Comment by cwal37
5 hours ago
> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.
This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.
And as a fellow Greek man said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics, it does not mean politics won't take an interest in you".
You could equally say "just because you take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics will take an interest in you".
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Well wasnt that a good thing?
After the extermination of Melos they could credibly say they were less responsible for the actions of the polis.
And had a higher chance of deflecting the inevitable revenge on to the non idiotes Athenians.
If one civilization is taking revenge on another I don’t think they would show that much nuance.
For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?
I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.
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Funny seeing people pushing for other people becoming more active in politics with the assumption that “being more involved” means with their political fights, then get worried when the other side grows or intensifies.
I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.
It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.
The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.
Did you buy options to trade on it?
Trump in 1987 in a full page ad in the New York Times: "It's time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. ... Tax these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America's economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."
Trump in 1989 talking to Diane Sawyer: "he would impose a 15% to 20% tariff on Japanese imports".
Trump in 2011 in his book "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again": "I want foreign countries to finally start forking over cash in order to have access to our markets. So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town — and that especially includes China."
Trump at a rally in Vegas in 2011, referring to China: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!"
Trump in 2018: If the Europeans are "not going to treat us fairly... then we're going to tax all those beautiful Mercedes-Benzes that are coming in."
Anyone who didn't think tariffs were coming is a fucking moron.
Too harsh. Trump was president once before, and didn't impose 150% tariffs on anybody. You don't have to be a fucking moron to assume he'll behave similarly in his second presidency. Trump says a LOT of things that he doesn't end up doing.
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I had a university friend who spent hundreds of hours on his YouTube channel whilst the rest of spent hundreds of hours arguing about politics.
He’s now unimaginably successful at YouTube but at least I’m better at predicting the content of tomorrow’s newspapers.
Yeah - you can try to stay out of politics, but no way politics will stay out of your life, simple as that.
> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not
I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.
National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.
Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.
A few examples:
- The Printing Press
- The Steam Engine
- Factories
- The Internal Combustion Engine
- The Internet
- "Smart" Phones
- Social Networks
- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)
All the main retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot/Lowes etc. should band together and pull out the tariff costs as a separate payment line on the bill like sales tax. They shouldn’t include it in the bill and pull it out to be paid at time of sale.
The Trump administration has made it very clear on multiple occasions that any company that does that will find that every law that affects them and has some amount of administrative discretion will suddenly be interpreted maximally against them.
https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/04/30/amazon-wont-b...
They couldn’t realistically take on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and major grocers all at once. They’re just not organized enough. We’ve already seen them give up or flop in court when challenged.
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
There are two different kind of “prediction” mixed up here.
The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.
That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.
If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.
It would have been very hard to find a counterparty that didn’t think Donald Trump was going to raise tariffs prior to his inauguration. He was very transparent about this (though the exact amount has fluctuated pretty wildly). Hard to make money when nobody else is taking the other side of the bet.
Isn't the problem that he can do it single-handedly ? Tariffs are usually something a given gover ing body needs to vote on & they are supposed to be implemented with a reasonable timeline.
Being able to set tarrifs and other stuff basically at random in real-time with no oversight is the main issue IMHO.
Plenty of things are predictable in the sense that one can bucket them. Tariffs were very predictable because we know the pedo has that unilateral lever and talks about wielding it. But who would have predicted that out of all the stupid tariff things that might happen, it would be things like tariffing allies, tariffing uninhabited islands, TACO tariffs, or a giant board with “reciprocal tariffs”? It requires not only predicting specific stupidity, but taking an aggressive position.
Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?
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What I find particularly galling is that he failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson: Maybe he wouldn't have these kind of problems if he hadn't outsourced his manufacturing to China but kept in on-shore instead.
I did wonder how many less issues would have popped up if the lamp wasn’t manufactured in China. Was a little surprised it wasn’t addressed.
The product would be perfect and he would lose $10 with every sale.
Last Trump term, a small business making PC cases locally in california went out of business because of steel tariffs. I'm not sure that local manufacturing in small batches is much safer given there's aluminum and other material tariffs this time too?
Cost was not the only issue addressed by OP.
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Nobody saw this coming. Trump's first term might have been crazy inside US, but outside... it's the least interfering US govt we've had in a while for the world. So as far as geopolitics is concerned, he is right.
“Nobody saw it coming” is a blanket people wrap themselves in that socializes their failure to see it coming.
> Nobody saw this coming.
That simply isn't true. Here's a PDF from December 2024 (before Trump was elected) by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee:
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5c392e02-9eb0...
Throughout 2024, Donald Trump has proposed a series of tariffs on all goods coming from outside the U.S. or on goods from specific countries. His recent proposals include:
• An across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• An across-the-board 20 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• A 60 percent tariff—“or higher”—on all goods imported from China.
• An additional 10% above any additional tariffs on imports from China.
• A 25% tariff on products imported to the United States from Mexico and Canada.
Yes, everbody who was paying any attention at all saw this coming.
First term Trump didn't quite have as many toadies willing to follow him no matter where he takes them. They also weren't quite so willing to blatantly violate the law and dare someone to do anything about it.
Second term plans were all written down for anyone to read but still far too many didn't believe it.
This is a great point. It makes sense now. All you gotta do is come to power. It's not strings attached.
Classic hindsight bias. In fact, you could be paying a lot of attention to politics and still think tariffs were not going to go so high. Here's [1] a betting market that regularly was below 5% chance of tariffs above 40% on Chinese imports in first 100 days of Trump's second term.
https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...
Polymarket isn’t a source for this, lol. Maybe google trends, since there’s no reason to manipulate it. There were also reasons to anticipate the amount of the tariffs, and the absolute stupidity of the tariffs (still reeling from the Heard and McDonald islands tariffs lmao).
If you're so much of a better predictor than Polymarket, then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and make a killing off those manipulators?
This is a strange position to take. Sure, Polymarket has warts, but that doesn't mean it's not a very good source for consensus opinions about the future from the past. Do you think this market was manipulated?
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I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
This isn't about timing the market by being clairvoyant about the timing of a madman's tariffs.
This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.
Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.
It was extremely easy to see them coming, because he talked about the repeatedly.
The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.
He literally said he was gonna:
"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...
(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)
EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...
And he did it last time too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_first_Trump_adm...
“Living under a rock” is the technical term, I believe.
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No, knowing that Trump really likes tariffs is not enough to know specifically how he's going to do it. (And which laws he's going to break to get there.)
Well yeah, but the man is also a pathological liar. I would not blame anyone for not believing he was going to do anything that he said he would do.
They were very much priced in, you had retailers purchasing a lot of imports in Q1 to prepare for them. What wasn’t priced in was the scale, which is what resulted in the initial sell off in April until the administration walked back the steepest rates
let me guess... you don't follow politics either...
You could also say politics is downstream of other forces that are less global and more local. Some people choose to stay aware of their more local forces rather than the grand ones.