sj_zero @ sj_zero @lotide.fbxl.net

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706

Joined

2 yr. ago

To be fair, we Canadians have an awful lot to fix that isn't going to get fixed.

Did you read about the recent uncovering of the government report that said that poor people were going to be foraging in the woods for food in the next decade or two? Sure I'm glad that we keep on focusing on the keeping rich people in Europe happy.

Unfortunately, no matter who ended up in charge the debt was always going to rise catastrophically. Trump talked a good game up front, but all you need to do is look at his first term to realize he doesn't want to be the guy who takes anything away. 

But unfortunately even the discussion around this bill shows that his political instincts are correct even if they are going to ultimately help destroy the country. The moment that anything is on The chopping block, everyone starts to panic as if you can just spend unlimited money forever without consequences.

Now people who want to make this a partisan issue are being silly, there is no political party you could vote for other than perhaps the libertarian party who would actually cut spending if given the chance. Unfortunately that's the game that we are playing right now, and you even see it in all the stories listed on this economics community -- nobody wants to lose anything paid for by the state even though nobody is paying the full cost for all the services being presented.

In a previous analysis I realized that the unlimited debt spending is the price of unity. The fact of the matter is that most countries on Earth today need to heavily balkanize, the only reason that they haven't yet is massive government outlays that effectively purchase loyalty. The same thing happened in the final days of rome, and it will continue to work right up until it entirely stopped working and all of these empires collapse. It also happened in Weimar Germany, the late Ottoman empire, and late Qing China. You can't hold an empire together with money forever.

Ironically, nationalism is thought of as a conservative idea, but it is in fact a product of the Jacobins, it's a new idea that doesn't actually work when pressed. The idea of a nation is not new, but the idea that the Jacobins presented of nationalism was a revolutionary idea -- literally it was built into their revolution. The problem is that often revolutionary ideas are empirically false. The United States is not the only country that is going to fall apart, we can already see that many European nations are unlikely to remain in their current form for the next century.

F

Ugly good guy non-isekai

I think you're making a number of major errors in your rant.

Your base assumption "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" is explicitly fascist, from the lips of Benito Mussolini. Ideally, culture is not the state, and religion is not the state, and the market is not the state. Many enlightenment thinkers who helped produce modern liberal democracy believed in a small state the protected people's rights and believe that such a state could only exist alongside a culture and religion that resulted in people who were good enough when nobody was watching that they didn't need a powerful state to micromanage them. In the absence of that, tyranny would be required and inevitable.

One consequence of this train of thought is you're trying to narrowly define what epistemological basis people are allowed to use to come to opinions. Their opinions are only acceptable if they came to their opinions through the exact same method you personally did. What, exactly, privileges your epistemology over others? Why is it that someone who listens to their pastor is somehow less than you, listening to corporate news?

It appears that you're stuck in the modernist fallacy -- assuming that we need to find one grand narrative and stick with that and through that we'll achieve utopia. Democracy is good, so everything must be democracy or it's bad. This is the totalitarian fallacy of modernity, and we have overwhelming evidence it's false, given how many millions of people totalitarian modernity killed.

Your second assumption "Religion is about not having opinions of your own, just following the opinions of the leader and spread the opinions of the leader" is deeply flawed. You're not describing a religion, you're describing a cult, and a cult that isn't represented in western religious history. In orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity, and Protestant Christianity, it is a base axiom that humans have free will and will not always do what their pastor, their cardinal, their bishop, or the pope says. The metaphor of the pastor is that you can't guide a flock with an iron fist, you can only hope to guide them and it's inevitable that some will stray regardless. This way of seeing religious leadership is incompatible with your statement that individuals aren't allowed to have their own opinions.

It is an important counter-point to your formulation that Protestant Christianity exists at all -- it was a schism where people had different opinions to the catholic orthodoxy and instead of just continuing to have the opinions the pope told them to, they created their own sect -- and today there are many different protestant sects of Christianity.

Your "Final Solution to the Religious problem" is wildly authoritarian and hypocritical -- Apparently under your conception of "Democracy", people shouldn't have to agree with their pastor's opinions, but they do have to have the same exact opinions as you or they can be expelled forcibly.

To assume that democracy is always good is also a shaky premise. American democracy formed their new United States with slavery centuries after Europe had essentially banned it under their monarchies and imperial frameworks. Greek democracy had many positives, but it was a slave state and acted deeply dishonorably with respect to the Delian league -- the Parthenon, the symbol of Greek democracy, was effectively built using embezzled funds from the Delian league that were supposed to be used to protect the Hellenic world from the Persians.

Under democracy, there are leaders for sure, though the degree of formalization of that changes based on the form of democracy -- democratic republicanism has democracy, but it is used to elect wise individuals to be the representative leaders. Even in pure democracy, there were people recognized as leaders -- Individuals skilled in rhetoric and logic may not hold formal power, but they could sway the voters to vote in one way or the other, becoming de facto leaders regardless of their formal standing.

The idea that democracy is a telos in and of itself, that it is a moral good in and of itself is to mistake the means for the end -- The end being individuals living a good life.

What you're doing here, which you might not realize because we are the fish made of the water we were born in, is trying to replace theistic dogma with secular dogma -- but the mechanism is equally religious. "Secular religion" might sound like a contradiction in terms, but as an example, Confucianism in China is religious in structure, but non-theistic as when for example you complete a Confucian ritual, it is in pursuit of social harmony rather than because a god or a clergyman told you to.

Your rant is a wonderful screed of the urban monoculture faith -- you took the idea that democracy is good and therefore all things must be good and democratic or they must be destroyed, and really hammered it home. Like a screed about how Jesus loves you and therefore you should work even harder to be a good Christian, it rings hollow for those who don't follow your faith.

Amen.

It hasn't been talked about because they went way down, first at the wholesale commercial level, then at stores. Egg prices dropped 12% in April, the largest drop in 40 years, and wholesale prices dropped a while back but haven't yet been reflected in prices at the store shelf.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5397827/egg-prices-drop-inflation-bird-flu

Inflation in the US in April was at the lowest level since 2021, In large part due to energy going way down and food mostly rising only modestly.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_05132025.htm

Problem is, most of the media have exactly one goal of talking about how horrible things are under the president they didn't want. Be careful relying on both the media and this Lemmy community in particular because if you're relying on the information to make good decisions you'll be directly misled.

It's even arguable that Trump didn't cause the drop in egg prices or inflation and they represent the continuation of trends that were already turning that way, but it's good news so it will not get reported.

The example of eggs is a good example of the dangers of relying on biased sources -- they'll tell you one side of the story but not the other.

It results in both. One of the reasons why they are one of the largest retailers in the world is that they maximize profits by selling lots of stuff by selling it for low prices.

Nextcloud with a 3-2-1 backup strategy is ace. Proxmox can auto-backup, it's slick.

"what did you think would happen? I'm fuckin evil! I killed kids! You think I'm too nice to use some f-slurs?"

Unfortunately most of the western world is simply in a debt spiral they can't get out of, America leading the pack.

The US has two parties, one wants to increase spending, the other generally wants to cut taxes, but neither of them cares about the consequences.

I guess, why would they? Most of them won't live to see those consequences.

Gemini isn't a very smart AI, I don't think it could figure out the parts of a video I care about most.

Well, don't I feel silly. haha

If your blog uses WordPress, there is an activitypub plugin so people can subscribe using mastodon or whatever you've got.

Honestly, I gotta take my licks at the moment, since it looks like the US is relenting particularly with China.

So yeah, it's a couple months of pain for a slightly better(?) tariff deal, but that's not transformative. It isn't going to work like the 1800s to actually build a whole infrastructure.

If things were done like back then, it would hurt in the short and long term but the US would come out stronger for it. Instead it was just some volatility and some mild trade concessions.

I tend to think that even if Trump came up with the best policy on planet earth, nobody on lemmy would admit it, they'd just keep calling him stupid. It seems like things are pretty tribal and so even if something does have some thought behind it, it's required to just keep on the attack so everything is evil and stupid. You can say "no, we'd be honest", but just look at the economics community here -- virtually every post is about how stupid Trump is.

There weren't just tariffs against China, they were just particularly bad to that country because they are a major US strategic rival. Something being created in China being moved to India may not necessarily be the optimal outcome (or even something being "made in the USA" being made in India being the optimal outcome), but as I said in my long post about tariffs, there are multiple things going on with different time constants for each. Immediate consequences are going to look bad because none of the potentially good things can happen on short timespans -- as everyone else has pointed out (and as I pointed out in my post on tariffs), building a factory or moving supply to the US takes a really long time, whereas the immediate negative consequences of tariffs occur almost immediately. That doesn't mean eating short-term pain for long-term benefits is stupid, it just means the pain comes first.

Will Trump's tariffs work -- that's what would make them smart or stupid -- so what's the answer? I don't really know. Widespread tariffs like the tariffs of abomination did work to increase the US manufacturing output in the 1800s despite introducing massive amounts of pain including being a (though certainly not the primary) likely causal element of the civil war. However, we aren't living in the same world as America was in the 1800s. England was more or less self-sufficient back in the 1700s and 1800s, the world is more globalized today, so it might not be so simple to do the same thing again.

Is dramatic action required immediately? Yes. Full-stop.

The US national debt is at 36.8 Trillion dollars at the moment according to US national debt clock. The interest on the national debt is already larger than the US defense budget. The idea that globalization can exist as it does in 20 years without the Americans being able to defend maritime shipping lanes with their absurd army is nearly 0. Moreover, as I mentioned, if war with China occurs and it really looks like there's a chance they try in the next little while, then all the Chinese supply chains immediately shut down.

So the only option is to start taking major actions. Just look at the news feed, it's all filled with how we should have just kept with the status quo, but that's not wise at all. So are the tariffs a dumb idea? In the short term, definitely. Do nothing and you won't hurt anything. But if you've been living in the rust belt you know full well what we've already lost -- the post-war policies have decimated the entire region. And I'm not saying the rust belt can return, but if nobody does anything painful to try to get something somewhere to return, the post-globalization era will be much more painful than it has to be.

One of the biggest moments of globalization failing in history was the Bronze Age Collapse, and it destroyed every ancient civilization in the fertile crescent except Egypt. In the near future of that event entirely new civilizations lived in those regions and some, such as Crete, would be lost to history entirely until a mere 100 years ago due to some exceptional archeological work. That collapse in part caused global supply chains feeding the bronze age to end, and that was a less integrated economy than today.

It isn't just peacetime vs. wartime. It's about good times vs. hard times. The current economic consensus was built in the post-war period where the US was the only country whose manufacturing capacity hadn't been blown to smithereens over two world wars. It made sense at that time because it was a move without a downside -- utilize multilateral free trade and everyone had to buy from you anyway, and if you needed anything from your clients you could get them at low prices without any tariffs. The problem is it isn't 75 years ago anymore -- Europe has a manufacturing base of some design again (with Germany at its heart, ironically), Asia is a manufacturing superpower and not just China, and the US is still following a foreign economic policy that was designed when nobody else was making anything. The US was also funding protecting the planet's shipping lanes to make globalization practical and that worked because it was doing everything for the planet earth, but now it has as high a debt/gdp ratio as it did after the second world war, but it isn't the end of the second world war any longer.

My country is generally fairly left, and we have some massive tariffs against the United States, including over 100% on dairy products, and 45% tariffs on aluminium and steel. All of those tariffs predate Trump's political career. It seems like high protectionist tariffs only are complained against in one direction.

Here's my previous analysis of the tariffs: https://lemmy.world/post/28221500

One thing that you are absolutely mistaken about is that I don't understand how manufacturing works. I'm a pretty old guy, and I've spent my entire career in manufacturing and heavy industry. That's exactly why I think it's important to be trying to rebuild local supply chains.

During covid, and for quite a few years after, parts that claimed to be made in America couldn't be purchased without massive lead times because it turns out that they were heavily reliant on Chinese supply chains. It doesn't matter that you have a factory that can build a vfd for example if you can't get resistors. That matters a lot.

Now you can say that the factories don't exist, and that is absolutely true. The problem is that you need to stop thinking in terms of first order effects and start thinking about knock-on effects. This is been our problem for the past 50 years. We don't have the factories because they shut down because industrial policy was to globalize. And we thought we could get away with that, because for example we could sell our expertise to other countries. The problem is that all the people who had expertise are dying of old age. Their kids are growing up in a world where they never had to go to a factory, they don't know how to build a factory, they don't know how to build anything. This is a big problem, and it's always been a big problem. In the 1700s, Alexander Hamilton presented a report that suggested that tariffs would be useful in helping to produce big enough trade barriers to build the industry on this new continent of america, and there was a lot of trouble caused by such tariffs. At the time the global manufacturing hub was not China but england. England was able to produce materials cheaper and better then the Americans could. The tariffs were effectively keeping out higher quality, lower cost goods. Regardless, this was how the United States ended up with its industrial base that was hollowed out centuries later.

I'm not pretending that tariffs aren't going to cause pain. They caused tremendous pain back in the 1700s and 1800s, and in fact we're likely part of the kindling that helped spark the civil War. Extremely high tariffs with England resulted in England putting retaliatory tariffs on American cotton and other agricultural exports, and so the South tended to suffer while the north benefited. Eventually things came to a head and they ended up needing to come to a compromise of higher tariffs then you might expect, but much lower than what the north was originally implementing. All that being said however, this is long-term thinking. It's what long-term thinking looks like. It's not looking around and saying that factories don't exist today, it's asking how we can make sure that there are factories tomorrow. It isn't talking about how we are relatively peaceful with China today, it's about asking what could happen if we ended up in a war with China tomorrow. This sort of long-term thinking is actually what the West in general needs.

And I think it's important to note, I'm not saying this from the perspective of an American who's going to benefit from these tariffs. I'm saying it from the perspective of a citizen of a country who has been hit hard by US tariffs. It would be better for me if everything was tariffed at zero percent. On the other hand, just because something hurts me doesn't mean I don't understand why it's important.

Most people didn't see it during covid, but even a lot of stuff that was "made in America" basically became unobtainable for a long time afterwards, particularly on the industrial front. If the precursors of most things they do make come from China, then it doesn't matter what America or the west in general makes because for example it becomes difficult to get electronics components like resistors, but also they've basically become the place to go to get molds for plastic manufacturing.

The trade war is just a taste of what that would be like, and adafruit is just one of the casualties.

The fact that it's going to be hard to make a change I think doesn't justify doing nothing. You have to at least try, because maybe you fail but maybe the next administration besides that that wasn't such a bad idea after all and keeps some of those policies in place, the same way that the Biden administration had kept tariffs against China in place.

It's a two-way street here, yes to an extent there is additional risk from building factories in a country where tariffs are rising, but on the other hand if you are not building your things in America then there's a chance that you end up getting priced out of the market. I've already written more than most people on the tariffs, but protectionist tariff policy goes all the way back to Alexander Hamilton in the 1700s.

I know you're just being snarky, but if a company's main purpose is importing parts from China then they suffer as a result of tariffs on China, than it is in fact working as intended.

Millions of Americans in the entire swaths of the country had to watch their homes die as businesses were outsourced. What's left is crime, drugs, and suicide. Like a lot of things, the people on the ground were just told to suck it up and deal with the new normal.

Besides, with China increasingly saber rattling, what happens if they try to take Taiwan, or end up in full scale conflict with India? COVID was a taste of a future that could be upcoming.

It is true that tariffs are paid for by American companies and by American consumers, but it is also true that if it is American companies and American consumers who end up buying the stuff from China and justifying the movement of industries from developed countries to countries like China. People don't talk a whole lot about it, but there were a number of policy changes that were made around the 1970s which were instrumental in hollowing out the rust belt over the past 50 years.

Countries particularly like China can impose their own tariffs, but the reality is that prior to the economic changes in the world wars that made globalization and free trade a good idea, America was its own biggest market. Henry Ford famously increased the pay of his workers and one of the benefits of that was that they could afford the cars that they were building.

Another thing is that tariffs alone don't rebuild industry, but unlike the previous changes they don't hurt. If they're going to stick around in the long term which unfortunately remains to be seen since American democracy happens in four your increments, then companies that were going to invest in China suddenly have a large incentive to invest in America for American markets.

It is true that reducing us trade can affect soft power, but I think that there's a counterpoint that letting things continue as they are will also reduce soft power because racking up debt to buy Chinese goods isn't sustainable in the long term or even the medium term. Moreover, if the United States can't manufacture anything to defend itself, and that conflict with China happens, it look a lot like Europe and it's struggle against Russia.

It could also be the case that this isn't being rolled out in a very nuanced and structured way, and I think that there is legitimacy to that, but as I mentioned before United States politics happens in 4-year increments, and so you have to go hard early.

Oh, sorry, it's Lemmy. "Look at how stupid and bad Cheetos Hitler is!"

They might be, but most AAA games for many years just haven't been worth playing at all, much less forever.

Like 95% of my gaming is pre-pandemic.