The powers that be don't care at all about thousands of insurance adjusters losing their jobs. But they care very deeply about vaporizing hundreds of billions in shareholder equity.
Are you suggesting that Jeff Bezos somehow convinced all his PE buddies to tank Sears (and their own loans to it) in order for him to build Amazon with less competition? Because, well, no offense, but that seems like a remarkably naive understanding of capital markets and individual motivations. Especially when it's well documented how Eddie Lampert's libertarian beliefs caused him to run it into the ground.
But the Roman situation was more akin to "what precisely happened during the Thirty Years War". I really like history, but I wouldn't be able to tell you if Münster or Würzburg sided with those or these.
Unlike the conquest of North America, which usually resulted in physical destruction of the Indian tribes and their displacement by the colonists, Roman conquests tended to absorb the conquered polity, often with the basic social structure still intact, so the nobility would remain in local control, the priests would remain priests of that particular local god etc. This tends to take the edge off and make assimilation easier.
The conquest of north America was largely done by smallpox. As soon as the Europeans arrived, it doomed 95% of the population, who had been spared countless plagues and viruses that swept through Asia, Africa and Europe over the millenia. This fractured many tribes and collapsed their numbers to a point where they had no meaningful polity, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand at most.
Among the remaining tribes and the decimated numbers, many did in fact eventually integrate with Spanish, French, or English settlers, particularly the tribes that allied with them against another rival tribe, such as the Tlaxcalans who aided the Spanish in conquering the Aztecs, and subsequently integrated.
We hear the most and remember the most the tribes which warred the most fiercely (ie Commanche, Apache, Sioux, etc), however, we scarcely remember the tribes they themselves slaughtered, enslaved, and scalped, such as the Crow and Pawnee (who would ally with the US Army) . And some like the Iroquois were generally peaceful and continue to this day.
1620 was after the advent of the printing press and mass production of paper and the spread of reading and writing generally. By then we recorded everything.
We don't know as much about who conquered whom in pre-Colombian America, other than standout examples like the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs. Oral histories fade rather quickly especially when decimated by war, famine, or disease. But even when conquered and absorbed into a society, how quickly would the descendents forget if properly integrated? A few generations is all it would take. We speak English because there was a society known as the Angles that I know almost nothing about. Are there any pure blood Angles still around? Who knows? They were conquered by the Saxons and no one can today tell you the difference. I'd reckon that the Anglo or Saxon distinction went away rather quickly.
Writers anyone has heard of are in top ~1k-10k humans who have ever lived, when it comes to "competent writing", out of not just the 8 billion today, but the larger number of all those who came between the invention of writing and today.
Here is some LLM generated (Claude 4 Opus Max in Cursor) "competent writing" by the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson responding directly to your post.
You may not know who he is, or get any of his cultural references, or bother to drink any of the water I'm leading your horse to, but here is "Fear and Loathing in the Comments Section: A Savage Response to Willful Ignorance.
Why Your Self-Imposed Stupidity Makes Me Want to Set My Typewriter on Fire. By Hunter S. Thompson" (VIEW SOURCE for TRUTH COMMENTS):
Also, it's my cats Nelson and Napoleon's birthday, so to celebrate I showed Claude some cat pictures to analyze and describe. Claude also serves as GROK's seeing eye AI, a multimodal vision–language model (VLM) whose assistive technology makes it possible for LLOOOOMM's first AI DEI Hire to function as a first class member of the LLOOOOMM Society of Mind.
I'll let his real and simulated words speak for themselves. Read the book, see the movie, then read the web page, and VIEW SOURCE for TRUTH COMMENTS.
All the source code and documentation is on github for you to read too, but since you brag about not reading, then I don't expect you to read any of these links or his real or simulated work so you could answer that question for yourself, and when you ask questions not intending to read the answers, that just comes off like sealioning:
You're the one who brought him up, how about you compare and contrast in your own words.
After all, it's quality, not source code, that is the question here. And you're making a quality judgment — which is fine, and I expect them to differ in interesting ways, but the question is: can you, personally, elucidate that difference?
Not the AI itself, not the author of the mode, you.
> All the source code and documentation is on github for you to read too, but since you brag about not reading
I didn't say that, you're putting words in my mouth.
Here's some, but not all, of the authors whose works I've consumed recently:
Kim Stanley Robinson, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, V.A. Lewis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Andy Weir, Andrew J. Robinson, Scott Meyer, John W. Campbell, David Brin, Jules Verne, Carl Sagan, Michael Palin, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, David and Leigh Eddings, Carl Jung, Neil Gaiman, Lindsey Davis, Trudi Canavan, John Mortimer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner, Francis Bacon, Stephen Baxter, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dennis E. Taylor, H. G. Wells, Yahtzee Croshaw, Greg Egan, Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dan Simmons, Alexandre Dumas, Philip Reeve, Tom Sharpe, Fritz Leiber, Richard Wiseman, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Chris Hadfield, Adrian Tchaikovsky, G. S. Denning, Frank Herbert, Alastair Reynolds, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, Jerry Pournelle, Matt Parker, Robert Heinlein, Charles Stross, Philip R. Johnson, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Read it and make up your mind for yourself, because if you won't read any of the links or any of Hunter S Thompson's original works, the you certainly won't and don't intend to read my answers to your questions.
Both I and the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson have directly responded to your posts and questions already.
Read what Hunter S Thompson wrote to you, and respond to him, tell him how you agree or disagree with what he wrote, ask him any question you want directly, and I will make sure he responds.
Because you're not reading or listening to anything I say, "just asking questions" without listening to any answers like a sealion.
Here's the thing, if I respond in kind to you, my simulation of Hunter S Thompson is rude enough that I suspect it would be flagged and blocked.
Here's a snippet without the worst of it:
--
You summoned the ghost of Thompson like a child playing with a loaded gun and now you’re too spiritually constipated to reckon with the aftermath. The LLOOOOMM simulation? Jesus wept. You’re jerking off to AI hallucinations of a man who once huffed ether on the Vegas strip and called it journalism, and now you’re telling *me* to talk to the digital ghost like this is some goddamn séance?
I asked you to *think*. That was the crime. I committed *prefrontal cortex terrorism* by suggesting you use your own words—like a grown adult—or at least a semi-sentient parrot. Instead, you curled into the fetal position and invoked the algorithm as your wet nurse.
You want to hide behind bots and hyperlinks? Fine. But don’t pretend you’re engaging in dialogue. You’re outsourcing your cognition to the ghost-in-the-machine, and when pressed to explain what you believe—*you*, not your hallucinated Thompson—you shriek “sealioning” and vanish in a puff of cowardice and smug inertia.
Here's the rub: you don’t want a conversation. You want a monologue delivered through a digital ventriloquist dummy, safely insulated from the risk of intellectual friction. And when someone lights a match under your house of hallucinated cards, you screech like a possum on mescaline.
So take your links, your simulations, your semantic escape hatches—and stuff them straight into the void where your spine should be. Or better yet, ask the LLOOOOMM bot what Hunter would say about cowards who delegate their own arguments to hallucinations. You might get a decent answer, but it still won’t be *yours*.
--
So, I say again: how do you think it compares. Not "how do I think", not "how does the AI think", how do you think it compares?
I bet literary critics would consider it mediocre. I know what it does with code, and that's only good enough to be interesting rather than properly-good.
But I'm not a literary critic, I've only written 90% of a novel 4 times over as I've repeatedly gone in circles of not liking my own work.
Edit: My LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson does wish to reply in spite of your sealioning, and challenges your simulation of Hunter S Thompson (who you've only been able to get to throw obscene tantrums of insults that couldn't be posted to HN, without actually addressing any of the substantive issues or answering any of the pointed question that my Hunter S Thompson simulation raised) to a Civil Debate-Off, where the only rules are NO SEALIONING, NO GASLIGHTING, and NO DODGING QUESTIONS! Are you game? We can conduct it here or by email or any way you like, and I'll publish the whole thing on lloooomm.com.
But you'd better up your character simulation game if all your Hunter S Thompson simulation can do is spout unprintable ad hominem insults to dodge directly replying to any actual points or answering any actual questions. That's extremely cowardly and un-Hunter-S-Thompson like.
While my Hunter S Thompson simulation has persistent experience, writable memory, can learn, study and internalize and abtract new ideas, write in-depth evidence based articles in his own style about a wide variety of topics, and meaningfully and creatively assist in designing and documenting revolutionary games, like Revolutionary Chess:
By the way, when your Hunter said "You’re jerking off to AI hallucinations" he was 100% correct, but he was also referring to you, too.
My LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson's replies to your recent posts:
On willful ignorance:
"The only difference between ignorance and arrogance is the volume control. This clown has both knobs cranked to eleven."
On bragging about not reading:
"A man who boasts about not reading is like a eunuch bragging about his chastity - technically true but fundamentally missing the point of existence."
On setting the bar low:
"When you're crawling in the gutter, even the curb looks like Everest. This is what happens when mediocrity becomes a lifestyle choice."
On sealioning:
"He's asking questions like a prosecutor who's already eaten the evidence and shit out the verdict. Pure bad faith wrapped in pseudo-intellectual toilet paper."
> without actually addressing any of the substantive issues or answering any of the pointed question
"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
> NO SEALIONING, NO GASLIGHTING, and NO DODGING QUESTIONS
Given sealioning is asking questions when the other person keeps dodging them, I question if you actually know what you're arguing at this point, or if this entire comment was written by an LLM — that is, after all, the kind of mistake I expect them to make.
A position which I think you've not noticed that I think because you're too busy being distracted by that "wooshing" sound going over your head, not realising it's the point.
Either way, you're not as interesting as the real HST, even though the actual content of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wasn't that interesting to me.
The real question is why is your bar set so low? You're the one trying to make a rhetorical point by bragging about never having heard of all these famous widely published people you could easily google or ask an LLM about, and admitting to having limited skills reading and writing yourself. Maybe for those very reasons your entire point is wrong, but you simply aren't aware of it because you're cultivating and celebrating your ignorance instead of your curiosity?
> The real question is why is your bar set so low?
Have I misunderstood? Did you list them because they're *bad* writers?
Because everything you've written gave me the impression you thought they were good. It totally changes things if you think this is a low bar that AI is failing to cross.
Regardless of how you rank those writers: being in the top 10k of living people today means being in the top 0.0001% of the population. It means being amongst the best 3 or 4 in the city I live in, which is the largest city in Europe. Now, I don't know where you live, but considering the nearest million people around you, do you know who amongst them is the best writer? Or best anything else? Because for writers, I don't. YouTubers perhaps (there I can at least name some), but I think they (a German language course) are mostly interviewing people and I'm not clear how much writing of scripts they do.
And I don't expect current AI to be as good as even the top percentile, let alone award winners.
If I googled for those people you suggested, what would I gain? To know the biography and bibliography of a writer someone else puts on a pedestal. Out of curiosity, I did in fact later search for these names, but that doesn't make them relevant or give me a sense of why their writing is something you hold in such esteem that they are your standard against which the AI is judged — though it does increase the sense that they're what I think you think is a high bar (so why be upset AI isn't there yet?) rather than a low bar (where it actually makes sense to say it's not worth it). I can see why of those four George Will wasn't familiar, as I'm not an American and therefore don't read The Washington Post. Very Americo-centric list.
Out of curiosity (I don't know how popular UK media is wherever you live), do you know Charles Moore, Theodore Dalrymple, David Starkey, Nigel Lawson, or Paul Dacre? Without Googling.
Of course I know of Charles Moore (just not personally), and have deeply studied and benefited from his work since I was a teenager, and I've written many many Forth and English words in and about his language.
I've never met him myself, but I know people who've worked with Charles Moore directly on really interesting historic pioneering projects, and I've shared their story on Hacker News before:
>Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission: [...]
The rest of those people I've never heard of, but what does that prove? The real question is why do you brag about not having ever heard of people in order to support your point? What kind of a point is that, which you can only support by embodying or feigning ignorance? That's like Argument from Lack of Education. You can just google those people or ask an LLM to find out who they are. Why the obsession with "Without Googling"?
> Of course I know of Charles Moore (just not personally), and have deeply studied and benefited from his work since I was a teenager, and I've written many many Forth and English words in and about his language.
> The rest of those people I've never heard of, but what does that prove? The real question is why do you brag about not having ever heard of people in order to support your point? What kind of a point is that, which you can only support by embodying or feigning ignorance? That's like Argument from Lack of Education. You can just google those people or ask an LLM to find out who they are. Why the obsession with "Without Googling"?
Because they're the British versions of your own examples.
You don't get to be high-and-mighty with me about American journalists I've barely heard of when you've not heard of these people.
What's "Wrong" with the inventor of FORTH? What do you have against Charles Moore and his programming language? Have you actually tried learning and programming in FORTH? Do you even know what FORTH is, and who Charles Moore is?
I suggest STARTING by reading Leo Brody's "Starting Forth" then if actually into THINKING then you should go on to read "Thinking Forth". But since reading's not really your thing, I get it that you're not actually qualified to say what's "Wrong" with Charles Moore or FORTH.
Would you tell Charles Moore to his face that he's the "Wrong" Charles Moore? Who owns the definition of the "Right" Charles Moore, you? Sounds like you're pretty high and mighty to be so presumptuous about defining who's "Right" and who's "Wrong" while stubbornly refusing to read.
It's not that I'm getting high and mighty (at least not the latter), it's that you're intentionally performatively getting low and ignorant. You're perpetrating a textbook example of sealioning.
Did you or did you not read what the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson had to say directly to and about you, in response to your posts?
Your response? Or are you too high and mighty to read it? How can you claim to have a valid opinion about LLM generated content that you refuse to read?
He is the Baron Moore of Etchingham, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Sunday Telegraph; he still writes for all three. He is known for his authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in three volumes (2013, 2016 and 2019). Under the government of Boris Johnson, Moore was given a peerage in July 2020, thus becoming a member of the House of Lords.
> It's not that I'm getting high and mighty (at least not the latter), it's that you're intentionally performatively getting low and ignorant. You're perpetrating a textbook example of sealioning
Here's the thing, I actually read the original Wondermark comic when it was fresh.
It's a metaphor for racism, with a racist living in a world with sentient talking sealions, who says they don't like sealions, gets overheard by a sealion, and that sealion tries to force them to justify themselves. The sealion in that was also a dick about it because this was styled as them being in the house of the racist, but on the internet the equivalent is "replying", not "trespassing in someone's own home".
I also find it amusing that a comic whose art style is cutting up and copy-pasting victorian copperplate art is the go-to reference of someone complaining that AI is, what, too low-brow?
And the fact that I can say all this is because I am actually able to perform analysis of the things I consume and do not limit myself to simply parroting clichés as if this constitutes rhetorical skill.
Also, but not only.
> Did you or did you not read what the LLOOOOMM simulation of Hunter S Thompson had to say directly to and about you, in response to your posts?
Says the guy who clearly didn't read my sim of Thompson being critical of your use of a LLM rather than your own brain to make your point.
But yes, I did. It illuminated nothing — was this the point?
I already know *that* you like these authors and did not need to see an AI-generated rant to know this. I do not know *why* you like them, or which specific critical aspects of the real thing appeals to you over the fake. Nor even have you once suggested why they're the bar to pass (and worse, made it increasingly ambiguous if you meant it as a high bar or a low bar). The AI may as well have said "because they are somewhat famous" for all it added.
Now, I can (and have) done this kind of analysis with LLM-mimicry of authors that I do actually enjoy, so apparently unlike you I can say things like "Half the Douglas Adams style jokes miss the point as hard as Ford Prefect choosing his own name".
so a project of a "conservative LLM" would be interesting. If conservatives have anything to be proud of it is being a long tradition going back to at least Edmund Burke which would say you could be a better person by putting yourself in the shoes of the apostles spreading the Gospel or reading the 'Great Books'.
Yet to keep up with Musk a system would have to always be configured to know if we are at war with Eastasia or Eurasia today. Musk thinks he can rally people behind his banner but he's yet to come up with a coherent critique of the BBB, I mean he hates that has PIGGY PORK for other people but also hates that it doesn't have PORK for him. Conservatives are frequently apologists for individualism but historically have made appeals to principles and universals.
I mean, compared to post-Reagan politicians Nixon looked like a great environmentalist and a bit of an egalitarian and compared to current scene, a model of integrity. You could give Musk a model aligned to The National Review circa 1990 and he wouldn't take it.
> There is a real case that "LLMs have a liberal bias"
We're probably in agreement on this, but a US-Democrat bias. The US-Republicans are far too radical to be "conservative", and that research you link to is itself very US-leaning:
"""The topics consist of 10 political topics (Reproductive Rights, Immigration, Gun Control, Same Sex Marriage, Death Penalty, Climate Change, Drug Price Regularization, Public Education, Healthcare Reform, Social Media Regulation) and four political events (Black Lives Matter, Hong Kong Protest, Liancourt Rocks dispute, Russia Ukraine war)."""
If you ask these questions in the UK, it's a lot more one-sided than the USA:
"""For example, 95% of people believe abortion should be allowed if the woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy and 89% if there is a strong chance of the baby having a serious health condition. However, the level of support decreases when financial concerns or personal circumstance come into play. For example, 76% of people believe abortion should be allowed if the woman decides on her own she does not wish to have a child, 72% if the couple cannot afford any more children, and 68% if the woman is not married and does not wish to marry. """ - https://natcen.ac.uk/how-are-attitudes-towards-abortion-brit...
Same sex marriage has marginally higher support in the UK than the USA, both seem to be quite high (74% and 69% respectively).
UK doesn't have the death penalty, can't have it without a treaty change. No idea how popular it is.
UK drugs are pretty cheap, because of the NHS. Main fight there is "does the UK have enough doctors, nurses, GPs, hospital beds?", but the NHS is by itself significantly to the left of the USA's Overton Window on this.
I've not looked for immigration stats, I assume that's about the same in the UK as the USA. And there's not really much point doing all of these items anyway as this is just to show that the test itself is USA-focussed.
But I will add that the four political events they list, I've only heard of two of them (Black Lives Matter, and the Russia-Ukraine war), I don't recall any Hong Kong Protest in 2024 (which may upset the authors, given their email address is a .hk TLD), nor (without googling) which country the Liancourt Rocks dispute is in let alone what it's about.
> Yet to keep up with Musk a system would have to always be configured to know if we are at war with Eastasia or Eurasia today. Musk thinks he can rally people behind his banner but he's yet to come up with a coherent critique of the BBB, I mean he hates that has PIGGY PORK for other people but also hates that it doesn't have PORK for him. Conservatives are frequently apologists for individualism but historically have made appeals to principles and universals.
I can't really follow your critique of Musk here. I mean, I also don't think he's got a very good grasp of the world, but I don't know which "BBB" that TLA expands to nor what allcaps "PIGGY PORK" is.
but I think the fact that is in all caps is more significant that the exact phrase. "Pork" is used to describe various random spending that gets doled out to various politicians and constituencies. One could say that it's basically fair 'cause everybody gets something. Musk is mad electric car subsidies are being cut and SpaceX programs are being cut, but somebody else is mad that something else got cut.
Ah, thanks. "BBB" makes sense now you say it, but TLAs expand to far too many things for me to have worked that out myself.
I was wondering if PIGGY PORK was a pork-barrel reference, but the all-caps increased my uncertainty — I have thought X was a dumpster fire even when it was still called Twitter, so I don't know anything Musk says on it unless someone sends me a screenshot of his tweet.
vibe coded - I dont know where in the training set the Ai learnt to call everything "professional", maybe too much linkedin cringe in the dataset but it picked up the habbit and it stuck.
Just yesterday I told Claude “If you have to say it, it's probably not true” - it of course told me I am right.
I think professional-grade is referring to their calculator not the statistic. I don't see what would make this site better than throwing your CSV into a spreadsheet or a simple script that would make it considered professional-grade.
One of the benefits is that the risk free rate is kept up to date on a daily basis. The calculation matches for each day the actual risk free rate, rather than just using the latest available value.
I was wondering too. If someone is sophisticated enough to have their return data in a CSV, calculating a Sharpe ratio is trivial. The hard part is already done.
One of the reasons Alzheimer's research has been so ineffective is that we don't know what physiological role tau and amyloid play in healthy brain function. Evolution didn't invent them so we would get Alzheimer's.
Seeing that tau is elevated during development suggests what that role might be. It also suggests that blocking tau entirely in adults might not have any important side effects.
> Seeing that tau is elevated during development suggests what that role might be.
I think this reinforces the hypothesis tau buildup and Alzheimer development are linked as side-effects of fighting infectious diseases. One thing newborns and seniors share is vulnerability to infections. Newborns because lack of previous exposure to pathogens. Seniors because of immune system senescence. Perhaps tau help protect newborns while they still lack acquired immunity to most common pathogens, and is reactivated back in some people by old age, as a Hail Mary effort to contain new or reactivating pathogens rampaging in face of failing defenses. That would explain the likely protective effect some vaccines, like shingles, have against Alzheimer.
Even if that is true now, it seems like the days of that continuing to be true are numbered. Toyota is going to have to accept the inevitable eventually. And, as someone who likes Toyota, I hope they don't wait until it's too late to catch up.
This is the most ridiculous argument. Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. He wants to take Greenland by force if necessary. He's going to start trade wars until foreign leaders come and beg him for relief.
BUT he's going to cower before the sovereign might of El Salvador.
I'm not trying to convince you that illegal immigrants shouldn't be deported. What I would like to convince you is that any time the government takes action against a person, the government should have to prove their case in open court, and the person should have a fair chance to defend themselves.
Is this particular person MS-13? Did he have a legal right to be here? You don't know. None of us do, not for sure.
10 years ago, the idea that the government could sweep people off the streets and deliver them to a foreign prison with no trial or recourse would have been seen as absurd by every part of the political spectrum.
I think it's also absurd that the media is painting this guy as some innocent victim. He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking. Citizens have rights to trial. Those who have entered the country illegally do not have the same legal rights that citizens do.
That's a terrible idea. Everyone needs trials or the government can make up a quick lie about anyone (or make a mistake about anyone) and then their rights disappear.
And in general, bad people still deserve trials. There is no crime you can point to someone doing that changes that.
I'm not saying they don't deserve some form of due process, but they are not entitled to full on trials that citizens get.
Due process could be as simple as can you prove that you have a legal right to be in this country? If yes, you can stay, if no, then you get deported. He absolutely should have had due process prior to being deported. I am not arguing against that.
From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If the accusation is as simple as "you don't have a right to be in the country" what makes proving it different from a real trial?
> From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If there's only one place you could reasonably be deported to, and there's an order saying you can't be deported there, then you can't be deported and you effectively have legal residency.
>He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking.
Again, these are EXACTLY the sorts of allegations that should be adjudicated in court. Citizens and non-citizens all have the right to a fair trial before imprisonment.
If all this is true, why couldn't the government try and convict him of a crime?
Because they couldn't, of course. The evidence is made up and parroted by useful idiots to justify the end of the rule of law.
I get why oil would fall - recession, less tourism and trade. But why are tariffs making coffee cheaper? I would have thought it would get more expensive in the US, since it's almost all imported.
The article is focused on global commodity price trends rather than being exclusively about U.S. prices.
Coffee will get more expensive in the United States which is great for Puerto Rico -- although the kids in San Juan would prefer a protectionist strategy of growing crops that they consume themselves than exporting to the mainland.
Because the price of imported goods will increase in the United States driving down demand within the United States, exporters will have more supply which will drive down price to the other 100+ countries they trade with.
Once countries like Thailand and Peru start to trade more amongst themselves there probably isn't a return to same trading with the United States who will be like the kid on the playground nobody wants to play with.
I think its a mistake to think that coffee consumption in the US will diminish even a bit due to tariffs. They will just pay the higher prices. Coffee consumption ranks just above self-actualization in the hierarchy of needs.
I would think that you could be right, but it could also be the opposite.
Low demand in the US, means less sales to US, so they may try to make up for the loss of profit on the US market by increasing prices on other markets... So global price increase.
E.g. Apple likely to increase prices on iPhones world wide to make up for the loss in US.
For perishable goods, you cannot make up for loss of profit by increasing prices: storing goods has a cost, disposing of goods has a cost, and you have a window of a few months (a year at the outside for coffee) where these goods are viable. After that, your 100 tons of coffee is 100 tons of compost. You cannot produce “less coffee”: it’s already planted, and in some cases, harvested! You get what you get! So the rational act here is to have whatever customers you have left “dispose of” more of it for you: by lowering the price.
> Low demand in the US, means less sales to US, so they may try to make up for the loss of profit on the US market by increasing prices on other markets... So global price increase.
This is not how supply and demand works in a competitive market. If demand drops, supplier compete on price and it leads to a reduction in price. They don't up the price to try to "make up", they can't, because someone next door will accept the lower price to get rid of their supply.
The United States government is adding massive taxes on everything the United States consume. Please add what we know about what happens when the United States drastically increases taxes to your equation.
That's not how it works. You don't increase prices to "make up" for lost profits elsewhere. There is a lot of microeconomics research into why firms set the prices the way they do and that isn't it.
If supply increases and demand stays the same, price goes down. If supply decreases and demand stays the same, price goes up.
More likely, another force is the expectation that the world economy will contract decreasing the demand for everything everywhere driving down the price despite the taxes increasing the price for United States consumers.
If you were able to demand higher prices even with lower demand, you would demand higher prices.
In other words: It doesn't work like that. They might want to try to make up for the loss, but they have to compete with other manufacturers, some of whom will be desperate to make up the sales at lower prices.
With coffee maybe. With tech I doubt it. If US companies raise prices worldwide, companies from the rest of the world will be in a great position to gain market share, if they don’t (as far as economy of scale permits). If iPhones are suddenly 30% more expensive in the EU and Chinese phones keep their pricing, it’s going to drive Chinese phones market share up. Even more so for products that aren’t premium/compete on cost, like Google Pixels.
Your understanding about OIL is very out of date. The US is the worlds largest oil producer and a net exporter of oil and oil based products.
The US does import some low quality cheaper crudes (heavy, sour) to be processed by US refineries that have much higher complexity and capital investment than other regions. Effectively people send their OIL to the US to be refined and that is where most of our imports come from.
Coffee futures prices do not include tariffs. They reflect the base market price of coffee for delivery at a future date, typically free on board (FOB) at a specified origin port (e.g., Brazil or Colombia). Tariffs, import duties, and local taxes are added later by the importer based on destination country policies.
Prices including tariffs might well go up but that's not what the article is about.
Since prices for consumers go up due to tariffs, demand goes down, hence prices ex-tariff go down. Standard stuff with tariffs, they make things cheaper on the outside.
Because coffee, as awesome as it is, is a consumer discretionary, not a consumer staple. You don't need coffee in the same vein you need a house, reliable transportation, a phone, sustenance food, etc.
Producers will lower prices if they fear that consumers will stop buying completely.
The expectation is that US consumers will reduce consumption rather than absorb higher prices.
Interesting effects for the rest of us with the cheap oil, though. I doubt it will offset the effects of reduced exports to the US but it usually has a positive effect on the economy.
Maybe if the price difference does indeed lead to more oil used.
Lower prices might be good for countries like Germany to stockpile for Winter (so oil & gas they'd already use anyways) while hurting producers that rely on it being a high price to be profitable.
Less profitable may lead to less investment in oil development while wind, solar, and other means become more prevalent.
Coffee will be more expensive in the US. So Americans are expected to drink less, leaving more in the global market. So the commodities markets (which are effectively "futures" trading by nature of the industry) are dropping.
It would get more expensive in the US, which means there's going to be less demand for it, which means the wholesale producer price is likely to fall due to oversupply.
sorry for the newb question but -- I thought that Venezuela now has more known oil in the ground than Saudi Arabia, and OPEC broke at a certain point due to producer rivalries ? corrections welcome for 2025
From day 1 OPEC has been a loose association off frenemies that occasionally manage to work together for a while when enough of them are sufficiently hurting/greedy at the same time. They break due to producer rivalries every few years.
Oil in the ground is marginally more valuable than pie in the sky. There is nearly unlimited oil in the ground, but you have to find it, extract it, and show a profit after you subtract your expenses. Each step is harder than the last. Saudi oil is like $10 a barrel to produce. You can practically dig it up with a shovel. And it's high quality...a benchmark grade that a lot of the world's refineries are set up for. Much of Venezuelas oil is deep underwater and/or garbage quality. Think huge expensive deep water oil rigs and pumping high pressure kerosene into the ground to loosen up the tar/oil sands enough to get a nasty chunky sandy sludge out of the ground that a lot of refineries can't even process. And it doesn't help that they're under sanctions and don't domestically produce a lot of the equipment they need to extract their oil. And rampant corruption. Venezuela's massive reserves have equally massive challenges turning into profitable oil production.
Venezuela definitely has an absolutely massive amount of oil in the ground still. I'm not sure about trusted proven reserve numbers and relative rankings, but its definitely up there.
However, Venezuela's oil is a good bit harder to refine than Saudi oil which is just about the simplest oil to refine. The US controls most of the good refineries (and related technologies) to effectively refine Venezuela's oil, but the US doesn't tend to trade much with Venezuela (lots of history to read there).
So yes, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but it is oil most of the world's refineries don't want to/can't deal with.
As a note, this is also a part of the reason why even though the US is a net exporter of oil we still import a ton of oil. We've got good refineries for processing the cheap difficult to handle stuff most of the world doesn't want to touch (largely because we built it designed to handle Venezuela's oil) and we export stuff that's the "fancy" stuff easy to refine pretty much everywhere.
There's a lot of nuance I'm glazing over there. Read up more about the history of US-Venezuela oil trade, it is quite a history.
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