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134 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 9 Aug \ parent \ on: Climate activist dinner tonight; wife said limit the bitcoin. What to do? bitcoin
Lucky you! Then you can just ask him and it will be his subject, not yours, saving you the hassle.
is cleaner than the average energy use in the economy
The economy is what's wrong to a climate activist to begin with. What he will hear is "hey, we can replace this tumour with this other less damaging tumour!". He will answer "yea... I think many things should change" and will stop there, which is code for "I actually want communist central planning".
LOL
I understand what you mean :P
I hate wasting my time in pointless discussion in private spaces, especially since it isn't appropriate to begin with. I have never started a debate on politics nor economy in social encounters. Not even once. Yet to my surprise, since everyone knows I'm heavily embedded on this subjects, it's everyone else who start me on them, and even then I limit what I say to what's appropriate for such contexts.
One of the funniest cases was on a friend's birthday, in which he asked me to please not to talk about politics since he had some leftist acquittances, and I assured him that I had no prior intention on doing so for it wasn't appropriate. I obliged to my word, yet some beers afterwards this friend was trying to start me debating with his friends just to see the world burn 😂 (of course I limited myself to do it on good humour).
I wouldn't, specially if he is a climate activist. He will make the point on how bad bitcoin is for the climate due to it's energy consumption and you will end up having a nasty debate that you will not win because for a climate activist any energy consumption above zero is sacrilege, and you will make everyone uncomfortable for the rest of the night. Don't do it.
The company didn't violate its own IP, for it sold and shared on free-will terms its own IP. The only laws infringed are related to what the state determined on its own terms about what IP can or can not be shared from a completely private company. What's unrealistic is to pretend to force that, since the product is intended for mass production and consumption. If the defence system of the state has specific technology it developed upon request and pays to own uniquely, then there would have been specific and very clear contracts in place and thus an undeniable violation of IP rights of the state. That's an actual thing and could and can and is treated that way even within the private sector. Why would it have to be any different upon arbitrary government terms on stuff it do not owns nor understands, when there are already perfectly defined protocols to deal with that exact situation within the private sector? Further, the unrealistic idealism is on thinking the government can deal with this better with absolutely no understanding nor skin on any aspect on the matter. This is outright arbitrary and pointless expropriation, a one-way path towards socialism if allowed to progress further. This is wrong everywhere.
This is wrong everywhere. The Cadence company acted fully under its property rights. What's actually wrong here are the tyrannical laws that made his actions "illegal": ECRA, IEEPA and EAR. All entrepreneurship killers. Brace yourselves in fear of certain doom every single time you hear the government discovered something new to call "strategic".
The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
The loss of business for exporters to the US would lower the prices they're able to charge.
There's a limit of viability, as any protectionist policy proved over and over, it will only cause imports to cease, not to become cheaper.
You're also assuming no viable domestic producers of substitutes.
I do am assuming viable domestic substitutes, that's one of the key factors in ensuring that tariffs will take effect only on the consumer side. That, together with decreasing and expensive imports, will cause local prices to rise. The US citizen will feel 100% of the tariffs one way or another.
The equilibrium increase from tariffs is going to be significantly less than you're describing.
Just wait and see.
Exempting tariffs on some products which US does not or cannot produce does not prove that tariffs are designed to protect uncompetitive US manufacturing. That is simply flawed logic.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. That's the opposite of what you where affirming at first.
is impossible without subsides! The 'free market' cannot and will not fix this problem despite your blind faith in it.
I just showed you it's already happening. The "free market" is about pure reality only. I just showed you that what's happening, in real life, is the opposite of what your articles cite in imaginary theory. Imaginary theory is for socialism and state-driven policies. Free market is about real life and actual facts.
ever since and increasingly since the Banana Republics era set the pattern
Please give me an example. Harvesting bananas once from Guatemala 100 years ago do not justifies the US today's wealth and dominance. Give me a modern day example.
do not expect Chinas rise to dominance to be so amicable
It will have to or it will fail. And as of now, in its actions, China shows it understands it can only rise on amicable terms.
just look at history
I did, that's why I know from the facts that only free markets are capable of producing wealth. Anything that says different is invariably government propaganda, and indeed comes only from government. Stop reading government propaganda, start reading history books, and you will see by yourself.
I do not assume that, I know that's how it's first hand, from direct experience in Argentina. A company must keep margins to stay solvent so all tax increments are always passed towards the customer. Tariffs are simply a tax imposed to US citizens when buying foreign products. A company can withstand temporal costs variations, but an official 100% tariffs will only mean that you get to paid double for the same product. You will see it in action by yourself.
again these are exceptions and the exceptions are anyway to preserve supply for remain US producers who need the materials as inputs for for consumers.
Which proves that tariffs are not driven by a "recognition of lack of competence", otherwise those products would be either forbidden or have the highest tariffs. Thus tariffs are exactly like the Berlin Wall: not a way to prevent others from getting in but only a way to keep the US citizens from breaking free from the governmental caste.
The 'free market' cannot and will not produce refined rare earths outside of China
Already doing it and on it's way to scale up operations. Natural consequence of allowing the free market to take the lead once and for all.
The US economy is heavily reliant upon illegal immigrants for domestic help and manual labour.
Which in all cases are always much better off than an average chinese citizen, both in terms of wages and workload. Wages are nothing if you can not live and the chinese people have been indoctrinated by the state to be willing slaves with the 996 slave work culture.
US wealth and power is not and never was solely derived from 'free markets'
Do the math. Do you really think that current US wealth and power comes from the fact it harvested bananas from Guatemala? Really? It doesn't, it comes from the fact it established itself as a world free-trade leader, of which even China benefited from greatly.
and what a Chinese global dominance could mean
I don't need to know anything to certainly predict that any dominance established on the basis of governmental intervention will be bad from any country. That's why I praise Chinese openness and condemn Trump's brute protectionism. But I'm certain both powers will equilibrate at some point, the key factor being that they depend heavily on each other.
That does not refute the argument that tariffs seek to protect US manufacturers and producers from more efficient offshore producers.
It absolutely does, in the most extreme way possible for it's the limit case: tariffs are not being imposed in an almost non-existent internal industry. Should your tariff logic apply, importing said products should be directly forbidden, and it's not, so your logic is false.
This is cherrypicking semantics and ultimately evasive nonsense
It's not, and indeed your cherry picked examples of leading industries are proof of that. You named 7 examples out of the literally millions the economy is composed off, and left outside equally important industries like, to name the most obvious, space launchers.
How long does it take to get up and running US or US allies based rare earths refining of all the rare earths that are absolutely essential to many military (and high tech civilian) applications? Ten years maybe at best, but even then all agree it will come at a massive cost- the US is simply incapable of doing that complex refining in a cost competitive way. It will/would take huge subsidies which free market end users cannot logically pay - only a determined government might.
God forbid the US tries to "invest" in mining and processing. Any state-dirven policy can only end in massive catastrophe. If the US is to do this right, it will simply reduce taxes and allow for free export and imports, and the industry will thrive quickly. The tech is already in place and operative, scaling might take time but with the help of Chinese imports it will be steadily sustainable. At that scale, 10 years are a blink of an eye, and if the US government makes sure entrepreneurship can develop freely and at low taxes, it will develop as fast.
China is led by a poliburo of mostly engineers.
Which is why China is still decades away from it's true potential. The day said politburo stops intervening, China will thrive in ways unprecedented in history.
They face incentives and consequences the corporate sponsored politicians who front wealthy US corporate capital do not.
The day the US gets rid of its crony capitalism and embraces the full free market, it will get back to its old glory days, indeed.
Chinas poliburo strategy of becoming the most efficient productive economy on the planet has succeeded because
it relies on slave labor.
It is true that China is struggling to develop suitable markets for its newly and increasingly wealthy citizens to invest in
Which is why said markets must never be developed by state intervention, for it can only lead to a predictable disaster like Evergrande which is, by the way, a blatant example of crony capitalism at the extreme in China.
I understand the huge resistance to accepting that US/western dominance is waning and may be on its last legs- it is a hugely confronting/frightening topic for those who do not understand the history of empires and the crucial role governments have always played in the wealth of nations.
I have no resistance either way, I'm ready to embrace China whenever it develops freely, for it will only be good for all. There is not and has never been anything remotely close to a "crucial role" of governments on economy other than causing damage to it, and China is an excellent example of a great population permanently hindered by interventionism. If today's China is what's left, imagine what it would be if the state would once and for all take off their boots from China's head! It would be the most epic revival in history. Just a glimpse of that is exactly what happened on Guangdong, which thrived exponentially only by being freed from the boot of the politburo.
Those who will not acknowledge the degree to which US hegemony dominance is now being contested
There hasn't been a single time since its inception in which the US dominance wasn't contested, and if everything goes well, this tendency will remain and hopefully equilibrate, for an equilibrium would mean that another power is at its level of producing goods and leading commerce, which is a good thing for all involved. Thinking in terms of "winners and losers" is a classical socialist fixed-pie fallacy. In reality, everyone wins, which is what's happening right now, in real time, right in front of you, otherwise China wouldn't sell and the US wouldn't buy, and vice versa. The only thing hindering further prosperity is the nefarious interventionism from both governments.
You can always find the truth by reductio ad absurdum. See my answer to Salomonsatoshi, to this comment you answered.
Glad that my contributions are of your interest :)
USA cannot compete in virtually all manufactured goods. The tariffs are admission of that!
This is fundamentally wrong, check the basic logic of the statement and you will easily realize it reduces itself to absurdity: if tariffs are an admission of US inability to compete, then why high-tech products that are not manufactured en masse in the US, like semiconductors and chemicals, have no tariffs due to, indeed, not being manufactured in the USA en masse? Isn't in that case the lack of tarifs an admission of inability to compete? You do realize it doesn't work at all like that? Tariffs are, again, not a shield against the outside world but a contention of inside exploitation schemes: the corrupt US socialist government will not dare to bring down taxes to make their industry competitive again, they will answer by increasing them under the disguise of "protectionism", through tariffs.
China dominates increasingly (...)
"increasingly" do not equates "majority", and making advancements do not means "gaining the lead". Further, advancing on some areas do not equates advancing on all areas.
Yes USA ditched its productive capacity and infrastructure because it became drunk on the extraordinary privilege of being the issuer of the global reserve currency
I fully agree on that part.
China is catching up and is using Russia as a proxy to test and challenge Europe and US hegemony.
If you can not see that Europe and the US are doing exactly the same with Ukraine you're missing half the story and will necessarily arrive to the wrong conclusions.
USA cannot source the rare earths it needs to produce military equipment
It absolutely does and will scale up production soon. You're relying on outright false information here and thus, again, unavoidably arriving to wrong conclusions.
China has cloned nearly all of the wests manufacturing advantages - China now produces EVs, solar panels, robots, drones, nanotech, biotech, infrastructure and other strategic goods at lower cost than anyone else can.
And that's a remarkable feat we all welcome gladly for it makes our lives better. Still, the observation on the first item holds.
Their mixed economy delivers superior efficiency to the wests crony capitalism which has increasingly become a financialised cesspit of non productive speculation because it cannot produce goods and services anymore at a competitive price.
I fully agree on that except that it's important to remark that what works on China's "mixed" economy is precisely one part of that mix, free market capitalism, while the other part has managed not to damage the other one that much, yet still does. It's a net positive, not a no-negatives.
Trump is justifiably afraid that Chinas domination of global trade will result in decline of the USD/SWIFT hegemony upon which US empire viability is not dependent.
I agree, and his measures only help to exacerbate that situation.
The ultimate outcome is hard to predict but nobody can credibly say USA will remain the dominant global hegemony.The next ten years will be 'interesting'.
All following years will be interesting and all major powers will unavoidably have their ups and downs. As long as the fight for supremacy remains on the realm of economic competition, we all win. I give you even more: China is leading by the example right now on international economic policy, and Trump is making a total clown show. I side with China's approach, and condemn Trump's brute, ill informed and incompetent measures.
USA Treasury trying to sell $100 Billion short dated (one month) next week shows how precarious the US empires liquidity and overall viability is.
Same old news, don't rely on those single events. What should we think about Evergrande's disaster on China? They all always come out of those situations, they both are too big to be bothered (still).
Economy is societal thermodynamics. As such, one of the fundamental principles is that of net preservation. You can always make very precise judgements on the net output long-term by simply looking at the input, ignoring whatever twirls in the middle. For example, in the case of inflation, a duplication of the monetary base will cause all prices on average to increase by 100%. In the meantime until that final and unavoidable state settles, prices will vary seemingly at random here and there, some might not change and some may increase by more than 100%, so if you make yourself the question "which price increment is driving inflation" you will be unable to parse the information correctly and conclude that "inflation is not an exact science", when in reality it's a perfectly deterministic outcome.
In the same way, in the case Undisciplined points out, how each cause will determine a final inflationary value once all settles (that is, if tariffs and money emission do not changes) has a perfectly defined percentage of final responsibility. An overall 50% of tariffs if imports account for 50% of the economy will have a net effect of 25% of inflation. A 100% monetary emission that's spent 50% on the country will cause 50% inflation. The net effect will be a 1.5*1.25= 1.88 => 88% total inflation. And so on and so forth.
Using this deterministic nature of monetary policies is that Milei was able to prevent an economic collapse, by simply executing a predefined plan.
If you want to perfectly understand monetary policies (and why they're something to get rid off for good), look for Milton Friedman speeches. He's the absolute master on the matter.
The USA is more than able to compete against China in any market of its interest. That's not the problem, the problem is much, much darker: tariffs are the confession from the US government that it's unwilling to revert the socialist burden it has drowned its own industry into, in order to maintain the privileged status of the governmental caste.
Ironically, Chinese efficiency is putting the US caste against the ropes, pressing for it to become a freer country. Once that happens, China itself is next. Accelerationism is real.
Exactly. No one can, so the only victims are US workers, for you can't take the compromise of a new salary contract if you can't tell if the good you're importing to get that new line going will become forbidden or unaffordable tomorrow beyond appeal. Thousands of high-end job positions where instantly lost due to this, and the effect is already affecting the general workforce as the recent statistics scandal very predictably revealed.
As with inflation, it can take from 6 months up to a year for the effects to be felt generally. People who receive the imported products first have been impacted instantly, both by price increments and perhaps more importantly by incertitude, which immediately got entrepreneurial sidequests shut down, which translates into less job opportunities and so on. All of those effects will take up to a year to be felt by the general public, if not removed previously. However, the trauma of the whimsical back-and-forth from Trump is causing severe damage indirectly due to increasing incertitude on what he will be doing next. Even a bad plan is not that bad if it's at least consistent, that is, it's much less damaging to persist with tariffs increments steadily and predictably with time, instead of going on-and-off about it repeatedly and totally at random, especially if you have a hundreds years long hard earned reputation of being an overall stable market.