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Comment by klipt

13 hours ago

The tariff wars certainly didn't help.

depends, on which side, of the tarrifs an economy happens to be and where, geopoliticaly.

AI, or whatever a mountain of processors churning all of the worlds data will be called later, still has no use case, other than total domination, for which it has brought a kind of lame service to all of the totaly dependent go along to get along types, but nothing approaching an actual guaranteed answer for anything usefull and profitable, lame, lame, infinite fucking lame tedious shit that has prompted most people to.stop.even trying, and so a huge vast amount of genuine human inspiration and effort is gone

  • The thing about tariffs is you’re guaranteed to be on both sides because the other side retaliates.

    Farmers get screwed twice because our tariffs increase the costs of their inputs and the retaliation reduces the value of outputs.

    If I was a farmer I’d be tearing my hair out about now.

    • Not just both sides, but infinite sides, every country border for anything that crosses the border. Making a pencil might requires dozens to thousands of mining/factories in the pencil supply chain and there is taxation at every level!

      Milton Friedman - I, Pencil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws and https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/

      "Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.

      That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."

    • Farmers stand to benefit from the current administration's trade and immigration policy; bailouts are part of the program. Bailouts were given out during the trade wars in 2017-2020. Bailouts are expected to pay out in early 2026 as part of the annual farm aid bill due in November.

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    • Farmers voted for tariffs so they should be happy. What, they didn't think tariffs were going to be bad when just slammed on the table? Maybe they should also think about higher education, to learn how things work beyond high school education.

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