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American Disruption

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Re: American Disruption

#91

Post by cowpig »

kjksf wrote: post #75
cowpig wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and I find this totally bizarre. The Trump administration's power is based in the Russian propaganda machine and xenophobia. Blanket tariffs (except towards Russia and Belarus, not mentioned in Ben Thompson's article of course) are in service of those two power bases.

US is still sanctioning Russia, meaning there's zero trade between US and Russia. It's illegal for US people and companies to buy from Russia. That's why there are no tariffs on Russia: there's no trade, there's nothing to tariff. I don't see how you concluded that US is currently "in service of Russia".

> US is still sanctioning Russia, meaning there's zero trade between US and Russia. It's illegal for US people and companies to buy from Russia.

Quoting the Trump administration:

U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million, down 12.3 percent ($73.5 million) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Russia totaled $3.0 billion in 2024, down 34.2 percent ($1.6 billion) from 2023. [0]

If the same formula were applied to Russia as every other country in the world, the Russian tariff would be above 40% since it's half of (3500-500)/3000 = 85.7%

[0]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...

Re: American Disruption

#92

Post by anon84873628 »

goatlover wrote: post #76
clodushid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary architect of trumps tariff strategy in his first and second term is Peter Navarro. If you want to understand the tariffs today, just go read one of his many books. His goals are pretty simple: reindustriaize America No more free trade China is evil and the worlds enemy It should be no surprise to anyone observing trump since he took office that the end goal was always to decouple from China.

> China is evil and the worlds enemy And what is the US under the Trump administration? China didn't start a trade war, accuse every other country of ripping it off, hasn't talked of acquiring Greenland and making Canada it's 51st state, or discuss bombing cartels in Mexico.

The parent comment is summarizing the viewpoints of one of the delusional people responsible for these policies, not endorsing them. The fact that it is all illogical and hypocritical is precisely the point.

Re: American Disruption

#93

Post by CharlieDigital »

clodushid wrote: post #17
morsecodist wrote: post #13

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…

The primary architect of trumps tariff strategy in his first and second term is Peter Navarro. If you want to understand the tariffs today, just go read one of his many books. His goals are pretty simple: reindustriaize America No more free trade China is evil and the worlds enemy It should be no surprise to anyone observing trump since he took office that the end goal was always to decouple from China.

    > It should be no surprise to anyone observing trump since he took office that the end goal was always to decouple from China
Then why are we also slapping tariffs on Taiwan, Canada, Japan, Mexico, EU, RoW?

Re: American Disruption

#94

Post by j4coh »

kjksf wrote: post #75
cowpig wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and I find this totally bizarre. The Trump administration's power is based in the Russian propaganda machine and xenophobia. Blanket tariffs (except towards Russia and Belarus, not mentioned in Ben Thompson's article of course) are in service of those two power bases.

US is still sanctioning Russia, meaning there's zero trade between US and Russia. It's illegal for US people and companies to buy from Russia. That's why there are no tariffs on Russia: there's no trade, there's nothing to tariff. I don't see how you concluded that US is currently "in service of Russia".

Are you sure? In 2024, exports of Russian goods to the US totaled $3.27bn, and the US exported $526m worth of goods to Russia. Not a ton, but more than many countries that received tariffs. Or what definition of zero trade are you using?

Re: American Disruption

#95

Post by tekno45 »

jasode wrote: post #59
samtp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Seattle, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber.

>, it's actually about 50% cheaper to get a taxi from SeaTac to the city than to take a Lyft or Uber. That type of ride from a "hub" where a bunch of taxis congregate to take the next passenger -- such as SEATAC airport -- is optimal for traditional taxis and can be cheaper. But using Uber for suburb-to-suburb routes away from any hubs is cheaper than taxis and I tried to explain why that happens: https://news.ycombi…

your "hack" is just how it works for food delivery. If you don't leave a tip, they'll ignore it and itll never get picked up.

Re: American Disruption

#96

Post by anon84873628 »

morsecodist wrote: post #13

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…

The confusing part is that the actions don't seem logically consistent with any of the possible goals.

>The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance

Ok, I buy that based on the stupid formula they showed. Is "not ruin everything else" not also part of his goals? Can you explain what I'm missing?

I think people just keep underestimating exactly how stupid and ignorant Trump is. That's why nothing makes sense. He does not understand the law of comparative advantage and thus doesn't understand that trade is the engine of growth. He only sees fixed size pies and win-lose deals, so he's not capable of finding real solutions.

Re: American Disruption

#97

Post by tim333 »

h2zizzle wrote: post #81
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me a lot of Brexit. Politicians in the south of the country were warning that the financial sector (predominantly in London) would loose 100,000 jobs and people in the north were saying "oh, that sounds pretty good". A few years later when that didn't happen to that extent I remember an interview with someone from a fishing port which lost a lot of business that previously went to Europe. They were complai…

I'm trying to figure out what you mean. Experts forecast Brexit would hurt the financial sector, Northerners said they were cool with that, the forecast was wrong, Northerners were upset. Nothing about that sounds illogical. Vindictive and short-sighted, sure. But everything follows reasonably. I say this as someone who's stomach sank when I'd heard that Brexit had passed and that there was a real chance that Donald…

A lot of voting, Brexit and other stuff, comes mostly to whether people are pissed off with the current situation or not. If pissed off they vote for a change as in Brexit, otherwise not. I'm not sure a lot of the reasoning gets much deeper than that.

I remember asking Brexit voters who said they didn't want EU regulations to name one actual regulation that inconvenienced them and I don't think I got one answer.

Re: American Disruption

#98

Post by torginus »

stevenwoo wrote: post #2

Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/manufacturing focus.

I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated.

In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster.

Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc.

And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue).

Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business.

American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use.

Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.

Re: American Disruption

#99

Post by cyberax »

const_cast wrote: post #88
cyberax wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them. That is exaggerated. Uber was losing something like $0.50-$1 per ride in 2018. Uber/Lyft were (and still mostly are) just _better_ than taxis.

It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions. I don’t know if I trust Ubers numbers on this. I don’t know what they’re counting as “cost per ride”. Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising? If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.

> It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.

Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated.

> Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?

Yes.

> If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.

And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.

Re: American Disruption

#100

Post by mullingitover »

Surprised there isn't mention that a big part of the tariff strategy is to throw the equity markets into chaos in an effort to drive down the price of the 10-year bond. There was a panic last night because the 10 year bond price started going up as stocks were trading down, which is not supposed to happen. It would be truly disruptive if the whole game gets blown up by a lack of buyers for US debt.
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