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This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is th

This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is the point?

ajmurmann 1y ago
The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction. And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!
- _verandaguy 1y ago
  Unfortunately, Americans chose to elect an administration which is either unwilling to learn why a federal bureaucracy has to move slowly sometimes, or who is actively leveraging that precedent to undo it.
- x0x0 1y ago
  It's like letting the idiots on here claiming you can build twitter in a weekend run our country. Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize: The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive. Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.
  - ajmurmann 1y ago
    You could rule by EO and just have them take effect further out, no?
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      And, indeed, it could be argued that past administrations have done that. Congressional deadlock has been an issue in the US for quite some time, and the administration has to go on anyway. Off the top of my head, I am reminded of Obama essentially ceding control of marijuana policy to the states by making it clear to the ATF that prosecuting federal possession crime in states that had legalized the drug was legal, within their authority... And a short path to locking in a desk job at their current level indefinitely. But when previous administrations did this, they (usually, as far as I know) consulted with domain experts on predictable consequences and set timelines to factor that in. This administration seems to have "effective immediately" as the only timeframe it's aware of.
      - ajmurmann 1y ago
        Nah, that's unfair! "Two weeks" seems to be a very popular timeframe as well.
ShakataGaNai 1y ago
It is. The original claim was that De minimis exceptions were being used to ship drugs into the USA from (insert hand wavy racist statements here about anything South of Texas). Then it was "because unfair". Then they terminated de minimis for all countries. I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - ncr100 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - fabioborellini 1y ago
      I bet the worst part of him getting shot, for himself, would have been ruining the final photos with an open casket
philwelch 1y ago
De minimis allows people to evade tariffs by simply drop shipping each individual product all the way from China or wherever, so long as the retail price is below the threshold. I’m skeptical of tariffs in general but if you’re going to have them, it makes sense to close the loopholes.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  But at least ensure you can then get paid... Which seems to be hang here. Failure to tell how to pay those tariffs...
- someotherperson 1y ago
  So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.
  - philwelch 1y ago
    China isn’t the only country that drop ships.
  - timr 1y ago
    > So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist. Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center. Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.
    - someotherperson 1y ago
      > If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is. > same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
mullingitover 1y ago
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken
- uncircle 1y ago
  "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill [disputed]
  - coryrc 1y ago
    What's your alternative? I'm serious. (Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic. The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect. Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on. It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase. It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).
      - ghssds 1y ago
        > Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.
monero-xmr 1y ago
I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair. For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good. The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah. I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this. One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Another reason is the weird fetish for pumping the spoils of the strong dollar into medical middlemen and tax cuts for billionaires.
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs. How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane
    - fzeroracer 1y ago
      > I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs. Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.
ModernMech 1y ago
If you're honestly asking what's the point, the literal answer is the entire federal government has realigned itself to support Trump's ego. That's literally its entire purpose now, without exaggeration. If something is bad for Trump's ego, it will not happen no matter how good it is for the country. Conversely, if Trump wants something to happen, it's going to no matter how bad it is for the rest of us. Or at least that's how they see it. Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him. And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI. So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.
- aworks 1y ago
  I read an article in Foreign Affairs that calls this "personalism."
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    This one I presume? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided. [1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7 https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).

This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is the point?

ajmurmann 1y ago

The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction. And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!

_verandaguy 1y ago
Unfortunately, Americans chose to elect an administration which is either unwilling to learn why a federal bureaucracy has to move slowly sometimes, or who is actively leveraging that precedent to undo it.
x0x0 1y ago
It's like letting the idiots on here claiming you can build twitter in a weekend run our country. Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".
shadowgovt 1y ago
This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize: The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive. Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  You could rule by EO and just have them take effect further out, no?
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    And, indeed, it could be argued that past administrations have done that. Congressional deadlock has been an issue in the US for quite some time, and the administration has to go on anyway. Off the top of my head, I am reminded of Obama essentially ceding control of marijuana policy to the states by making it clear to the ATF that prosecuting federal possession crime in states that had legalized the drug was legal, within their authority... And a short path to locking in a desk job at their current level indefinitely. But when previous administrations did this, they (usually, as far as I know) consulted with domain experts on predictable consequences and set timelines to factor that in. This administration seems to have "effective immediately" as the only timeframe it's aware of.
    - ajmurmann 1y ago
      Nah, that's unfair! "Two weeks" seems to be a very popular timeframe as well.

ShakataGaNai 1y ago

It is. The original claim was that De minimis exceptions were being used to ship drugs into the USA from (insert hand wavy racist statements here about anything South of Texas). Then it was "because unfair". Then they terminated de minimis for all countries. I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.

OutOfHere 1y ago
[flagged]
- ncr100 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - fabioborellini 1y ago
    I bet the worst part of him getting shot, for himself, would have been ruining the final photos with an open casket

philwelch 1y ago

De minimis allows people to evade tariffs by simply drop shipping each individual product all the way from China or wherever, so long as the retail price is below the threshold. I’m skeptical of tariffs in general but if you’re going to have them, it makes sense to close the loopholes.

Ekaros 1y ago
But at least ensure you can then get paid... Which seems to be hang here. Failure to tell how to pay those tariffs...
someotherperson 1y ago
So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.
- philwelch 1y ago
  China isn’t the only country that drop ships.
- timr 1y ago
  > So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist. Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center. Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.
  - someotherperson 1y ago
    > If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is. > same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.

mullingitover 1y ago

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken

uncircle 1y ago
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill [disputed]
- coryrc 1y ago
  What's your alternative? I'm serious. (Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic. The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect. Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on. It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase. It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).
    - ghssds 1y ago
      > Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.

monero-xmr 1y ago

I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair. For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good. The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah. I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this. One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics

actionfromafar 1y ago
Another reason is the weird fetish for pumping the spoils of the strong dollar into medical middlemen and tax cuts for billionaires.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs. How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane
  - fzeroracer 1y ago
    > I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs. Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.

ModernMech 1y ago

If you're honestly asking what's the point, the literal answer is the entire federal government has realigned itself to support Trump's ego. That's literally its entire purpose now, without exaggeration. If something is bad for Trump's ego, it will not happen no matter how good it is for the country. Conversely, if Trump wants something to happen, it's going to no matter how bad it is for the rest of us. Or at least that's how they see it. Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him. And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI. So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.

aworks 1y ago
I read an article in Foreign Affairs that calls this "personalism."
- ModernMech 1y ago
  This one I presume? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided. [1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7 https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).