> It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.
I was probably lucky.
We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.
Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.
Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.
The ‘design everything as a publicly accessible API’ directive seems to play to this as well. If all your data / services are available and must be documented then a lot of communication overhead can be eliminated.
For anyone who doesn't know what you mean, here's an archived copy of Steve Yegge's post about this directive + other musings comparing Amazon vs Google (which is how a lot of us came to find out about this, via Yegge's write-up): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102800
Copied the most relevant snippet below
---
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:
- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.
- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.
- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.
- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.
- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.
That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.
This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.
At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.
That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
> You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, we were making it a platform in small ways long before that edict from Bezos. But because it used to be only an online bookstore, the footprint was a lot smaller.
1. the external interface was ... HTTP
2. the pages were designed to be easily machine parsable
3. you could queue up search queries that amzn would run on its own hardware, and notify you of the results asynchronously.
Sure, this didn't look anything like the things Yegge is describing, but the idea that "it's a platform, dummies" was some new revelation is misleading.
Time and time again it amazes me how incredibly cheap lobbied politicians are. They may be earning big sums for an individual, but if you go full corruption[1] to sell out a state or a country - sell it for a fair price.
I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $200k, when median values were much much lower.
Politicians are selling tens of billions of dollars (if not hundreds of billions) worth of revenue to ISPs for couple or dozen million. Literally 1000x return on investment (if successful).
I remember local politician (I am not from US) got caught taking 100k bribe from a company for helping with alleged highway construction procurement. Project was valued ~1B - 10 000x return on investment (if they wouldn't have been caught).
Bribed are even smaller. Some councilmembers got indicted in LA some years back for pay for play development. The bribes were things like steak dinners, 5 figure sums of cash in paper bags, and hookers. Astoundingly cheap.
in the 1990's there was a woman prime minister of Turkey.
she ended up resigning in a scandal caused by her husband accepting a boat (or work on the boat..i don't remember). the scandal was caused by the amount of the bribe. it was too low. the Turkish people could understand some corruption, but to be able to bribe the top leader for $50k. Unacceptable. If it would have been $100 million, it would not have been a scandal.
This. Issue in the USA is that if you don't accept the money offered, you get primaried and they bribe money you would have gotten just goes to the campaign of your primary opponent.
Rinse and repeat. Unless, politicians band together and say "we need the full ROI of your project, and NONE of us will even talk to you unless we get half the profits, and you can't primary all of us at once"
Traffic light buttons were already equidistant to the edge of the window. Now they are trying to center circles in squircles[1], breaking window edges and draggability, etc.
> It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.
That's why I am baffled (as many commenters here) - how did this went out all the way to release, instead of ending as an experiment at design floor.
In MacOS 26 it's only weirder, because as you say - due to squircle window corners, now we have this constantly varying distance to the edge.
EDIT: I "get" apple's fascination to squircle, but why they made it such a big radius. Probably no one would've complained if they just have changed from current ~15-20px rounded corners into ~15-20px squircles, but they went 50px+ on toolbared windows.
Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.
NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.
> Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses.
idk, its a trailer so lots of beauty shots and also selection bias at work... i think also the previous ui though wasnt gods gift to ux either (thinking about that "oompaloompa skin" [0] calendar app lol) so there is a lot of "refreshness" that does look good (again that new calendar app looked slick). that being said also after release i remember everyone blasting it for super thin fonts and low contrast so im inclined to say rose-colored glasses....
as an aside: personally (and at $work in user tests) very flat design seems to lead to cognitive load increase and difficultly discerning interactive vs non interactive elements so i'd say we have one step forwards two steps backwards for sure...
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
> being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
Beans, lentils etc. may be inexpensive but you skip over the fact that they and any other kind of plant source contain too little protein in comparison with the amount of energy.
Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.
On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
I have eaten for 4 years only plant-based proteins, but to satisfy simultaneously 3 constraints, enough proteins, not so many calories as to cause weight gain and price no greater than when eating chicken meat, in Europe where I live there was only 1 solution, with no alternatives.
The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes. Any plant-based product that I could buy for enough protein would have been more expensive than chicken meat.
Extracting gluten, which is done by washing dough with abundant water, works. However it requires much time and much water. Extracting pure gluten requires so much water and so much time that I never did this regularly. I was typically removing around 75% of the starch from wheat flour, and with the result I was baking a bread that had about 50% to 60% protein content.
Besides wasting a lot of water and time every day, this procedure had the additional disadvantage that the amount of calories provided by eating enough protein was still rather large. This limited severely the possible menus, e.g. any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden. I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
These inconveniences have made me eventually abandon this approach. While I still eat mostly vegan food, I also use in cooking some whey protein concentrate, which can increase enough the protein content of plant-based food.
There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus. I hope that this technology will become viable commercially, because unlike with fake meat produced from cell cultures, it is certain that with such a fungal culture one can make proteins less costly than by growing chicken or other domestic animals.
The availability of such a protein powder would solve completely the problem of vegan food for me. I do not need fake meat.
> Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.
> On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
Anecdotal counterpoint - I've done hard physical work for ~2 years. For ~10 years before that and for about 1.5 after I stopped the physical work I've been spending most of my days sitting in front of the computer with the occasional walk to the grocery store. No sport or hiking or fitness.
I don't eat TVP or other condensed protein food. I don't count calories or even consciously decide when to eat protein rich food. Sometimes I'll even just eat pasta or other food relatively low in protein and rich in carbs and calories. Yet, I'm in the same physical health as I've always been. Not athletic, but normal weight - the type of weight an annoying aunt would see and say "ooh, you gotta eat more". :) The first BMI calc I tried put me right in the middle of the green zone (yes, I know BMI is not that important). And I could return to the same physical work if I wanted to.
Besides my anecdotal counterpoint, there are many sources online you can find where people discuss their diet, how much it costs and their lifestyle.
> The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes.
> any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden.
That seems very extreme to me. Were you trying to be a bodybuilder or maintain some low body fat or something while maintaining this sedentary lifestyle? I eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and bananas all the time.
> I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
If that's the case, why not spend some of the calories on exercise? Although I find it hard to believe that with my current and previous sedentary lifestyle I expend enough calories to not care what I eat on a vegan diet, but you gain weight "extremely easily". Do you have some rare disease, if you don't mind my asking? Cause the only fat people I know are the ones who overeat, regardless of diet. Even if they start blaming "slow metabolism" or something else, it's obvious when you see them eat.
> There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
Economy of scale and subsidies.
> There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
Interesting. Although I don't see myself buying it, I'll look it up.
> fake meat
It's as real as you can get. "Fake meat" would be TVP prepared like meat. You wouldn't say "fake whey protein" if you extract it from genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
> being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
I read this often but the long term vegs usually says the opposite as does the studies [0]. Bonus point: The veg options are often the cheapest in the non-vegan restaurants (although not the tastiest). I have some hypothesis where it comes from:
- Meat substitues are seen as a necessary replacement. They are transformed, which require more work - and therefore more expensive. However they are as (un)necessary as a fined-prepared piece of charcuterie, which isn't cheap neither.
- Cost is evaluated at the supermarket shelf but as you noted the animal products are extremely subsidised. Vegs pays for them but don't use it. Infrastructures like airport, rails, road and urban amenities are not free either even if you don't pay for them. How you evaluate the price is at your own discretion.
- Fancy products are placed in the most visible shelf and thats the people see first, but they compare it with the cheapest animal alternative. I'm an engineer and by my fancy organic tofu 7-20€/kg but used to buy chicken at 25-35€/kg in the same fancy segment. If I'd be on a budget I'll probably buy the bottom shelf one at 3.5€/kg, next to the 5€/kg chicken.
- Cost of change: changing habits require to re-create the optimization you build during the previous years: where to find the best price for the product X, what quantity should you get or what daily stable you can add in the routine for cheap (fake meat and fancy milk aren't).
0:
> Main findings suggest that food expenditure negatively relates to vegetarian food self-identity, and unemployment status mediates the link between vegetarianism and food expenditure.
Side topic, but this number puts into how crazy it was for trump[0] to go on tariff war against enemies and friends alike. All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!
Masterminds!
…and now they need to refund it.
NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.
[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.
You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.
Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.
They also put out of business a bunch of upstart businesses that could threaten their oligopoly. In addition they acquired huge tracts of agricultural land for cheap from all the farms that went bankrupt.
Companies will make far more than 130b off this. There's no way they only raised prices just enough to cover the 130b and the labor required for the internal policy changes. This was a justification for price gouging. Which they will not stop doing.
Agreed, this is the real take away most people will be left with. Not only did we all pay higher prices, instead of using that money to pay off the debt we give it away to business managers who were never out that money in the first place. Politically, that doesn't accomplish what some think it does. Midterms are coming up in 8 months...and the results of the house are going to be drastic no matter which side wins. Either Trump can do what he wants or the government will be deadlocked and nothing will happen for 2 years. Neither seem like good outcomes.
Even if the tariffs are not a lot, they are potent negotiating leverage.
They def knew they were lying about much they were collecting
They def knew they were lying about who is paying
They lied to the public about that and got a bit of extra creme in the bag but the effect was mostly leverage, which 'kind of worked'.
They could have very effectively used illegal tariffs to actually do 90-deals-in-90 days, knowing the case would take time to draw out.
But - they have no plan.
Trump does not think 9 months ahead - he has grudges, grievances, and he pursues whatever grievance he wants to that day.
He doesn't forget and will push his staff to go against old enemies
The point is not to improve the economy, bring back jobs - the point is to 'Look Tough' and 'Stick it to the Libs and Foreigners' and to get elected again, failing that, rig the elections (note, his secret signed Executive order with all sorts of things regarding elections)
The 'high visibility' of ICE is not a bad thing for him - it very much in purpose to show MAGA base that he's cracking liberal, immigrant and brown people heads.
Jamming those Somalis on the concrete is exactly the optics he wants for his base.
It was only until people started dying when newsmax/fox started questioning the legitimacy and some support is lost - and not even that much among the base.
Same thing with tariffs: he will play grievance, the 'Liberal Courts' are against, him blah blah and MAGA will be fine with it.
The problem is that Core MAGA is maybe really only 20% and Soft MAGA another 15% and that's not enough to win.
But it's almost.
Narrative, performance, grievance, populism, social media, information sphere - that's it.
It's Post-Truth.
People keep talking about these through the lens of the 'issues', it's completely wrong headed - policies don't matter, only perception etc.
Reality does have a way of sneaking through though, and 'hardball reality' can change minds. People do understand Epstein, tariffs when they pay attention, unemployment, prices, 'war mostly bad' etc. etc..
This is White House Reality TV, not really policy and that's the best way to understand it.
The entire Cabinet have completely been unable to explain the tariff policy - they keep changing their views there is no consistency - it's the same with the war in Iran - everyone's saying different things, objectives are unclear.
It's irrational too think that there is 'policy' here, this is whim, impulse, populism.
Maybe I don't understand as I'm an outsider, but as per my recent comment on this topic [0], I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.
I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.
Tariffs almost never make sense, unless it's an industry that's super important for your own survival.
Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.
Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.
US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.
Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
It's not that it's conveniently ignored. It's that a services economy, while lucrative in the good times, leaves you lacking self sufficiency and resilience. We should never have let manufacturing leave to the extent that we did, all in the name of efficiency over all else.
Of course it goes without saying that launching an absurdist comedy interpretation of a global trade war is not the way to fix the problem.
I don’t have a source for this handy, but I believe that in terms of goods produced, manufacturing is actually still alive and well in the US. It’s just that this is done by a much smaller and more automated workforce.
The importer pays directly. There are three ways the importer can deal with the burden of that. In most cases it will be a combination of all three of them.
1. Raise the price they sell the imported item for.
2. Eat it.
3. Lower the price they are willing to pay the exporter.
For the Trump tariffs it has been overall it has been about 90-96% #1 and #2 and 4-10% #3. I haven't seen a breakdown of how #1 and #2 is split.
Next time you wonder why a Trump supporter has a bad argument, remind yourself there was a nonzero number of them who literally drank bleach and Lysol after he told them too.
I like how you're being downvoted for pointing out an objective, documented fact. [1]
Of course an important corollary is that Trump did not, in fact, tell anyone to drink bleach or Lysol. His supporters were stupid enough to do it on their own initiative, at Trump's mere suggestion that it was worth looking into.
> I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.
The "logic" is/was that this was a lie directed at his "low information supporters" who tend to simply "believe" whatever he tells them without question. Those same supporters would have been very much against having a "tax increase" levied upon them, but so long as he lied to them and told them "the other country pays the tariffs" then they were fooled into not understanding the tariffs were just a tax increase and so were "in support" of the tariffs.
That was the sole logic -- although there have been times when I've seen news blurbs that have made me wonder whether Trump himself actually believes his own lie about "other countries pay us" in regards to tariffs.
I am old enough to remember when the great minds at DOGE found $10T a year of fraudulent Social Security spending which would have cut the total governement spending from $7T a year to negative $3T.
It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.
The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.
Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
There are better ways than tariffs. For instance, you can increase VAT and use the proceeds to decrease taxes on work, or cut taxes for specific sectors. This way your economy is more competitive internationally, while avoiding the distorsions of tariffs.
Tariffs can also be footguns as they increase costs on imports for upstream supplies, making downstream local producers less competitive. VAT is much better for this as it is refunded when you export.
The biggest damage is the souring of relations with other countries, who now no longer see the US as a reliable business partner. They have nudged countries in the EU to rather look to China. The longer Trump is in office, the bigger the damage gets. The long term course might already be set away from the US and towards China. The loss for the US cannot even be estimated yet.
Also the US is working hard on losing their military dominance. Engaging in unnecessary wars, offending its allies left and right, who are now starting to invest more into their own military, since they have learned, that they cannot rely on the US any longer, while China plays the catch-up game and is getting closer to US military capability every year.
Reputational damage is enormous of course and the US hands China easy PR wins after wins.
This seems to be the current trend. Projecting this into the future, it seems likely, that in 10, 20, 30 years from now, the most powerful global player might be China, instead of the US. Obviously, in decades a lot can happen. Future US administrations however have got a lot of repair work cut out for them. How can they convince international partners, that this does not repeat in the future, the next time a crazy administration is elected? Can they at all? Or can they fix the political landscape in their own country in that timespan? It kinda looks like their are stuck.
```
The government has collected perhaps $180bn in IEEPA tariffs. Over the past year 1,800 companies—including Goodyear, a tyre-maker, and Costco, a retailer—have filed lawsuits to protect their right to a refund should the Supreme Court overturn them. They are now owed this money, equivalent to roughly 5% of the profits companies generated in America last year, or 0.6% of GDP—plus interest, compounded daily at an annual rate of 6-7%.
```
The rest is financed by debt. The theft-class stole the rest from the govt thru debt, and expect the rest of us and the following generations to deal with the fallout while they sit on top of their obscene gobs of cash insulated from the fire they created.
I'm serious. The Trump/MAGA view of foreign policy is that the US sits at the top, we owe friendship to no one. We engage with other nations transactionally, zero sum, with the US always getting more.
Countries act on people's emotions. Friends and enemies are a pretty good description of a lot of international politics, much better than a dispassionate analysis of interests.
I think it's legitimately hard to say. Most Americans know very little about international affairs, and care even less. I think interpreting broad opinion surveys can be fraught.
So, who do you count? everyone? only the informed? only people with strong views? Or do you assume people support the views and actions of the people they voted for?
This isn't the Trump/MAGA foreign policy, american exceptionalism is a century old and only gotten stronger. If anything MAGA is the full blown expression of this phenomenon.
The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies.
Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.
From the 2nd half of the 20th century until Trump there was the view that the US lead a large group of "western" democracies (in the sense that Japan is "western") in a loose coalition that was NOT zero sum. The US provided a lot of benefits to others, this collaboration produced an overall surplus[1], which the US got a large share of.
The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.
[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.
You may be right, but the honesty has destroyed an insane amount of good will and privilege that the US previously enjoyed (deservedly or not). To throw that all away for literally no benefit is . . . not good.
It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.
Being impulsive doesn't mean you have a good system 1 intelligence. Quite the opposite. His system 1 sucks and is driven entirely by superficial biases and ego. His system 2 appears to be moribund as he rarely comes up solutions beyond the same facile reasoning his system 1 comes up with. He has neither intellect nor good instincts.
The $130B is only part of the economic costs of the tariffs. Many companies and people changed their buying behavior, either paying more to a domestic company or maybe a company in a country with a lower tariff rate or changed their behavior to not require an item all together. We've also heard about small companies that have gone out of business.
I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.
this reminds me of the Indian government's (read Modi's) demonetization efforts of 2016 which caused 80+ deaths and huge headaches for the common people. In the end, more than 99.3% of the demonetized money came back in circulation. Elect a clown, expect a circus. true for the oldest democracy in the world and also true for the largest democracy.
The purpose of the tariffs was to appeal to the part of the domestic constituency that has belief in protectionist policies as a good in and of themselves rather than a means to an ends, not to achieve some direct material policy outcome outside of the scope of political enthusiasm.
-They only got 130B
-They planned to fix all this with 100B?
I see what you did there. 70B eh? They only got 50B. A paltry 20B?
The real number though, was gotten in a relatively short time. And now replacement tariffs are on the way. And many companies have re-thought of manufacturing outside US with the higher tariffs always being the possibility in the future too.
If the OP had (incorrectly) rounded 130B to 200B, OP's point would have still been perfectly understandable and correct. Your odd quibble about rounding completely misses the point. Whooosh.
To steel-man their sentence, it’s a large number to extract from US citizens, nearly $500/person. But it’s a small number in terms of government deficit and current spending
No, Trump manufactured negotiating leverage out of thin air— nothing, really. He extracted concessions on something like a bluff. Plus, didn’t he also extract a budget that in retrospect wasn’t appropriate had the tariff revenue been removed?
The budget wasn't appropriate regardless of tariffs. And OP's point is that 130B is a tiny number that no where near makes up for the loss in tax revenue from the very very stupid "OBBB".
"Trump brags in Oval Office that his billionaire pals made a killing in stocks after he pulled the plug on tariffs"
> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.
I mean 130 billion is a significant amount of money, and it's more remarkable given the tax is unnoticeable to the average consumer and primarily impacted foreign manufacturers (either forcing them to move to the US or more friendly countries). The deficit wasn't built in two years and I don't think it could be solved in two years either.
I was probably lucky.
We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.
Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.
Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.
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