CountSessine

Read Miran’s paper.

Read the Miran paper. It’s not about imbalances. It’s about negotiating leverage. Australia in particular is going to be the most interesting case in the world.

Strategically, Australia is more sympathetic to the US, but your trade with China is many multiples of your trade with the US. If you join the US you’ll have to raise tariffs against China and if you don’t you’ll naturally fall into China's orbit. Interesting times!

Because Trump himself isn’t really that smart?

Like I said, he takes the advice of the last person who talks to him. He’s very suggestible. The best parts of his presidency, so far, have been when he follows the plan in project 2025, which you may not agree with, but is at least sane and coherent. The worst bits are when he adlibs, like the stupid tariff escalation with China.

Ultimately the biggest problem with Miran’s plan is that now that Trump is tearing up these trade agreements, no one has any reason to believe that the new one is worth the paper it’s printed on. He has no integrity and no one signs agreements with people who have no integrity.

And yet the near-term interest is to keep buying Volkswagens from Hitler.

I agree with you, but I also think you have this idea that trade is currently governed by largely linear and symmetric rules in Ricardian harmony, and that just isn’t the case.

Every industrialized exporting country in the world has optimized for exporting to the US, and there’s plenty of govt policy involved. Trade barriers are the norm, not the exception. If other countries optimize their trade rules, regulations, and money supply to optimize for a sizeable trade surplus with the US, they can change their policy to reduce the surplus.

Give up your whole notion of “should”. There is no “should”. The formula is for aligning incentives. It’s no longer enough for other govts to claim compliance with abstract requirements while clandestinely working against them - they need to be committed to helping importers succeed.

If you read Miran's paper, the point of the tariffs is to bring US trade partners to the table to negotiate the alliance, so really they could be anything at all. It could have been 420% or 31.4159% or whatever, right across the board.

But the amounts are actually kind of clever and it reflects the fact that there's a more mature understand of trade barriers now vs when the WTO was negotiated.

How much do you know about trade barriers? Beyond tariffs, they're extraordinarily complicated and rely on regulations, trip-wires, and unequal application of rules.

Canada has "free trade" with dairy, but only on dairy imports up to a point, and after that heavy tariffs apply. But no one ever imports enough to incur those tariffs, so, that's free-trade, right? But actually, no one considers the Canadian dairy market worth the trouble without being able to import large amounts of dairy. So Canada can legitimately say that the trip-wire isn't applied, but it's a long ways from "free trade" because large importers are kept out.

China requires that foreign companies must partner with local companies to sell into the Chinese market. This effectively leads to a lot of technology transfers. It's not a tariff, but it's pretty clearly a "trade barrier" because companies that want to protect their IP are denied access.

In the 80's when US trade reps were negotiating with Japanese trade reps, the Americans would try to convince the Japanese that free trade was best for Japanese consumers. The Japanese reps would just respond, "how much do you want us to buy?"

The Japanese really didn't believe in free trade, and they were actively manipulating the value of the Yen at that point (it would be a few years still before the Plaza Accord), so they knew that just lowering tariffs wasn't going to make US goods sufficiently more competitive in Japan.

What's changed in 35 years is that the US doesn't really believe in "free trade" anymore either - not after all of the grief the WTO brought. The simple formulas are a no-bullshit approach to trade - the same ones that motivated those Japanese trade reps.

"I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."

For the record, I'm not really sure how I feel about this plan. Free trade with China uplifted 700 million people (in China) from poverty.

OTOH, if you believe that China is basically Germany circa 1938 (and indeed, China in 2025 is the largest and most successful fascist state in all of history), then kneecapping China's economy makes plenty of strategic sense.

But we could always just keep buying Hitler's Volkswagens - that's the direction our incentive gradient points in. The US doesn't need to be the global police - we could always just let China have Taiwan, the Senkakus, the Ryukyus, etc...

I don't know about incompetent - there's plenty of smart people around Trump. The big problem seems to be that they all kind of disagree with each other and Trump ends up doing what the guy who talks to him most recently advises him to do.

The current "plan" seems to be to leave behind the largely-defunct WTO once and for all and build a selective free-trade alliance specifically excluding China, much like GATT was. I don't think this would really make the US "richer" (or any participant in the alliance) - in fact it would probably make us all a bit poorer. But it would make China much poorer which at this point is kind of the goal.

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

But that's just today. Next week someone else might get Trump's ear before he speaks to the press.

Yes, this is the Triffin Trap or the Triffin Dilemma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

Just as an aside, I love the term, “made out of snail.” Is this a Swedish idiom?

Maybe they’ve fixed this since then. I haven’t looked at darcs in AGES.

I used Darcs a long time ago and what I remember was that because it reordered patches, it was actually quite difficult to do a bisect to find a patch that broke a build. Unlike git where you can completely characterize a build with the HEAD sha, darcs didn’t really have that concept and it was very tricky to figure out what actually went into a particular build.

It didn’t really seem to me at the time like this was an appropriate VCS for a team of developers using CI.

Ah yes - the weird one was PC not zero. Anyhoo, all of these mistakes were fixed with Arm64.

Sadly, no. 32-bit ARM only has 16 GPR’s (two of which are zero and link), mostly because of the stupid predication bits in the instruction encoding.

That said, I don’t know how valuable getting rid of FP on ARM is - I once benchmarked ffmpeg on 32-bit x86 before and after enabling FP and PIC (basically removing 2 GPRs) and the difference was huge (>10%) but that’s an extreme example.

The thin end of the wedge. The epistemic supply-chain needs grooming to achieve information purity.

If you support this idiocy, let me assure you that eventually it will be used against you when the Wrong sort of people are in power.

.local is used by mdns so your .local machines can conflict with discoverable devices and services. I guess they wanted something that wouldn't conflict?

At some point I guess Apple will have to give up the 30% and instead charge more directly for their costs associated with running the App Store, namely hosting costs (probably very small) and the cost of testing and reviews (probably larger). If there are competitive App Store's, that where all of the free software will wind up.

Duverger’s Law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

Make larger routing tables.

Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?!? MOARE TCAMS!!!

I remember back in the 80’s when we were all witness to Japan’s economic miracle. Some said it was the tightly managed Keiretsu supply system, some said it was MITI, some said that it was Deming, or maybe it was just Japanese culture?

It really looks now like it’s demographics. This is just the sort of amazing thing that countries with a young well-educated workforce and a below-50 managerial class can accomplish. Now we’re all in the age of the gerontocracy, with Japan Inc. leading the way. Even the United States, ostensibly the most societally agile nation in the world, can’t seem to find political leaders who aren’t in comas or don’t suffer micro-seizures in public.

I don’t think that Jewish organizations like Birthright discriminate. They want all Jews to have children. I can’t think of anything equivalent to Birthright that operates on a national level.

I suspect that men are more likely to link education to income and opportunities - and the ROI for a lot of degrees has plummeted as tuition has increased. I don’t think women are as bothered by this and you can see this in the student loan data. 2/3 of distressed student loans in the US are owed by women.

Not time trend - category trend. The dataset shows that the less education you have the less likely it is you’ll be married at 40.

Yeah the python and rust devs will be pretty crestfallen too. All that wasted effort for all of these failed projects!

It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.

Every dictatorship is seething with discontent among the elites. Dictators are rarely overthrown by revolutionaries - it's more common that they're deposed by their own generals. A public failure like Taiwanese independence isn't a problem for everyone in the Chinese government - for some, it could be an opportunity. If you're at the very top, you don't want that.

The Chinese government does, at present, strongly favor the status quo.

There is only one external event - an event that takes place outside of China - that can seriously disrupt the CCP's rule over China and that is Taiwan successfully declaring independence and international recognition.

It would be a humiliating loss of face for the CCP and would probably be followed by a desperate reshuffling within the party and perhaps even a civil war. The CCP is strong and rigid, but like ceramic, not like steel. Their only mandate rests on China's continued economic and diplomatic success. Taiwanese independence would be the nucleating particle for an explosion of domestic unrest and chaos.

I guarantee you that if they gave those antiquities back it wouldn't change a thing.

Certainty.

The CCP has (right or wrong) declared that Taiwan is an inviolable part of China and a rogue province. That means that if Taiwan were to declare independence and succeed, it would be a signal failure for the CCP - a gross loss of face. The party's legitimacy (always a complicated thing for an authoritarian state) would be threatened by the demonstration of weakness.

Taiwanese independence is the CCP's soft and fleshy underbelly. Bringing Taiwan under Beijing's control eliminates the uncertainty that comes from that political vulnerability.