The belief of Trump and his allies is that the last 40 years of free trade has been extremely favorable to college educated "elites" and extremely unfavorable to the working class. They see foreign trade as having hollowed out American manufacturing, and therefore they see the shutting down foreign trade as a way to reverse this decline. While they are aware that doing so will hurt college educated professionals, they don't care because they feel those people have had it too good for too long.
I get it and even sympathize, but I don’t think it will work for three reasons.
First is the uncertainty they are creating. Factories take a long time to build and staff and cost millions to billions depending on size and industry. Who in their right mind is going to invest that to build factories that are only economically viable under a tariff regime that could vaporize after the next election? Or if Trump changes his mind? Which he has a history of doing. Chaos like this is anathema to that kind of long term investment.
I am not opposed to the idea of trying to rebalance trade and repatriate manufacturing. Not at all. But it can be done skillfully, strategically, and without panicking global markets. This economic pivot is less well planned and executed than Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The second reason it won’t work is that there’s way more competition today. After WWII during those glory days of US manufacturing everyone talks about Europe was destroyed and much of Asia had not yet industrialized. We were not just selling to a domestic market. We were selling to a world that had no alternatives. That’s just not true anymore.
The third reason it won’t work is that these tariffs are going to be massively inflationary and that will wipe out any gains the working class gets from more or better jobs.
Meanwhile they are doing nothing to address cost disease in housing, health care, or education.
Housing is the big one and I haven’t heard a peep. Instead of using Federal leverage to tilt at windmills like trans people using bathrooms, they could use that power to push states to regularize zoning and allow more home construction. “No more Federal highway funds unless you implement a plan to reduce housing costs.” Now that would help the working class and the young. It would also help things like the birth rate, which I know a bunch of people on the right are freaking out about. Reducing the #1 cost barrier to family formation would help a lot.
In short I think they’re doing a terrible erratic job of implementing a dubious strategy. This is going to fail, and we will all get poorer as a result. China will be the largest beneficiary since even more of global trade will now shift to them. They are now seen as stable, responsible, and reliable while we look like a basket case.
I think that's the belief of his voters in the Upper Midwest, but not necessarily Trump himself. He's the college-educated elite. He's playing them like a fiddle. He knows that they will absorb the damage from this, not the elites, who are far more connected than they are college educated.
Where did you take this from? Trump is not from working class. Working class might've been his 'platform' for the election, but he's already elected now, he basically has no incentive now to fight for the rights/interests of his voters, he has his own wallet that needs to finally get filled. Unless you think he really aims for a 3rd term.
Sure, it's just that though, a belief. The vast majority of the poor have prospered from free trade; indeed, the costs they complain the most about (health, education, housing) are the biggest categories of things that _can't_ be traded.
But these beliefs have been core to the American left for decades. Even left wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky have attacked the neoliberal trade agreements I think.
Trump’s populist right wing fans have adopted traditionally left wing views. What’s surprising is so many left wing people are supportive of free trade when they were against free trade during the Reagan era.
I don't think the left has been automatically in favor of tariffs--or at least I'd appreciate evidence for that claim. The complaints about free trade deals that I've seen have tended to be about provisions that treated various labor and environmental regulations as restraints on trade. It's fair to say that left-liberal people are paying more attention to the downsides of tariffs than they were, but I don't think it's a simple reversal of positions.
I’m not sure what your sources are but if Bernie Sanders is the left, then he’s been saying the same thing for a long time and continues to. Maybe there’s some nuance to it?
Not going to comment on the politics, but I'd point out that recession odds on Kalshi are currently 64% and 58% on Polymarket [1,2]. In other words, recession in 2025 is more likely than not -- though far from guaranteed.
My thought relevant to HN is that either way this is likely to decimate venture capital and startups, at least in the short run. Venture capital funds come from limited partners like pensions and endowments, and the professionals I know are all shifting away from growth stocks and into value, international and bonds. VC is already in a drought (except for AI) and now my guess is that it's going to get worse. So many VCs I know have started only in the last 15 years, so they have never seen a real recession like 2009 while working in venture.
It's too late, these actions have shown how truly fragile and arbitrary USA policy is, and extreme anti-current-rules-based-order views are rampant in USA politics. Policy will be volatile and no multinationals or governments will want to deal with the chaos.
I don't think this is quite true. Because these tariffs have been levied under the guise of a national emergency, they technically need to be confirmed by the legislature within X number of days. The House is playing tricks to not hold a vote, and I'm not sure if they need cloture in the senate, but I don't think they need 2/3 to slap the tariffs down.
That is true. X=150 under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is the authority under which Trump is establishing the tariffs. After 150 days, someone could file a lawsuit to reverse the tariffs if there has not been any vote.
"None of these trade provisions empowers Mr. Trump to impose tariffs on all imports from all countries based on an arbitrary formula. Section 122 lets a President impose tariffs of up to 15% in response to trade deficits, but Congress must approve them after 150 days. Someone should sue to block his abuse of power."
OK but they still just need a majority in the house to undo that? And that is assuming that silliness isn't smacked down in the courts forcing them to hold a vote anyway.
It’s more that it absolves them from having to hold a vote to continue the “emergency”. I believe the emergency act requires congress to vote to continue the emergency after a certain number of days.
But the republicans know that would be embarrassing to hold a public vote to do so- so they sneak in shit like this, to continue to be cowards since they’re too scared to publicly endorse the cruelty.
No-one’s seeing the impact yet (except for those who pay day-to-day attention to the markets, but that’s not a huge number of people), because nothing has actually happened yet. The tariffs go into effect on the 9th, and China’s retaliatory tariffs go into effect towards the end of the month; the EU’s retaliation will probably start hitting in May. Over the next month, it is likely that Americans will see prices go up dramatically, and significant job loss is likely. Considering how upset Americans got over expensive eggs, you’ve got to assume every congressperson is about to drown under a sea of angry calls and letters from constituents.
That might actually produce a veto-proof majority for undoing this, quite quickly.
Two thirds of the Senate, only half of the House. Focusing on reversing just the tariffs is a waste of effort. The traditional ownership-class backers of the Republican party need to wake up to the reality that this bankruptcy enthusiast will only bring further destruction and ruin, start leaning on some congresscritters to buck the maggot party line, and depose this America-hating fuck. That's about the only hope of the United States being able to rebuild credibility.
X-Com: Enemy Known, where you're forced to play with a certain squad leader who is always either out of Time Units, panicking, or mind-controlled, and a 99% hit chance is not really 99%.
I feel like you might be confused about the statement. One platform gives 58% odds, the other gives 64% odds. This is obviously high, but also very far from virtually guaranteed. In 100 trials, we’d expect recession in ~60 events. There is no secret math hidden here, it’s just that.
> My thought relevant to HN is that either way this is likely to decimate venture capital and startups, at least in the short run.
Yeah, seemed like the IPOs were really getting going again, but I think that likely dries right up, too.
Unless you figured out how to materialize rare earths out of thin air, or spin up an automated factory in six months, it’s hard to imagine anyone will be looking to give you money.
It's already happening. Klarna canceled their IPO. So did StubHub. I think it's a safe bet that all planned IPOs have been canceled for the time being.
If the betting site is used as a hedge, then the equilibrium prices don’t reflect real-world probabilities.
Suppose people predicted that Trump would tank the economy and wanted a few extra dollars in that case. An extra dollar in a Trump world would be worth more than in a normal world, thus distorting betting.
Actually, that's not what I've found. When I have compared betting sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to the implied probability of Fed rate cuts in the interest rate futures market, I have found them to match up and move in lock step with each other. (I don't work for any of these companies and I don't use the betting sites myself; just stating my observation.)
That's because there's an easy arbitrage. If the prices get out of line with each other, anyone can buy the cheap one, sell the expensive one, and get free money.
Good. Silicon Valley collectively sold their souls to Saudi Arabia, and put their full weight behind Trump because that’s what Saudi Arabia wanted, and now they are gonna get what they deserve. I hope their wealth is destroyed to the point of needing to care about Social Security and Medicare.
There used to be more of an image of making the world better - people were still talking about getting rich, of course, but there was a sense that they were going change the world more positively in the spirit of Steve Jobs’ bicycle for the mind quote, and it seemed like that got dropped in the 2010s when everything got so focused on adtech riches and, later, the cryptocurrency marketing push tried to finalize everything without delivering anything truly beneficial to the users.
"Making the world a better place" is an incredible marketing trick, almost good enough to fool the people working at the companies into feeling like they were doing more than selling electronics, and chronic anxiety.
The only way to convince someone the world needs to be made better is to either convince them it sucks or force it to suck. Ad tech just said the quiet part out loud.
Yeah, it's a Briticism. The FT is basically the Wall Street Journal of London, for those not familiar. I've been reading this paper for decades and they often use "group" for "company," "sack" instead of "fire," and many other delightfully English locutions.
In British English there are specific meanings. “Firing” is a general term for getting rid of staff. “Sacking” is getting rid of staff because they have done something wrong.
“Group” can be used when talking about a large organisation as a whole, rather than a smaller component or subsidiary.
So the FT is explicitly drawing attention to the argument that the people were fired because of something they did (attempting to unionise) and that that decision was made or sanctioned by Apple at the top level (not some regional CEO or middle manager).
One might think that they're using "group" because Apple is a multinational with subsidiaries in various other countries. But the article is in fact about a dispute between the US company and some of its US employees.
I don't have any statistical data on this, but my impression is that it's more than "some people." It may be half or even most.
You have one contingent that is anti-Trump and will vote for any alternative to Trump, even a senile old man with dementia. You have another contingent that is against Progressivism/leftism and will vote for anything that opposes this, up to and including voting for Trump despite strongly disliking him.
The root problem is that social media amplifies extreme voices, so you get very extreme rhetoric coming out of both sides. This scares people and makes them feel like their primary goal must be to vote against the scary thing.
I think you can lend credence to this theory in your first sentence by considering election strategy. Usually the focus is on the moderates, because those super motivated voters are pretty easy to guarantee.
The moderates end up being a very small portion of voters, I believe?
That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you since yours looked like every other student's except the for the markings.
There can be 2 or more transistors in a dip-8, but I think the point is more that the wrong dip-8 was given, not which specific dip-8.
I change details when I tell stories, both to prevent eyes glazing, and because the details don't matter that much. If I told this story to a neighbor it wouldn't involve the words "dip-8", 555, or "transistor".
For instance I had a professor that just did not like me. I did all the work, the papers, but the second paper assigned was about bioethics and at the time there was a lot of negative press about that subject and I went really deep into a subject I had never heard of before. Well the prof was a bioethicist, and on some bioethics committee, and did not like my prose. I barely passed that class that semester. I think they knew they couldn't fail me because, as I said, I did the work; but they certainly made me not want to continue college, that's for sure.
I don't think it's just adoption and network effects, though that is part of the equation. The other big (bigger?) piece is that the CUDA landscape is very complete, with libraries and examples for many different kinds of use cases, and they are well documented and easy to get started with. Ctrl+F this page for "ecosystem" and you'll find another comment that explains it better than I can.
OpenCL was definitely supposed to be the standard, but as the sibling suggests, it's just much harder to use than CUDA. Also, it doesn't feel like OpenCL has much of a community around it, documentation doesn't seem great, and just the overall experience is very frustrating. I tried to implement something in OpenCL about 5 years ago, thinking it would be fairly trivial to port a simple compute shader from CUDA, and ended up giving up. Just too difficult.
