I do agree that he is incredibly detached from reality and probably overestimates his support, but I don’t think that’s a factor in what he’s doing to destroy/fleece the government. I think he overestimated the competency of himself and the kids he’s having do all the coding work.
If a country doesn’t produce their own fighter jets (which only ~20 countries do) but needs to buy some, they don’t have a lot of options. And while it’s private companies that manufacture and sell the jets, the government of the manufacturing country isn’t going to let a business sell weapons of war to just anyone. The US doesn’t want to sell jets that might later get used against the US. So any weapons sales have to be approved by the US government first. Just like they don’t want to sell to an enemy, they don’t want the weapons they agree to sell to get stolen by an enemy. So they include technology (kill switch) than can prevent that from becoming a problem.
People don’t when the system works for them. The problem is when the normal system of government stops working and seems to be more of a hinderance than a benefit. Then people start looking for alternatives. Autocrats present an incredibly simple solution: give me all the power and I will solve all your problems.
Mostly because the only real exposure to electricity the people who came up with the “classical” elements had was lightning. I’m sure they experienced static electricity from time to time, but they probably didn’t associate it with lightning.
From their perspective, lightning is a very brief moment of extreme light, then maybe a fire if they can actually see the impact site. So it seems a lot more closely related to fire than we would suppose.
maybe there is a scientific explanation of why it isn’t
Nothing about the “classical elements” is rooted in what we would understand as science today. It was just people making guesses about how the world around them worked without the rigor of the scientific process. It was little more than wild speculation.
In my experience, a LOT of commercial construction companies prefer to hire inexperienced workers in order to teach workers “their way” of doing things. Residential tends to go for more experienced workers because they don’t have the time or money to train workers.
If you go union, the union will set you up with apprenticeship school and help you find a company to work for.
Doss that mean you had no experience with the topic at the time of hiring?
Yes
I don’t agree.
These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He’s been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.
His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That’s the role Musk has taken on.
Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that’s the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn’t a red herring. He’s not diverting from anything. He’s just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.
That doesn’t even really get around the flaw. It’s a band-aid which might help in the short-term. Even if the government pays to build you a new factory and subsidizes your labor force, unless the tariff is permanent and/or the government subsidies are permanent, your market share is still going to drop once the tariffs are removed or changed. And even if the tariffs and subsidies are promised to be permanent, you can’t rely on that.
Exactly! Imposing a tariff with the expectation that will cause the domestic market to just spawn a new manufacturer is even more asinine than expecting tariffs to increase already existing domestic production.
The rich also have a hell of a lot more to tax. They SHOULD be paying a higher percentage of their wealth in taxes because they’ve gotten a much greater benefit out of the services those taxes pay for than a poor person.
If you make $50k annually and are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $12,500, leaving you with $37,500.
If you make $500k annually are are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $125,000, leaving you with $375,000.
It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to support yourself and your family on $37,500 than it is on $375,000.
More than 50% of consumer spending in the US is done by top 10% of the income bracket. They are willing to pay that extra $1.50 because they’re also the people who own the domestic manufacturers that are reaping massive profits by raising costs commensurate with the tariffs but not having to actually pay the tariffs.
Maybe they lose a little business from low income consumers, but they don’t care that much because they make it up from the higher sale price to higher income consumers. The poor get fucked.
So there’s the way a tariff is meant to work in theory, and then there’s the way they actually work in practice.
In theory:
The whole supposed purpose of a tariff is to make foreign manufactured goods more expensive than domestic competition so that domestic consumers have a price incentive to buy from domestic manufacturers. To that end, the point of a tariff is to raise prices on foreign goods. The government imposes a tax on the company which imports the foreign product, making the importer’s costs go up. That importer passes on the cost of the tariff to the wholesaler/retailer by increasing their sale price of the imported product. The retailer then passes that higher cost on to the consumer in the form of a higher retail price. The consumer then has to pay more for the foreign product.
The goal here is to raise the price of the foreign product above that of the domestic competition so that people buy domestic. Overtime, the increased sales for the domestic product is supposed to increase revenue enough that the company expands operations, hires more workers, builds more factories, etc.
Following the theory, in the short-term the effect on common people is to raise prices of foreign goods. Since most people aren’t looking at where their products are made, they just buy whatever is cheap, the effect is to raise prices on the cheapest goods. The lowest priced option in that product category gets more expensive. Over the medium-to-long term, the domestic manufacturers expanding operations is supposed to create more jobs and increase revenue for government. More jobs is supposed to create a more competitive labor market, which is supposed to raise wages. This is also supposed to increase government revenue. With more revenue, the government should be able to provide more/better services…
HOWEVER, Tariffs almost never work out in practice how the theory suggest they should.
In practice:
There’s one giant flaw to the whole theory behind tariffs. It presupposes that domestic manufacturers will keep their prices unchanged from before the tariffs are introduced AND make large capital investments to expand operations. But this almost never happens. Before the tariff is introduced, there’s a (relatively) stable economic equilibrium. All manufacturers have set up their operations for their share of the market. If they are currently selling 10,000 widgets per day, their operations are set up to produce roughly that amount. If their competition’s prices jump because a tariff has been imposed, they don’t have the capacity to rapidly increase production. If orders jump from 10,000 per day to 100,000 per day, they can’t easily fill them all. And expanding operations is an expensive prospect without guaranteed payoff. What if the tariff is dropped in 6 months and the competition’s price drops back down. Now you’re set up to produce 100,000 widgets per day, but sales have dropped back down to 10,000. Now they’re stuck with new factories, more employees, etc geared towards producing a quantity of product they can’t sell.
It’s safer and easier to NOT expand operations. So what happens almost every single time is that the domestic manufacturers increase prices a similar amount as the foreign competition. They don’t have to pay a tariff tax, though, so the domestic companies just pocket the increased revenue resulting from charging higher prices. Everyone’s market share stays the same, but consumers end up paying more and the rich get richer.
I’ve been with the same company for 17 years. I dropped out of college right before the Great Recession started. I had no prospects or ambition other than paying rent and keeping by stomach full. My dad sent me an ad from the classified section of the paper (actual physical print paper) for an electrician job.
I was impressed initially that the company did not lay off a single worker through the entire Great Recession. In fact, they promised every employee your full 40 hours every week regardless if they had enough work for it. There were months on end I was just sitting in the company office waiting for them to get more work, but at least I was getting paid 8 hours each day. They also paid for me to go to school for my electrical license and offered pretty good insurance.
I started as an entry level pre-apprentice, worked my way through the apprenticeship program and got my journeyman electrical license. I was a foreman for about 9 years before they promoted me into the office as a Project Manager.
At least with Reddit, banning 3rd party apps was just a byproduct. The overall point of paywalling their API was to prevent LLM AIs from training their models on Reddit user content without paying Reddit to do so.
Obligatory correction that capitalism =/= free markets and free markets =/= capitalism. Markets existed long before capitalism and will exist long after it.
Capitalism very specifically describes the economic relationships between owners of capital and workers. Without the exploitative relationship, it’s not capitalism.
Up until the liberal revolutions of the 18th/19th centuries, permanent global trade war was kinda the norm. People in different countries still bought and sold things to each other, but on an enormously smaller scale than today (even taking into account far smaller population sizes and difficulties in transportation).
Before capitalism became the dominant economic model for pretty much the entire planet, the standard economic model was some form of mercantilism. This is an economic system by which every country tries to maximize exports and minimize imports. The idea was that each country tried to be as wholly self-sufficient as possible. To this end, countries put all kinds of barriers in place of international trade. In many instances, if a product was produced domestically, it was illegal to import it at all, for any price. In other cases there were extremely high tariffs (like several hundred percent) of imported goods. Countries would even go so far as to try to poach industries from other countries. New technologies which made industry cheaper or more efficient were guarded as state secrets. Everyone was always trying to limit the amount of international trade wherever possible. As European colonial imperialism got rolling, the standard was that each colony could ONLY trade with the metropole (home country in Europe). So, to give an American example, the Virginia colony was not allowed to directly trade with the Massachusetts colony, even though both were owned by England. If someone in Massachusetts wanted to buy a product produced in Virginia, that product would have to first be shipped back to England, then to Massachusetts, paying tariffs and duties each way. And if someone in Virginia wanted to trade with someone in, say, Spanish Florida or French Canada, that was strictly illegal under English, Spanish, and French law.
Today the dominant model is that each country focuses on the industries that they do exceptionally well at (the larger a country’s economy is, the more industries they tend to focus on), while minimizing or even neglecting industries which they don’t do well at. For example, a lot of poorer countries might focus on low-skilled manufacturing and agriculture while wealthier countries might focus on higher end manufacturing and services (and a lot of this is driven by the national self-interest of wealthy nations through economic imperialist institutions like the IMF and World Bank). The idea being, I do what I’m good at and sell that to the world while I buy what I’m bad at from people who are better at it.
To this end, the idea of free trade became very important to international politics over the 18th and 19th centuries. This is the idea that there should be a few artificial barriers (read "regulations and taxes/tariffs) on trade as possible in order to facilitate the most efficient economic system as possible. Wealthy European imperialist powers began to recognize that they could get raw resources (food, minerals, etc) from colonized places far cheaper than they could be produced in Europe. Simultaneously, they recognized that if they could see the higher-quality manufactured goods in made in Europe to people living in other countries then they could make a much larger profit than when trade was limited to just the domestic market.
A big part of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries was aimed at breaking down these trade barriers. This isn’t to say that all tariffs and import restrictions disappeared. They never did. But they were massively reduced and it became the global standard to preference a reduction in duties unless there was some extenuating circumstance why you shouldn’t. Economic hardships like depressions tended to see a rise in economic protectionism as blaming foreign industry for your own economy failing was an easy scapegoat.
The push away from free trade came in the early 20th century along with the rise in competing world ideologies. It had always been the case that even free-trade focused nations (the US and UK being the biggest historical examples) would limit trade with countries they were at war with or expected to be at war with soon. In the run up to WW1 there was a lot of restrictions in trade between, for example, France and Germany as the two countries fully expected to be at war at some point. Then, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, communist nations tried to fully block all trade with capitalist nations, and vice versa. This was driven not only by economic concerns, but primarily by ideological concerns. Cold War propaganda (on both sides) preached about how inferior the other side was and how terrible life was for people on the other side. Trade had a huge potential to put the lie to that propaganda, so it was restricted.
So, to summarize my this long rambling post, for most of “civilized” human history, what we’re calling trade war today was just the standard. International trade existed, but was limited as much as possible wherever possible. After the liberal revolutions made free trade the global standard, trade wars as the discrete events we think of now became possible. They pretty much always looked like what we’re seeing now with the US and Canada. One side slaps a tariff or restriction on trade from the other side. That other side does a similar reciprocal action in return. The first side does another action in retaliation to that retaliation. Etc etc.