Yes, he is inept. But in this case, he is following a playbook that was deliberately written to achieve the ends that this series of actions is bringing about.
There is most likely a deeper plan behind it. It's not 4D chess, or if it is, it's played by people who don't really understand it themselves, but there is a goal behind it: ending Reagan's neoliberal economic world order.
That in itself is not a bad goal, and it's one I agree with; neoliberalism has increased inequality, put excessive wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, and looted nations of their infrastructure and social structures. Neoliberalism should die.
The problem is that Trump's economic advisors seem to want a new world order where the rest of the world is even more subservient to the US, and they think they can enforce that by cutting everybody off from the US economy, and they'll only be let back if they accept America's new terms.
The problem is of course that the US actually cut itself off from the rest of the world, and as big and powerful as the US is, it's not more powerful than the rest of the world put together. It's not the rest of the world that will come crawling back; it's the US. After having squandered its 80 year dominant position in the global economy.
Trump is the actual anti-imperialist, and as he said, unifier. He’s so selfless that he’s putting the US on the line to ensure world peace and unity /s
Could you clarify for me please why the term globalist would be used instead of global? Like "Apple is a global corporation" is an unarguable fact but using the term globalist for these companies seems pretty strange to me since there are some pretty weird connotations with it.
Very untrue. Major corporations can absorb the damage for a few months without raising their prices, since they have more inventory, bulk discounts, etc.
Small companies are often running nearly paycheck-to-paycheck, which requires them to raise prices immediately, making them completely uncompetitive with the large corporations.
The large corporations know this and are happy to keep their prices low and burn money until the small business competition dies, then they can raise their prices.
China is isolationist and they seem to be growing.
The problem is the USA is a consumer economy which isn’t sustainable. We could get away with it as a tech leader, but with China stepping ahead (Deepseek) china will be a tech leader and manufacturing leader. What will the USA have?
China is what now? China is the biggest trading partner of something like 70% of all nations in the world!
China is asymmetric and unfair, not "isolated". They disallow imports except in a handful of industries they can't replicate yet. That works for China, because: (1) they are huge, and (2) they remain poor, and thus can do the low wage jobs internally in addition to doing them for the rest of the world.
The US only has advantage #1. Though at this point #2 seems within reach...
We love cheap stuff if the country providing it is weak and not a threat of any kind. Suddenly we don't love good Chinese prices any longer. The massive world wide tariffs are a scheme to restructure the trade order because we have lost control of the WTO, etc to China. We have been so greedy American companies fell over themselves to build factories and joint ventures in China only for China to create competitive companies and force these joint ventures to bankruptcy. Because of the greed, intellectual property and knowledge transfer to China Donald Trump has decided to save the system himself. The stock market being at all time highs doesn't matter if the United States is left empty of capabilities.
China is very far from isolationist. They're making huge investments into other countries with Belt & Road, importing huge amounts of commodities, exporting huge amounts of finished goods. Sure, the domestic market is protected, but it's a long way from North Korean autarky, which seems to be Trump's goal.
I moved my AMD Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Fedora, no real complaints. Having the newest kernel and Mesa stuff is pretty useful if you're doing any gaming on it.
I'm sure you have other examples (and I'm not really asking for them) but your sshd example would make me dislike the choices Ubuntu made, not systemd. Like I don't blame systemd for snaps being so awful.
My view is that there is an attitude/approach spillover from systemd crowd into other teams. Switching port 22 from sshd to systemd was not something that any sane person could come up with. It's a stream of incredibly hostile decisions from systemd upstream that allowed that kind of thinking.
Or maybe the people who think it's a good idea have a different perspective and value system to you?
Labelling a technical decision that was made about a system design (that a lot of people agree with) as "not sane" makes you look like a fundamentalist.
I don't have an Android device but surely anything that excludes can just be accessed via web browser? I use my banks mobile website in a mobile browser all the time.
Many times the web browser works, but there are some cases where it doesn't or is just a much worse experience. Or even some apple-specific stuff, like my mom enjoys calling me via facetime.
Having the second device just opens up more chances that you have something that works.
