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> 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 cou
by cwal37 8mo 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.
- skybrian 8mo agoI'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?
- mmh0000 8mo agoHe 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-trade-tariffs/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra... (https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-trade-tariffs/ 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-trumps-new-trade-plan-to-protect-american-workers https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...
- throwup238 8mo agoAnd he did it last time too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_first_Trump_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_first_Trump_adm... “Living under a rock” is the technical term, I believe.
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoYep, in his first term he was called "tariff man" (among other things).
- cyanydeez 8mo agoYeah, I find it curiously delusional, but the reality seems to be a segment of the population just refuses to accept the drastic change in pace to political change.
- skybrian 8mo agoHe didn't do it the same way last time. Trump's second term is significantly different.
- skybrian 8mo agoNo, 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.)
- otikik 8mo agoWell 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.
- skrtskrt 8mo agoThis 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.
- swang 8mo agolet me guess... you don't follow politics either...
- straydusk 8mo agoIt was extremely easy to see them coming, because he talked about the repeatedly. The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.
- derektank 8mo agoThey 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
- renewiltord 8mo agoRealistically, 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?
- derektank 8mo agoIt 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.
- m4rtink 8mo agoIsn'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.
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoPlenty 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?
- krisoft 8mo agoThere 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.
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- ihaveajob 8mo agoIn 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.
- MichaelZuo 8mo agoWell 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.
- landryraccoon 8mo agoIf 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.
- MichaelZuo 8mo agoI did say higher chance, not guaranteed to avoid it. The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown.
- landryraccoon 8mo ago> The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown. That fact alone doesn't demonstrate nuance. It's possible that 5% of the population was innocent and treated as scapegoats, or chosen randomly, or that anyone high profile regardless of guilt was chosen to die. Unless there's data on who was actually innocent or guilty, the mere fact that extermination was selective doesn't mean it was in any way accurate.
- EarlKing 8mo agoWhat 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.
- ungreased0675 8mo agoI 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.
- nemomarx 8mo agoLast 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?
- EarlKing 8mo agoCost was not the only issue addressed by OP.
- nemomarx 8mo agoOther than the back and forth / lead time issues on checking issues, what do you think a local manufacturer shop in the US would do better? If the takeaway was needing to specify stuff in the design phase earlier that's kind of a universal manufacturing lesson I think.
- spacebanana7 8mo agoI 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.
- seizethecheese 8mo agoClassic 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-on-china-in-first-100-days https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoPolymarket 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).
- seizethecheese 8mo agoThis 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?
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoSearch “Polymarket manipulated” or similar and examples are legion. You can even do that on hacker news. There’s a lot of incentive to do so.
- seizethecheese 8mo agoSure, but that’s not likely in this specific market, at least in enough size to make a difference to the main point here.
- georgemcbay 8mo agoOpen, public non-academic prediction markets basically exist to be manipulated by people with insider knowledge. Filter out all the noise of people random ass guessing what will happen in the future and focus on people making big bets late in the game. That's your important "prediction". See: Anonymous person who made $400,000 betting on Maduro being out of office, etc. I'd be surprised if there weren't already people running HFT-like setups to look for these anomalously large late stage trades to piggyback their own bets on the insider information.
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- chillfox 8mo agoI 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.
- munificent 8mo agoTrump 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.
- bjt 8mo agoToo 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.
- polishdude20 8mo agoYou 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.
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- unclad5968 8mo ago> 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.
- ahnick 8mo agoExactly. 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)
- burnermore 8mo agoNobody 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.
- brewdad 8mo agoFirst 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.
- burnermore 8mo agoThis is a great point. It makes sense now. All you gotta do is come to power. It's not strings attached.
- Waterluvian 8mo ago“Nobody saw it coming” is a blanket people wrap themselves in that socializes their failure to see it coming.
- js2 8mo ago> 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/5c392e02-9eb0-4c57-9251-0b1baa64d299/jec-fact-sheet-on-cost-of-trump-s-tariffs.pdf 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.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoAll 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.
- Bratmon 8mo agoThe 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-break-out-tariff-costs https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/04/30/amazon-wont-b...
- ch4s3 8mo agoThey 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.
- Animats 8mo agoTariffs are applied to the price the importer pays. Listing them separately would thus give away the reseller's markup. That's far more than the tariffs for most importers from China. Often you can look up the same item on Alibaba and find what the reseller is paying.
- thenayr 8mo ago[dead]
- m4rtink 8mo agoYeah - you can try to stay out of politics, but no way politics will stay out of your life, simple as that.