> There is really one ultimate question here: "Is this the best use of our tax dollars?".
The government has far more ways of financing things than taxes. I’m not sure why we refer to money this way—it’s fundamentally disingenuous. A federal budget is not the same thing as a household budget in any way.
That argument makes no sense, I don't care that the government has other revenue sources, those revenue sources still belong to the people. The government doesn't have its own money, it manages its people's monies. And UBI at significant cost only makes sense if the people agree to that cost.
I don't believe that political views used to be narrow, I believe the political views you were allowed to actually express were much more narrow and everything else was repressed.
Really depends on the region. There's lots of opinions/ideas/directions/parties in many countries with lots of overlap. In the US... I'm not sure how relationships, that actually talk about things, can survive if partners have different party preferences.
They don’t even necessarily have positive benefits for manufacturers unless they somehow have a supply chain that exists only in the US all the way down. The automakers are against tariffs, for example.
That's why you implement them reciprocally, to force anyone else implementing them to reduce theirs. Their problem is that the method they used to identify the tariff levels was, generously, crude. And also that it was implemented too sharply.
However, as a political tactic, the sharp implementation gives them breathing room to re-calibrate before the midterms. That comes at a real GDP cost, though.
Not retaliatory, reciprocal. Retaliatory tariffs are dumb. Reciprocal tariffs are the Nash equilibrium. Whether or not these particular tariffs are in fact reciprocal is something we could debate, though. At best they are a very crude approximation of reciprocal tariffs.
Since we are diving into language semantics, these are _arbitrary_ tariffs that have been shat out via a "formula" which is being fed "how much stuff they sell us" as its input.
trump said "punish everyone who we spend more money with, barring our favourites" and they gave him a set of options. He chose the one he liked the best. No he didn't read any impact assessments, if they were made. He went by gut instinct.
Its just a punt. There is no greater game plan. its just a man making policy by vibe.
What makes them arbitrary? there is no really plan to test if they are going to work, or at what point they need to be adjusted. He will keep them until he sees something on twitter/truth social that makes him reconsider.
Yes, they are badly implemented, I agree. He is calling them reciprocal tariffs though, which implies he will lower them as they lower theirs. I don't think he's chosen a good way of estimating theirs, and so I don't think it's a particularly good policy, but reciprocal tariffs in principle are a good idea.
Even though his first pass crude approximation is stupid, it's really how other countries react, and how he reacts to them that will determine whether they behave like reciprocal tariffs or not.
There is a baked-in plan to test if they're going to work: they are formulaic, based on the trade deficit. Supposing that deficit falls, they will automaticlaly readjust downwards. I don't think the trade deficit (particularly restricted to goods, as they did it) is a good proxy for that, but it's also not completely untethered from reality.
> There is a baked-in plan to test if they're going to work
I really dont think there is a plan. Trump says he wants tariffs, this is what he got. Why would he adjust them, unless there is an upside for him? is he going to remember to re-evaluate them? does the department that generates the stats even exist any more?
I find it interesting that you are downvoted and yet nobody have a reason why you're wrong. Even the answer you get seems to agree with you.
I feel like that's not true (really, zero positives? never? that would mean a whole lot of people is patently stupid), but I'd like to base my opinions on facts, not feelings.
Could be a thing? Perhaps people might start caring about product durability and stop buying cheap shit that goes in a landfill because the producers only care about shelf appeal.
This is my hope, too. But also I fear the transition is going to be ugly. Personally I feel lucky that I’m not just starting out my life — I already have high quality stuff.
I think there is a bit more nuance. US manufacturing jobs are never coming back. If you look at the stats, US manufacturing output continues to set records. Yes, the US is second to China (has been since ~2010), but that was bound to happen on population/demographics alone.
Give me a way to filter out results with ads on them please.
Edit (hn doesn’t let me post this fast): is finding places to buy shit really an issue? How many times in your life have you thought “damn I know what I want to buy, I just don’t know from which site to buy it”? That’s hard to imagine of anyone. This user story just seems like a problem made up by search indexes to court capital.
I don't want to argue for ads, but, as someone trying to cut out Amazon from my life, it genuinely is hard to figure out where else to buy stuff these days. Slightly less common things that nonetheless used to be stocked in any halfway decent electronics store just aren't any more.
Would you mind giving more details about your use case? I'm curious.
I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?
> Would you mind giving more details about your use case? I'm curious.
That would definitely have enriched my comment, but, unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything in particular in the moment, and can't now. seb1204 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564922) mentions one common kind of use case for me: I want to buy some small utility item that I'm used to finding in the hardware store, but it's sufficiently specialty that it's not worth it for the hardware store to carry it, and it's sufficiently small that its price would triple or quadruple if I paid the manufacturer's shipping costs.
> I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?
As I say, I'm stuck in the situation of being vague because I can't think of the last specific time this affected me, but I have definitely dealt with relatively small sellers where the purchase option on their webaite is "here's a link to buy from our Amazon store."
If you're referring to sponsored content, then you can actually use MatterRank to configure an engine to devalue content that's trying to sell you something or is sponsored.
If you mean pop-ups, MatterRank can't handle that at the moment because it evaluates markdown content, but it's something we're looking at adding. In the meantime, I'd recommend a good ad-blocker.
Conversely, let me only see sites where I can buy something. Too much of my life is consumed by trying to see if something can be bought and if so how much it costs.
> If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
The government has far more ways of financing things than taxes. I’m not sure why we refer to money this way—it’s fundamentally disingenuous. A federal budget is not the same thing as a household budget in any way.