Simple answers to complex questions is fast, and helps people quickly move into the phase where they’re expending energy on “solutions” rather than debating the issue.
We’re lazy. People are lazy - I know I am.
Something that’s sufficiently removed from our everyday experience is mysterious, and (someone we trust) tells us that it will work? No questions, here we go!
This was explained to people all over the internet. I remember people posting the dailyshow shirt guy interview where they explain to him how tariffs will impact his business. Some people didn’t care as long as it also hurt everybody they don’t like.
So ask yourself we someone who voted for Trump whines about tariffs. Is this person just dumb or a total piece of shit?.
yeah, the point of being nice is to create a better world with better people who will be more capable of being nice.
and because it feels good.
but being nice to nazis doesn’t feel nice, and it makes the world a more dangerous place, where being nice is harder and riskier and less pleasant.
laughing at their suffering is pretty great though. pointing and laughing at their suffering maybe makes the world a slightly better place, long term.
I might be wrong here, but tariffs can be very effective tools, but as a slow burn. The way they’re being wielded here is asinine.
If you want to affect behavior, tariffs are a long game. They’re passed by Congress so they aren’t tied to the whims of one man. If you don’t want US chicken or EU trucks, make a law and let decades of implementation change behavior.
If you just want them to hurt, you do them the way we are now. The unpredictability hurts businesses and individuals, inside and outside the US. It makes prices and markets volatile and sows distrust. It hurts the vast majority of people, but benefits people who have the stability and assets to buy low and sell high. Each tariff implementation and retraction is just a mini market manipulation giving people with advance knowledge of what is affected to profit.
They’re a tool for correcting price alterations on the seller side. If China is subsidizing the manufacturing of Fidgets, a matching tarrif on the import of Fidgets protects domestic manufacturing from artificially cheap competition by preventing consumers from seeing those low prices.
The subsidies don’t even need to be hostile. The US subsidizes food to lower domestic costs, ensure a stockpile, and keep farmers happy. The side effect of driving down world grain prices is incidental.
Additionally, they strike me as the stick that pairs best with a carrot to spur domestic production of whatever you’ve put tarrifs on, along the lines of the CHIPS act.
I distinctly remember learning about tariffs in Social Studies. That was back in elementary / middle school. I understood it then and so did my classmates.
i wish people were better at doing their own research
I hate anyone with a passion when they say that they “did their research” as it’s always “I read a Facebook page”
People have no idea what the word research implies, or what goes into actuall real research
Schools should really put much more focus on explaining what science is and what it does
I long for the time when people said “I read a Facebook page”
Generally my circle watches 12 45-second videos on TikTok which gave them bias from assuming seeing it more places made it more right. They don’t even have to go to the comments to get bamboozled.
It was killing me with the pandemic. ‘‘I’m not sure about mRNA vaccines, I’m doing my own research’’ homie, researching a vaccine means you are running a immunology lab. You’re not researching, you’re listening to a nut trying to sell you an unregulated vitamin in place of real medicine.
I did my own “looking into something and learning about it”, and you know what? I came to the conclusion that a lot of those people are pretty smart and know what they’re doing.
Research can mean something that’s a synonym to what I said in quotes above since it doesn’t specifically mean experimental research, but that still requires looking at a variety of credible sources and knowing how to interpret what they’re saying.
Probably not what you’re going to find on tiktok.
Here in the UK properly researching topics was something we did in multiple classes in secondary/high school. Not just googling shit for an essay but checking our sources as well as source authors and dates.
This was true in the US during the 90s at least. But also some high school graduates can’t read out loud.
By the way, if tariffs are directly sent back to the customer through tax reduction on the tariffed category of products, wouldn’t it be painless for the company/customers (if you forget the retaliation tariffs) while increasing you local insensitive to production? (all things equal if you imagine companies reduce the cost of the products properly etc which is not realistic)
I don’t see how that would help. In the ideal case of a finished product, tariffs artificially raise the effective price for the buyer; they don’t change the math on the cost of production. Usually, they hurt the producing/exporting firm by forcing it to increase the asking price, which reduces sales. It reduces sales because the buying/importing firm has to pay higher prices. If the buying/importing firm gets tax reductions that are directly tied to the tariff, then its out-of-pocket expense hasn’t changed, and it can just keep buying the imported product with no effect on its profits. That means that the producing/exporting firm can still sell exactly the same volume of product at the higher price, covering the tariff cost, with no effect on its profits. Nothing much has changed, except a bunch of extra paperwork and transactions.
There’s only incentive to move production locally if the buying/importing firm can switch to a cheaper, local product, but retain the tax benefits, allowing it to keep more money. But that means the tariff money is no longer being collected, so somebody else is paying the taxes while not getting the benefits. In short, tariffs can only work by causing pain to somebody locally.
That’s 2 if’s. Sure, IF both of those things were true, maybe it would net out, but still be a paperwork and cashflow delay for the company (pay the duty today, get the money back at some point in the future) which sucks liquidity out of the market and generally holds back growth and investment.
But that isn’t particularly relevant since neither of those two things will ever happen. The tax cuts will go to the top earners, and retaliatory tariffs are very much a thing and cannot be ignored.
Ah yeah I see I forgot this part, more bureaucracy and delay might hurt cash flow. Thanks that’s a good thinking.
It’s just a though experiment, in real life it’s not a nice math problem to solve like you said.
Personally if I had to cut someone’s hours, all else being equal, the one who took 50 attempts to figure out tariffs would go before the one who took 2.
Trump & Co do love the uneducated.
I tell people that if they think other countries pay the tariffs they probably believe Mexico is paying for a wall
After brexit, the searches of “What is the European union” skyrocketed in Britain.
Most people are morons who don’t think for themselves.
From what I’ve heard most pro brexit voters thought that leaving ment no non white immigrants allowed, they failed to understand the EU only let European labor in, the people from not white lands gained access from England’s colonial past.
This may be “unpopular opinion” stuff, but I frequently see highly upvoted populist pitches on Lemmy that are just the same; a supposed way of sticking it to the man that will quite obviously be borne by the little guy.
Yeah there are too many poorly educated lefties here. Or worse, well educated and deliberately deceptive.
He’s a sucker. And his news media knows it.
Next try telling him there’s no God with an EKG. The same part of his brain will be activated, guaranteed. Not to dock religion. But US conservatism is a religious cult basically.
Why else do Republicans love to defund education? Conservatism requires people to be ignorant about reality in order to have any chance at succeeding.
Dumbasses go from not believing everything a politician tells them to believing everything a politician tells them because he’s dRaInInG the SwAmP. Zero sympathy for anyone still buying their lies.
It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.
What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.
I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.
But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.
What do you say to someone who works in a recession proof field? That they made all the wrong moves?
That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?
I do work that stresses me the fuck out every single day. It’s not the field I wanted to get into when I was younger, but the payoff is that my family can live on a single income. My wife and kids have the opportunity to travel and learn. I sacrifice those trips so that they can make them.
Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation. They belittle anyone with an “I’ve got mine” attitude to support their claim that those people should be supporting their lives through taxes!! Simple hypocrisy.
I don’t mistake my “selfishness” for a twisted understanding of how the economy should work. I know exactly what I want. I’ve worked hard to get it. I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.
That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?
If you’re a military contractor who gets to enjoy the benefits of a recession-resilient Pentagon budget despite the downturn in the overall economy, and your response to a civilian construction worker or an HVAC repair guy or a restaurant waiter out on the unemployment line is “Suck shit, asshole, you should have made the right decision to drone strike overseas daycare centers, like me”, I won’t say I’m surprised.
But when the wheel turns, and those angry voters say maybe we don’t need USAID or the latest model F-35 or the VA, I’m not sure you get to be the first in line to complain, either.
Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation.
Selfishness is a state of nature, as you have varying limited exposure to other people, but you spend 100% of your time with yourself. It’s something you have to learn to grow beyond.
But what I see online isn’t selfishness nearly so much as it is tribalism. They form social niches and empathize with one another. That can be a source of strength when they recognize a communal source of aggrievement. But it can also be a source of weakness, when marketers and propagandists exploit a superstition or common gullibility. The era of Big Data has revolved around industrial manufacturing of consent and delusion.
That’s not a consequence of any single individual’s failure. It is a systematic psychological attack on communities at-large. It is a strategic effort to alienate people from one another, to weaken them, and then to consume them - devouring their accrued wealth, their free time, and their valuable human labor - for the profit of the industry sponsoring the deceptive content.
I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.
If you see unemployment as a consequence of laziness, I suppose that makes sense.
But if you see unemployment as a consequence as a form of industrial lock-out, in which business conglomerates and cartels force down the price of labor by deliberately understaffing and overworking a fraction of the population…
This isn’t a matter of someone taking from you because they want it. This is a matter of someone withholding something from you through violence, because they can extract more of your wealth in exchange.
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult
Yeah, I can. It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I. And some days I don’t have energy to waste on regulating my feelings towards intentful idiots and then I do get mad. It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I.
Alright, fair enough. But you cannot see the symptoms of the problem as the root of it.
It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
No, no. Sorry. I definitely get that. But at some point you need to look past the guy in clown makeup dancing around your neighborhood to the clown college that’s churning these people out.
