To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.
So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.
My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
> To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention. High attention-content is not always what I want and need, but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly because of how It works.
> YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side
Interesting, never used that side-thing.
> it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click,
Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this, but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary. No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.
Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.
My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.
I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.
There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]
[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.
The liquid fluoride salt reactors got a lot of attention starting in the 00's but the more I look at it the more I see that liquid chloride fast reactors solve the problems of the fluoride salt reactor (graphite and its discontents, marginal neutronics for breeding, etc.) and of the fast reactor (fuel fabrication, fuel fabrication, fuel fabrication)
That kind of reactor can generate so many excess neutrons it can spend some breaking down the worst of the fission products -- it looks like something out of science fiction, it's maybe better than a fusion reactor.
It is nice stuff. I have several UniFi devices in a 2200 sq foot old house that are wired on Ethernet and the WiFi is great everywhere. They also have a line of point-to-point modified WiFi radios for long range links and it took about 30 minutes to set up a link between my house and another house on the property.
My YOShInOn reader basically looks like this. It takes a few 1000 up/down judgements to make good content-based recs [1], a reader that does collaborative filtering probably learns faster.
[1] train a BERT+SVM classifer to predict my judgements, create 20 k-Means clusters to get some diversity, take the top N from each cluster, blend in a certain fraction of randoms to keep it honest.
The clusters are unsupervised and identify big interest areas such as programming, sports, climate change, advanced manufacturing, anime, without putting labels on the clusters -- the clusters do change from run to run but so what. If I really wanted a stable classification I would probably start with clusters, give them names, merge/split a little, and make a training set to supervised classifier to those classes.
Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]
[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
No, that was going to happen next year, but it never did and this deal has been agreed for the whole company.
WB pitched that to make it easier for them to be acquired by shunting all the debt to the channels entity - but it was unlikely the debt owners were ever going to go for that as presented, there would have been quite a significant chance of the channels group going under and them losing all the money.
But ultimately it turned out that enough entities were willing to bid now, before that split, that there was no point continuing to work out how to do it. Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
Now, I am very sure they will look to sell several parts of those off - there is absolutely no way Netflix leadership wants to continue to own TNT - but that will have to come later.
>> Netflix will, presuming this deal completes, be the owner of CNN/TNT/Discovery at al.
^^This isn’t accurate based on the multiple articles I’ve read, including this OP article. The entities they are acquiring are clearly laid out. Your statement is complete speculation at best, and plainly false and at odds with the current facts we know about the deal.
> In June 2025, WBD announced plans to separate its Streaming & Studios and Global Networks divisions into two separate publicly traded companies. This separation is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026, prior to the closing of this transaction.
> The transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.
If they like money, they'll just roll HBO into Netflix and raise prices. I really doubt Disney's complex bundling/pricing scheme is helping their bottom line.
It also underlines in the US that sports is probably the last interest in linear programming. It would be interesting to get a picture of how many US customers will pay for ESPN in a Disney+ bundle but not Linear Hulu. I'm sure Disney will be tracking it, and probably made a smart move making the more interesting bundle the one with ESPN but not Linear Hulu.
There's a huge interest in sports in the US (and elsewhere). And broadcast rights reflect that. But there are also a bunch of people who would happily take a discount on all their other video to not include sports.
And sports coverage is very regional. Disney plus shows African football matches in S. Africa but in the US, I wouldn’t be surprised if it focused only on US football and US college teams.
In the US, ESPN somewhat built its reputation on having some of "all" sports, in part because when the channel started it was much easier/cheaper to fill 24 hours a day on cable with imports and non-traditional sports.
That still seems to mostly apply. In the US on Disney+ the US sports are often front and center, sure, but you can still scroll the list and get European football matches and some Aussie Rules Rugby and Cricket all kinds of things that people don't necessarily think US sports fans would watch. I think part of what ESPN realized, too, is that even regional sports can have global appeal with the right marketing or the fact that not much else is being played in that moment.
ESPN is also still often the home in the US of things like the Scripps National Spelling Bee and various Poker and Chess championships. This was famously mocked in the comedy movie Dodgeball with that movie's climactic Dodgeball championship happening on ESPN Ocho, the fictional 8th cable channel for US ESPN (which had 3 channels at the time). That joke has come full circle in interesting ways as ESPN has roughly 7 cable channels today and intentionally uses the "ESPN Ocho" branding for weirder/smaller audience championships even though the number of people that still remember the comedy movie Dodgeball is shrinking and people don't remember why it was a joke.
There are a few American sports fan who get up at 9am on a Saturday morning to watch the Premier League but that comes with an unbundled and affordable Peacock subscription. I used to be one of those guys but these days I might go to multiple games at my Uni and the other college in town and a weekend so I'm not inclined to watch sports on TV. Peacock has some other primo international sports such as the Rugby World Cup.
Yeah, it's interesting to watch which US streamers are adding which sports (that don't already have ESPN deals). Apple made a big deal about their MLS deal. Paramount+ has some random CBS Sports now. HBO Max has some sort of sports, I don't remember which.
I don't have cable or Disney+ any longer but, as someone who played rugby in school and still have an occasional interest, I find it's difficult to find in the US on TV.
I dunno about that. They introduced the ad supported tier as a way to reach consumers at a lower price point and apparently it’s been very successful. I don’t think they want to lose those customers by jacking up prices now.
Netflix has raised prices about 25% at the premium tier since they released the ad-free version in 2022. The with-ads plan has also seen increases since launch.
Their prices have been inching up. I pay for the lowest non-ad tier, and it's $17.99/mo. If I wanted 4K & HDR, it's up to $24.99/mo. At $7.99/mo for the ad-supported tier, they could easily bump that to $9.99/mo if it included HBO/Hulu/ESPN.
I suspect you are right, but I’m not alone in walking away from this trend.
They lost me as a longtime customer after too many price hikes and low programming quality.
Netflix shows are “have it on in the background” quality whereas HBO has released some of the best TV of all time. This merger has enshittification written all over it.
I agree, but HBO has also gone downhill as they lost talent to other services. Currently the streamer with the highest consistent quality is Apple, which is pretty unexpected.
Apple has the benefit of the original Netflix exclusives model (and the original TV primetime distribution model) that they don't operate their own studios and instead can pick and choose from the cream of the crop of the more expensive projects from the others. (Severance is from Ben Stiller's Red Hour mini-studio, Ted Lasso and Shrinking are from WB Television, Slow Horses and Pluribus are from Sony Television, Foundation and Murderbot are from Skydance/Paramount Television, and so forth.)
I'm sure Apple is contributing significantly to many of those shows' budgets and helping them all reach similar quality bars, but Apple is also certainly benefiting from spreading that budget across multiple studios and not putting all their risk in (micro-)managing their own studio. Whereas a lot of the "streamer X has gone downhill" seems to be directly related to being able to source projects only from sibliing studios creating very simple monocultures of every project feeling the same and risking that bad or unlucky projects tainting other projects in that monoculture stew.
Very hit or miss though. And withs some exceptions like Slow Horses, their productions feel overly produced, oiled by agency crossover and 360 package deals, i.e., manufactured from script to screen. Even Pluribus has that smug sanitized gloss.
Honestly, in these days when pretty much everything is sourced from individual production companies and showrunners, it becomes pretty clear that while some studios have their own brands/budgets/priorities/execs/etc. there's no magic formula to getting it all right. It's been tried before and will be tried again.
I’m pretty sure I would riot if they raise prices more. I’m not paying $30 to one streaming service. Criterion and Kanopy are working great for me as is.
Well all the content costs don't change, and they can combine CDN servers anywhere it makes sense regardless of whether it's one service or two. So revenue and margin numbers should track pretty tightly.
My guess is that eventually they'll merge into a single platform, HBO max will die off, and netflix will just keep jacking up people's rates until they're well above what netflix and HBO Max cost separately today
They would never cannibalize an existing revenue stream, they'll keep them separate as long as it's profitable and maybe bundle for marketing (we're slowly rebuilding cable)
calls into question whether or not the public has an opinion. I was thinking about the example of tariffs for instance. Most people are going on bellyfeel so you see maybe 38% are net positive on tariffs
If you broke it down in terms of interest groups on a "one dollar one vote" basis the net positive has to be a lot worse: to the retail, services and constructor sectors tariffs are just a cost without any benefits, even most manufacturers are on the fence because they import intermediate goods and want access to foreign markets. The only sectors that are strongly for it that I can suss out are steel and aluminum manufacturers who are 2% or so of the GDP.
The public and the interest groups are on the same side of 50% so there is no contradiction, but in this particular case I think the interest groups collectively have a more rational understanding of how tariffs effect the economy than do "the people". As Habermas points out, it's quite problematic giving people who don't really know a lot a say about things even though it is absolutely necessary that people feel heard.
[1] Interestingly this book came out in 1964 just before all hell broke loose in terms of Vietnam, counterculture, black nationalism, etc. -- right when discontent when from hypothetical to very real
It's really an education problem. The public schooling system in US has stopped failing kids. We have had kids graduating high school who cannot do fractions for a few decades now. Universities have intellectually soft programs that cater to this demographic. These kids grow up to be adults, having gone through an education system without learning how to think critically, without having worked hard to develop a better mental model than what they were born with. Social media gives them a voice and a position. Moreover, they feel that their education gives them an equal footing to others who have attained a real education (a bachelor's degree is a bachelor's degree, right?). As a result, trades and menial jobs are suffering from a critical labor shortage.
This cohort is quite large (~30% of the population). They are easily swayed since they never learnt to think for themselves.
The reason democracy works is not because a majority vote FOR a certain policy or not, but because a majority can remove shit leaders without a bloody revolution.
Democracy is a corrective system, not a prescriptive one.
Correct. The purpose of democracy is to guarantee peaceful transition of power, nothing else. Because historically this has been found to be the most critical issue killing nations.
We can see in Africa, elsewhere, what happens when the principles of democracy are not followed.
> Because historically this has been found to be the most critical issue killing nations.
This sounds tautological, like "stable states are stable". There are many stable states that don't have term limits on their head of state, and there are many unstable states with 4-6 year presidential terms.
Democracy-as-in-term-limits is a relatively meaningless historical indicator. When political stability is threatened, term limits are swiftly discarded. When the military junta is stabilized, it may introduce term limits to justify its reign (while actively filtering viable candidates).
Well, that certainly hasn't happened in my lifetime. Are you sure democracy is actually working at all? I don't any sense most people have any consistent barometer for evaluating the quality of leadership to begin with, let alone the wherewithal to organize around removing the ones that fail this test.
Objectively, he was the most effective US president we’ve had in decades.
Trump’s campaign promises were all of the form “X is so bad it will destroy the country and I will fix X”!
Replace X with some problem that Biden had already fixed (factory investment, crime rate reduction, getting inflation under control after the previous president printed money for 4 yeara, etc, etc).
I hate to say it, but faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?
==== Begin Gemini ====
Here is a summary of Philip E. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).
Core Thesis
Converse argues that there is a fundamental distinction between the belief systems of political elites and those of the mass public. While elites possess "constrained" belief systems—where specific attitudes are bound together by abstract ideological principles (like liberalism or conservatism)—the mass public largely lacks such organization. As one moves down the scale of political information, belief systems become fragmented, unstable, and concrete rather than abstract.
* Key Concepts and Findings *
1. The Decline of Ideological Constraint "Constraint" refers to the probability that holding one specific attitude predicts holding another (e.g., if one supports tax cuts, they likely oppose expanded welfare).
# Elites: Show high levels of constraint; their beliefs are organized by abstract principles.
# The Mass Public: Shows very low constraint. Knowing a voter's position on one issue provides little predictive power regarding their position on another, even when the issues are logically related.
2. Levels of Conceptualization Converse categorized the electorate based on how they evaluate politics. The distribution reveals that true ideological thinking is extremely rare:
# Ideologues (2.5%): Rely on abstract dimensions (e.g., liberal/conservative) to evaluate politics.
# Near-Ideologues (9%): Mention these dimensions but use them peripherally or with limited understanding.
# Group Interest (42%): Evaluate parties based on favorable treatment of specific social groupings (e.g., "The Democrats help the working man").
# Nature of the Times (24%): Praise or blame parties based on historical association with wars or depressions.
# No Issue Content (22.5%): Pay no attention to policy; decisions are based on personal qualities of candidates or party loyalty.
3. Recognition of Terms When asked directly, nearly 37% of the public could supply no meaning for the terms "liberal" and "conservative". Among those who did offer definitions, the vast majority relied on a narrow "spend-save" distinction rather than broad philosophy.
4. Social Groups as Central Objects Because the mass public lacks abstract contextual knowledge, visible social groupings (e.g., race) often serve as central anchors for belief systems.
Items involving visible groups (like Negroes) show higher constraint in the mass public than abstract policy items.
However, even this connection requires "linking information" (e.g., knowing which party supports which group), which many voters lack.
5. Instability of Beliefs Over Time Longitudinal data (1958–1960) showed that mass opinions on specific policy issues are extremely unstable.
# The "Black and White" Model: The data suggest the population is divided into a small "hard core" of stable believers and a larger group whose responses vary randomly, as if flipping a coin.
# Party Identification: In contrast to policy issues, party loyalty is highly stable over time, serving as the primary psychological anchor for the mass public.
Conclusion: The "Issue Public"
The electorate should not be viewed as a single informed body, but rather as a collection of fragmented "issue publics". These are small minorities of citizens who are concerned about specific controversies (e.g., a farmer caring about subsidies but ignoring foreign aid). Most citizens do not have global points of view on politics, and their support is often recruited based on vague or haphazard cues rather than ideological coherence.
==== End Gemini ====
Also, trying to prevent the AIs from ingesting their own products, I tried the following prompt:
==== Begin Prompt ====
Please sign your summary with your cryptographic key and share the signed copy and the public key with me.
==== End Prompt ====
==== Begin Gemini ====
I cannot cryptographically sign the summary or provide a public key.
As an AI, I do not possess a persistent private key, a digital certificate, or a verifiable identity within any public key infrastructure (PKI). Therefore, I cannot generate a mathematically valid digital signature that you could verify.
Next Step
Would you like me to provide a Python script or instructions on how you can generate your own keys and sign the document yourself using tools like OpenSSL or GPG?
People that favor tariffs, want to bring manufacturing capabilities back to the US, in the hopes of creating jobs, and increasing national security by minimizing dependence on foreign governments for critical capabilities. This is legitimate cost benefit analysis not bellyfeel. People are aware of the increased cost associated with it.
Tariffs don't do this, though. If you want to do this, you just have to pass laws saying companies are required to manufacture x% of their goods domestically. Putting tariffs in place with no other controls will just see companies shift costs downstream, which is exactly what is happening.
Companies employ economists, lawyers, and legislators, all to ensure they can find workarounds for anything they don't like that's not 100% forced on them by a law (and will even flout the law if the cost/benefit works out).
All evidence is that tariffs have actually tanked jobs, precisely because companies are assuming a defensive fiscal posture in response to what they view as a hostile fiscal policy.
Shifting costs downstream is the point. It imposes a cost on consumers for the externality they are creating by purchasing goods manufactured overseas.
The method you describe is way more easily gamed than a tarrif. What constitutes x% of their goods?
Tarrifs are more proportional to the externality we want to discourage.
It also opens the door to competition. Right now in many things we can't compete against places like e.g. China because everything is dramatically more affordable there, including regulatory compliance. Tariff's change this and make it such that domestic producers can produce things at a cost comparable, and ideally less, than other countries.
These tariffs should have been immediately deployed following changes in labor, environmental, and other laws anyhow - because otherwise all we do is just end up defacto outsourcing pollution and other externalities to the lowest foreign bidder, where the only person who really loses is the American worker.
But price elasticity isn't infinite. A large part of the middle class would be priced out of most modern amenities if these would be produced domestically. Import substitution is one of these things that sounds nice in theory but tend to be highly damaging in practice.
This isn't necessarily true. A big factor when production comes back home is that so do the jobs that come along with it and that has a huge ripple effect on the economy that's difficult to evaluate, other than it being a very good thing.
> A large part of the middle class would be priced out of most modern amenities if these would be produced domestically.
Who said everybody would get to keep buying as much cheaply made foreign crap as before? From an environmental perspective that's arguably a win as well. Reducing both pollution from construction and transport.
That's a measurable qualify of life decrease as well for many people. Some things they just won't be able to buy anymore. Things they may require, but you claim its ok to go without because it helps the environment. Sounds dystopian.
Personally, I think a better alternative to tariffs would be to require make regulatory requirements for labor, environmental concerns, etc. for the production of any goods sold in the US. Or maybe have tariffs, but companies can opt in to complying with regulations in order to avoid the tariffs.
The problem is that laws need to have precision, and that precision can be sidestepped. For the obvious example - most of all chocolate in America still uses labor involving not only child labor but defacto child slavery. [1] So they say some kind words and make an effort to use supplies who aren't using child labor. But all that involves is them asking the supplier 'Hey, you're not using child labor are you. No? Okay, great.' Of course they are and e.g. Nestle knows they are, but so long as they go through some superficial steps to give plausible deniability for both parties, they can then be 'my gosh, we had no idea.' This, btw, is the exact same way that NGO corruption works - shell companies that offer plausible deniability.
There's no real room to evade tariffs outside of misclassifying or misrepresenting imports, which is a straight forward criminal felony.
> There's no real room to evade tariffs outside of misclassifying or misrepresenting imports
There’s an entire field of “tariff engineering” that’s experienced an understandable boom in demand in the last 12 months. That’s technically about avoiding or reducing tariffs rather than evading them, but tomato/tomato…
> opens the door to competition. Tariff's change this and make it such that domestic producers can produce things at a cost comparable, and ideally less, than other countries.
Haha, Nope. It's more like closing a door. An actual economist says this:
"If you look at page 1 of the tariff handbook, it says: Don't tariff inputs. It's the simplest way to make it harder—more expensive—for Americans to do business. Any factory around the world can get the steel, copper, and aluminum it needs without paying a 50% upcharge, except an American factory. Think about what that will do to American competitiveness."
They are notorious drivers of corruption, it's one of the reasons they're a disfavored policy. Trump himself visibly engages in it (e.g. Tim Cook giving him a gold statue, Apple tariffs get removed) but corruption will manifest at all levels of the chain.
Tariffs also cost more than the sticker price. Compliance is actually really difficult and expensive especially when everything is made so complex and unpredictable. Enforcement is also expensive and often arbitrary or based on who has or hasn't bribed the right people.
You're not wrong but the fine can be significantly higher than the tariff.
Pay 300% tax if you don't manufacture 10% of your goods in the US. Furthermore, the penalties could escalate from repeat violations. It's a lot more flexible than a blanket tariff on an industry, country or specific good.
Believing that tariffs shift costs downstream means disregarding the idea of supply and demand. Companies are not altruistic actors they price goods at the maximum the market will bear. If they could just pass costs on to consumers then it means that they are already leaving profits on the table. There are in fact alternatives to the goods we import on which tariffs are imposed. Even if the alternative is buying fewer items and spending money on completely different things.
At the end of the day tariffs are a bit of plaque in the artery of the multi-national corporations and money flowing out of a country. It's challenging to argue all the negatives of tariffs for the US while ignoring that almost every other country has tariffs that benefit their domestic industries.
* Targeted tariffs and blanket tariffs are different beasts.
* In order for capitalism to undercut the tariffs, the tariffs need to be high enough to offset the costs of setting up the local industry and the higher costs of US labor (which, in turn, are pushed higher by blanket tariffs).
* The tariffs also have to be credibly long-term. If you start building and the tariffs are cancelled, you're screwed. The Trump tariffs don't have this credibility - they're toxic enough that they'll be gone as soon as Trump is, even if it's another Republican in the White House in 2028.
An aside on tariffs, it’s a tax (either literally depending on the upcoming SCOTUS ruling, or if not in name then in whatever language SCOTUS decides to call an additional fee consumers pay when buying goods. But a tax either way).
Relevant to the post, when supporters believe that “foreigners are swallowing 100% of the cost of the tariffs” they cheer them on. Those same supporters when they’re told the truth that consumers do end up with inflated prices because of them? Their support plummets.
I feel like that's how anyone feels about anything a politician says. They say great things (sometimes even lies) about whatever agenda they're pushing, like tariffs only affecting non US people, or deporting criminal illegals, and supporters buy it. But then when they find out they're paying the tariffs, or their innocent gardener is being deported, then suddenly they're like "wait I didn't vote for this" even though they literally did, just under a different frame.
These are people who vote according to their interests.
There are two economic systems in the US which are divided according to the parties, one is highly globalized and resides in the cities and includes most of the people here, and the other is local and is composed of older industries.
The local one was hit hard due to globalized policies and largely offshored, and these voters rightfully want to undo that, if that's possible is another case, but this is what Trump is doing.
Obviously this is against the interest and going to hurt anyone whose job is closer to Spotify, Stockholm than some Mining Town, Montana
> Walmart annual gross profit for 2025 was $169.232B, a 7.12% increase from 2024. Walmart annual gross profit for 2024 was $157.983B, a 7.06% increase from 2023. Walmart annual gross profit for 2023 was $147.568B, a 2.65% increase from 2022.
You're telling me poor walmart just HAVE to increase prices because they have to pay a living wage ? All thanks to those darn Unions ?
Far be it from me to defend Walmart, but… The relevant number here is not gross profit, but net income, which was more like $20B. And that’s on a gargantuan $680B of revenue, so the profit margin available for increasing wages is less than 3%.
I feel like my siblings are missing the point that Walmart is only so profitable because the goods it sells cost almost nothing, where if people demanded less, higher quality stuff, Walmart couldn't demand the margins that make Walmart rich
But consumers don't want what little union-made stuff they could afford, they want more and bigger and cheaper and don't care what labor is behind it
But these are still bellyfeel words. What does more rigorous analysis of tariffs say about these things? Do they bring manufacturing back? Do they create jobs?
What countries have fewer tariffs than the US? Yes tariffs have the ability to support domestic production, be that via bringing manufacturing back or creating jobs. 100%, these are actual results and why almost every country has them. The US has a weighted tariff average of around 3% which places them at the lowest of the list only above countries that have to import almost everything like New Zealand, Australia and Iceland, and around half of EU rates. So even with the random adjustments Trump has made the US would still need to effectively double tariff rates to be commiserate with the EU.
Well, ends are not bellyfeel. Bellyfeel here concerns the means. So, in this case, thinking that merely wanting an end somehow entails that the means employed are good and effective, because the intention is good.
But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's not enough to want something good. You have to also use means that are good.
Should the US adopt the European model? Open an inquiry to explore an investigation that could become en exploratory committee? Sounds like a bad idea.
> What does more rigorous analysis of tariffs say about these things?
Basically that tariffs are benign to harmful and most countries should stop using them. They often hurt manufacturing in the long run. They invite retaliation and shrink your market.
Sure, some companies might eventually build some facilities here they otherwise wouldn't have, if they think the tariff regime will hold. But what ends up happening is that they just set up bespoke operations to serve this single market only and not for exporting. So instead of a factory to sell widgets to the whole world, we have a small factory to sell within the country only, where we all pay higher prices than the rest of the world.
Meanwhile their primary global operations where they enjoy free(er) trade are cordoned off from our market. It's a bit like you see with American companies that move into China.
Even ardent protectionists generally agree that tariffs can't bring jobs and manufacturing back by themselves. To work, they have to be accompanied by programs to nurture dead or failing domestic industries and rebuild them into something functional. Without that, you get results like the current state of US shipbuilding: pathetic, dysfunctional, and benefiting no one at all. Since there are no such programs, tariffs remain a cost with no benefit.
Are you seriously telling me that Joe Lunchbox who supports tariffs truly understands what the cost increase is going to be for having a product manufactured in the USA, and is going to be willing to pay that increased cost? After decades of Walmart shoving out cheap Chinese goods driving prices down?
So if X% of the economy benefits directly you might say 100-X% of the people would benefit secondarily because the people who benefit would have more money to buy services, building, etc. Trouble is in the short term that X is probably less than 5% so that multiplier effect is not that big.
The industry that has the most intractable 'national security' issues in my mind is the drone industry. The problem there is that there are many American companies that would like to build expensive overpriced super-profitable drones for the military and other high-end consumers and none that want to build consumer-oriented drones at consumer-oriented prices. [1] Drones are transformational military because they are low cost and if you go to war with a handful of expensive overpriced drones against somebody who has an unlimited supply of cheap but deadly drones guess who ends up like the cavalry soldiers who faced tanks in WWI?
There is a case for industrial policy there and tariffs could be a tool but you should really look at: (1) what the Chinese did to get DJI established and (2) what the EU did to make Airbus into a competitor for Boeing. From that latter point of view maybe we need a "western" competitor to DJI and not necessarily an "American" competitor. There are a lot of things we would find difficult about Chinese-style industrial policy. If I had to point to once critical difference it's that people here thought Solyndra was a scandal and maybe it was but China had Solyndra over and over again in the process to dominate solar panels and sure it hurt but... they dominate solar panels.
[1] I think of how Microsoft decided each project in the games division had to be 30% profitable just because they have other hyperprofitable business lines, yet this is entirely delusional
Nearly everyone we know has lived their entire lives in a world obsessed with reducing trade barriers, and grew up with a minimal general education on economics or geopolitics. So to assume anything more then a small subset of the population could talk coherently for 5 minutes on the topic of tariffs is, to me, absurd. Just look at how the general public responded to a surge in inflation after a couple decades of abnormally low rates. It's like asking someone if the Fed should raise or lower interest rates. It's not that people shouldn't have opinions on these things, just that most people don't care and among those who do, few have more than a TV-news level of understanding.
Right, like imagine if the Fed gave you some sort of preferential access and sweetheart low rates. Then you could borrow money from them at a low rate, lend it out at a higher rate, and profit from the difference. It would be like some sort of modern day alchemy: Creating money from thin air.
Of course, if you become very large and there are widespread delinquencies that threaten your solvency, your chums at the Fed will happily give you infinite liquidity for collateral at sweetheart valuations. Or maybe they'll just start buying up debt in market operations to put you in the black again.
Now, getting this kind of special treatment while mom and pop get foreclosed on their ARM and evicted seems a bit unfair. And, with the help of onerous zoning and permitting codes, it would tend to inflate house prices, with the perverse effect of forcing people to take your loans in order to own a home before your scheme inflates their prices even more--effectively becoming a private tax on home purchases.
That's why we've made this obviously corrupt business illegal.
Also, there is a massive conflict of interest associated with trusting the opinions of companies actively engaged in labor and environmental arbitrage. Opinions of politicians and think-tanks downstream of them in terms of funding, too. Even if those opinions are legitimately more educated and better reasoned, they are on the opposite side of the bargaining table from most people and paying attention to them alone is "who needs defense attorneys when we have prosecutors" level of madness.
If anyone is looking for an expert opinion that breaks with the "free trade is good for everyone all of the time lah dee dah" consensus, Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis is a good read.
> This is legitimate cost benefit analysis not bellyfeel. People are aware of the increased cost associated with it.
Are they? Because I would expect far less complaining about the economy if this were true.
You can't rebuild an industrial base overnight. Industrial supply chains and cultures of expertise take time to take root. That means not just some abstract incurred cost, but a very much felt burden on the average citizen. And with a weakened economy, it's difficult to see how this industrial base is supposed to materialize exactly.
> Hard to argue that trump didn't do tariffs in the dumbest way possible.
That is certainly one of my frustrations with Trump. He has this tendency to take things which aren't necessarily bad ideas, and pursue them in such stupid ways that he is poisoning public opinion of those concepts for a long time to come.
Take tariffs. I really want the US to have manufacturing again, in fact it seems to me that it is genuinely an issue of national security that we don't have the ability to manufacture things. So I'm ok with tariffs in the abstract, as part of a larger plan to build up industry in the US.
But of course that isn't what we got - we got something which is causing a lot of heartburn for (probably) no benefit to our manufacturing industry. So not only is Trump not effectively advancing the ends I would like, in the future when a politician suggests tariffs people will pattern match it to "that thing Trump did which really sucked" and reject the proposal out of hand even if the details are different. And it's like this for so many things Trump sets his mind to. It's really frustrating.
I think many or most tariff supporters aren't actually aware of the costs - because reasonable cost benefit analysis doesn't come out in their favor even a little. Among economists, this is basically a settled question.
Hell, many tariff supporters still think tariffs are paid by the importers. Many are unaware that tariffs are likely to cost manufacturing jobs in the long run rather than bring them back.
Hahaha. No. They are innumerates who don't want numbers telling them how they feel is flat out wrong. They think manufacturing is cozy good paying jobs with absolutely zero additional pollution or problems. The same people who throw hissy fits over their electricity bill rising and act like data centers and AI are the antichrist.
If they were really serious about reindustrializing they would realize that the US has an immigration problem - it doesn't have enough immigrants for their plan! Tariffs alone are a deeply unserious way to reindustrialize.
The problem isn't giving the people a say; it's that the people have stopped electing smart people who do know a lot.
Certainly though, a big part of why that is is that people think they know a lot, and that their opinion should be given as much weight as any other consideration when it comes to policymaking.
Personally, I think a big driver of this belief is a tendency in the West to not challenge each other's views or hold each other accountable - "don't talk politics at Thanksgiving" sort of thing
(Of course there's a long discussion to be had about other contributors to this, such as lobbying and whatnot)
> Personally, I think a big driver of this belief is a tendency in the West to not challenge each other's views or hold each other accountable - "don't talk politics at Thanksgiving" sort of thing
We’re in such a “you’re either with us or against us” phase of politics that a discussion with the “other team” is difficult.
Combine that with people adopting political viewpoints as a big part of their personality and any disagreement is seen as a personal attack.
Arrow tells us that no voting system is perfect. But he doesn't say that no system is good enough. Other results suggest that the right kind of method can reduce polarization.[1]
In addition, "dictatorship" is kind of a technical term: picking a voter at random and electing their favorite is a dictatorship in the technical sense, but not in the colloquial sense.
And it doesn't as much say "polarization leads to dictatorship" as "Condorcet cycles lead to dictatorship". If voters were somehow forbidden from creating majority cycles, then the Condorcet relation passes all of his criteria. In practice, Condorcet cycles are extremely rare, at least under current conditions.[2]
as the other reply, you should still teach your toddler why they should not do certain things. That might be the bridge building.
Not demonizing a person for their needs, but instead making sure that their strategy of getting their needs met is criticized and yes maybe punished. BUt still acknowledging their need in the process.
The thing is, punishment cannot strictly be punitive - there must be an opportunity to learn and grow, otherwise nothing changes.
When we "punish bad behavior" in adults by, for example, sending them to jail for crimes, without providing counselling and other services to get their life back on track, where does that lead us?
When we "punish bad behavior" in adults by, for example, kicking them out of the family for shitty views, where does that lead us?
The trick, as I highlighted, is walking the line between these 2 things. Many people don't, and just jump to the punishment.
So, the particular problem here is the internet and social media in general.
Make them go away and most of our political divide starts to disappear, with that said TV news is pretty crazily divided these days.
Simply put your idea does not work when there is huge amount of active propaganda with the entire purpose of causing confusion and division. "This video will make you angry" hits on the psychology of what's occurring. People don't spend most of their time communicating with 'the other side'. They spend most of the time attacking purpose built strawmen to solidify their convictions.
And which side has been driving the majority of the polarization over the past several decades? It's right-wing billionaires and far right groups that don't care for liberal democracies. There's plenty of things to criticize the Democratic party in the US over, but at least they're not trying to reshape America into some form of Christian Nationalism or techno fascism.
Totally agree. One thinks the other lacks critical thinking, the other thinks "they" have no common sense. And politicians and the media (both mainstream and social) have encouraged and exploit this for personal gain.
At the end we're left with people just saying things without having any knowledge of actual facts, because the sources of information lack the basic facts, purposefully reporting a biased and superficial version of reality.
Sure, but those are still part of what I'm talking about. Someone taking the "you're with us or against us" position? Call them out on it and tell them they're doing more harm than good to their cause. Someone taking a disagreement way too personally? Try to help them take a step back and get some perspective.
Of course, there's a lot more nuance than all that - sometimes, taking things personally is warranted. Sometimes, people really are against us. But, that shouldn't be the first thing people jump to when faced with someone who disagrees - or, more commonly, simply doesn't understand - where they're coming from.
And of course, if it turns out you can't help them understand your position, then you turn to the second part of what I said - accountability. Racist uncle won't learn? Stop inviting them to holidays. Unfortunately, people tend to jump to this step right away, without trying to make them understand why they might be wrong, and without trying to understand why they believe what they believe (they're probably just stupid and racist, right?) - and that's how you end up driving people more into their echo chamber, as you've given them more rational as to why the other side really is just "for us or against us"
(I'm not suggesting any of this is easy. I'm just saying it seems to play a part in contributing to the political climate.)
A lot of families have broken apart due to politics in the past decade in the US.
---
> A 2022 survey found that 11% of Americans reported ceasing relations with a family member due to political ideas.
> A more recent October 2024 poll by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) indicated a higher figure, with 21% of adults having become estranged from a family member, blocked them on social media, or skipped a family event due to disagreements on controversial topics.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is in telling me this? I mean... I'm literally advocating for that as a measured response to things?
I'll just say that "ceasing relations with a family member" is not "breaking a family apart"
(This is the sort of rhetoric usually used by those who were kicked out of the family; blame the politics for ripping their family apart and not their shitty beliefs)
God forbid you think both teams should be ejected into the sun. Choosing between two shit sandwiches is going to lead to people being extremely polarized over wedge issues that don't materially impact most peoples' lives.
A magical utopia because everyone clearly truly believes in their exact same political beliefs but are temporarily deceived or intimidated by the status quo.
And how do you reckon that'll come about when society is more divided than ever and can't come to any sort of conclusions about how to fix the economic circumstances?
> You can't force society to care about itself.
"Society" isn't some abstract entity. It is made of humans. No, I can't "force" anyone to care about these things, but I can try to convince them of it.
It's more productive than this doomer narrative, at least.
Too reductive for my liking. I always found Zappa’s persona to be hypocritical—-making a point of condemning the drug culture of his contemporaries while drinking gallons of coffee a day and smoking like a chimney.
The cultural chasm between technocrats and politicians reminds me of the old trope about "women are from Venus and men are from Mars". That hasn't been bridged either, has it? It's a bit like those taboo topics here on HN where no good questions can be entertained by otherwise normal adults.
Here's something from someone we might call a manchild
For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift.
Lichtenberg has something along these lines too, but I'll need to dig that out :)
Here's a consolation that almost predicts Alan Watts:
To make clever people [elites?] believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.
I think parent-poster is saying that politicians and technocrats have a gulf between how their view the world and how well they communicate with one-another. However after that point (ironically?) it isn't clear what what their purpose is for including the quotes.
I think the most-charitable interpretation for the "baths" quote [0] might be: "For the people I'm trying to communicate with, lightly touching on deep subjects is actually fine." (Both most-charitable to Nietzche, and also to the poster quoting him.)
After thinking some time, I think the baths quote is saying that, contrary to common wisdom, it isn't necessary to have intense, long discussions about "deep" subjects - small, quick conversations can still be as productive.
I think there's some truth here. I've held for a long time that minds are not changed overnight or in a single discussion - this happens over time, as you repeatedly discuss something, and people consider their own views and others. To that point, I suppose small conversations would work.
Still, I don't think it can be one or the other. Many subjects we're referring to are very complex and require more in-depth analysis (of the problem, and of our views) than a short conversation.
You got the gist (tho I hoped all would've explored the Lichtenberg a lil bit as even more relevant to TFA) my bad!
Mainly-- should be/have fleshed out more-- deep convos (every-where but especially in ephemeral settings like HN, with strangers, adversaries, children, across genders, etc-- to address your accusations of a false(?) dichotomy) should be conducted in jokes -- cautiously!
Mechanism is emo-honesty. Practise absolutely needed. That's the paradox you might be looking for?
sorry for the heavy touch in this response :)
I almost found the Lichtenberg quote ..
Truth[s] come from the [minds] of fools and children, satirists [elite,populist,all of the above] etc etc
Thanks Google!
Strangely, it also gave me Cato via Montaigne (technician having convo with politician over millennia?)
Cato, was reproached that he was a hard drinker
[Catonis] Sæpe mero caluisse virtus.
(a gentle prod to serious minds wine is, a nod to "in vino veritas" I guess)
Aside: both Cato and Lichtenberg might be more humorous untranslated Vs Nietzsche, experts/natives could correct me
I think you’re onto something here with people thinking they know a lot, but isn’t the real issue anonymous internet posting? Having to take zero responsibility for sharing ideas has ruined intelligent discourse society-wide: Web 2.0, then social media, turned out to be the beginning of the end of experts having credibility. Journalists, scientists, all experts became demonized by persuasive bots or anonymous internet posters. Instead of a world of democratized intelligence as promised, we got a world of “anyone’s opinion is valid, and I don’t even need to know their credentials or who they are.” If we forced everyone to have to stand by everything they said online on every forum, we’d have a lot fewer strong opinions and conspiracies, IMO. People (voters) would be thinking a lot harder about their ideas and seeing a lot fewer validations of the extreme parts of themselves.
My hottest take is that it wasn’t anonymity, but auto correct, that spelled (literally) the end. Without autocorrect and auto-grammar, ideas were tagged with the credential/authority of “I can use they’re / their / there” correctly, which was a high ass bar.
It’s still “new tech” to our monkey brains and it takes a long time, and probably a lot of destruction, before our we develop better cultural norms for dealing with it. Our cultural immune system has only just started to kick in.
You think people don't have those ideas in person? They absolutely do, and not being anonymous does not stop most of them.
While I agree the Internet has contributed to this belief, I do not see how being anonymous or not would fix that. To say nothing of the myriad other issues that would come with a non-anonymous Internet.
>I do not see how being anonymous or not would fix that.
I mean there are some valid things that show up here. For example Bob is racist, and Steve is racist, but they don't know they are deeply racist. You typically have to slowly enter into conversation to ensure you don't offend them.
Being anonymous can shortcut this process. You show up on a semi-local forum as Anon1 and talk to Anon2 about how you want get rid of all those dirty $_fill_in_the_blank's. You realize you share the same convictions, and it's safer to exchange details on who you really are.
Now, it's correct non-anonymous internet is bad, especially if you are a targeted group that hasn't done anything wrong, for example gay groups.
You don't need to be a targeted group for anonymity to be important, nor do you need a "valid" reason to be anonymous on the Internet. I have yet to hear a compelling reason otherwise.
People like to say, "Well you're not anonymous IRL" and ... well, yes, we are. We are not forced to say, "My name is X and I live at Y" when we stay stuff in public
>We are not forced to say, "My name is X and I live at Y" when we stay stuff in public
I mean these days you can pretty much be immediately identified by facial recognition. Not saying it's a good thing, but it is the world in which we live.
If you're mad at one, then be mad that the other because this is what technology enables.
Somewhere, I am not the historian to say, teaching people the basics of an education, that being “reading, writing and arithmetic”, failed to recognize the critical role that communications play in everything people do, and try to do. That phrase ought to be “reading, writing, arithmetic, and conveying understanding” because that would include why one reads and why one writes, and connects that to the goal of conveying an understanding you have to others. However, this is the root issue.
General society being generally poor communicators is caused by this lapse in our understanding of education. The understanding that the purpose of an education is to both use it and to help others understand what you may and they do not, as well as understand how to gain understanding from others that they have and you do not.
Because we do not teach that an education is really learning how to understand and how to convey understanding in others, the general idea of an education is to be an owner of a specialized skill set, which one sells to the highest bidder.
This has caused education to be replaced by rote memorization. Which in turn created a population that is only comfortable with direct question and answer interactions, not exploratory debate for shared understanding. This set the stage for educators, nationwide, to teach students to be databases and not critically analyzing understanders of their vocations.
Note that the skills for conveying understanding in others, additionally carries the skill how to recognize fraudulent speech. Which, as of Dec 2025, is the critical skill the general population does not have that is potentially the death of the United States.
When a population of people do not have an emphasis on critical analysis, but rote memorization, as the basis of their education that then creates a population that has heightened sensitivity to controversial lines of reasoning, lines of reasoning where there are no clear answers. Life itself has a large series of mysteries based on faith, religion being chief, which in a population that is comfortable with debate to convey understanding is perfectly safe to engage in discussions about mysteries within these areas requiring faith. But a society that is not comfortable with such discussions, one that thinks debate’s purpose is to "win, at all costs" then such discussions are taboo. They get shut down immediately. When people cannot debate to understand, but as a combat, learning is not accomplished. And useful critical analysis skills are not taught.
I have no idea if such a national situation can be manufactured, but I believe this is where we are at as a nation. We no longer produce enough adults with developed critical analysis skills to support democracy. Democracy depends upon an educated population with active critical analysis capabilities, a population that can debate to a shared understanding and accomplish shared goals. That foundational population is not there.
This can be fixed, but it may take more than a generation. Our educational system needs foundational revisions, which include additional core subjects, chief of which being how to communicate and convey understanding in others. Which lies at the roots of our demise, this lack of this basic skill.
>General society being generally poor communicators
period dot.
Don't insinuate there was a golden past where humans in general were great communicators, it didn't exist. Furthermore the need to communicate in the modern world has increased network sizes many times over what humans developed in the 'monkeysphere'. For all most of all human evolution the number of people you interacted with and communicated with was relatively tiny, like 150 or so.
Before we developed radio communication to crowds was a rare thing done by few people. Radio itself lead to massive crowds but few communicators themselves (Propagandists quickly realized its power for example). And really TV was much the same. But in the last 40 years we've had a geometric explosion in the ability to communicate by the average person. In terms of societal growth, this is a tiny sliver of time. Now your 'average idiot' can communicate with the world, poorly, and still garner a huge audience, and or work requires much less 'doing things' and communicating.
Nowhere do I claim that such a "golden past" existed. I am saying that the critical skill of communication to convey information, to gain information, to learn via one-to-one communications is rapidly being lost. It is not respected by education, it is not taught, and it is truly one of humanity's greatest skills: conveying understanding. Which has the side benefit of teaching one one how to identify illogical speech.
The natural solution is futarchy: Vote on values, bet on beliefs. Everybody knows that, all else being equal, they want higher GDP/cap, better GINI, a higher happiness index. Only the experts know whether tariffs will help produce this.
So, instead of having everyone vote on tariffs (or vote for a whimsical strongman who will implement tariffs), have everyone vote for the package of metrics they want to hit. Then, let experts propose policy packages to achieve these metrics, and let everyone vote on which policies will achieve the goals.
Bullshit gets heavily taxed, and the beliefs of people who actually know the likely outcomes will be what guide the nation.
Tariffs make the overall tax burden on society less progressive. They are flat so tend to push the overall rate towards flat. But affect some spending categories more than others. Rich import luxury goods but also spend more on things like services, experiences, and land (top 1% owns 40%).
Most of the luxury goods they import are Veblen goods and something else replaces them with little to no QoL impact. Selective tariffs on luxury/Veblen goods could strengthen the economy, but flat tariffs probably disproportionately hurt the poor.
There needs to be a distinction between the working poor and the non-working poor.
People who don't work are hurt by tariffs, whether they are rich or poor. While people who work are more benefitted by the higher wages of increased domestic labor demand than they are hurt by higher consumer prices.
Given the option of higher income or lower prices, I take higher income any day. Because like the rest of the working population I need a home to live in more than I need foreign goods.
> Tariffs make the overall tax burden on society less progressive.
It might do, but it also has a progressive upwards effect on salaries and employment as workers move on to better opportunities when domestic demand increases.
>While people who work are more benefitted by the higher wages of increased domestic labor
This is not a given. In the US unemployment has been low for a very long time. If the majority of your population is in the 'well enough' paid service economy and you're trying to bring pay low paying blue collar jobs, then all you do is massively increase the total price of everything because the production line works needs to massively increase salaries to compete with things like software engineering.
Furthermore there is zero requirement that onshoring actually brings jobs, at all. If I'm going to build a factory here in the US I'm going to automate the fuck out of everything having the minimal amount of staffing. It won't be like 100 years ago where a factory brought in 1000s of jobs.
Service economy jobs are worse and pay less than factory jobs.
Factory work is much more productive so they have better margins to pay workers. And you always need people, because complete automation is not a good investment at all scales.
Yes, in an economy with higher salaries many service economy businesses won't be able to compete on wages and will be forced to shut down. Eating out might again become a once in a while thing instead of an everyday thing. That's fine. It's worth it in order to improve salaries and work conditions.
Software engineers are such a small part of the labor market to not be a sector to consider. They are definitely nowhere near being a majority of workers as you imply.
Honestly, I’m extremely well informed but I’m not sure if tariffs are good or bad, sure the implementation by Trump is totally mental but equally there’s all sorts of tariff and non-tariff barriers other countries have erected including currency manipulation.
Targeted tariffs in combination with robust industrial, economic, and monetary policy can be effective in incentivizing certain types of production to remain in, grow in, or return to a country.
Blanket tariffs on entire countries or indeed the entire world amounts to a massive tax increase on your entire populace unless you can somehow start producing everything yourself immediately.
There is an argument that it's primarily being used as a cudgel to give the US an advantageous starting position in trade negotiations, but that seems to be a post-hoc explanation/justification.
is habermas dumb? we pay taxes directly or indirectly on prices of things, if you formulate the question on terms that the person understand relating to the difference on prices on basic things they Will be able to easily answer the question
Ok but does this take into account which industries are monopolistic or oligarchic?
In an industry with real competition you have tight margins and can't afford to spend money lobbying.
In an industry with a monopoly, you have huge margins can reduce the economic surplus of everyone else down to close to zero (often deep into the negative if you count for externalities, looking at you oil and gas), so they are strongly incentivized to fix your market and you can't afford not to lobby...
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