I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...
(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)
EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...
“Living under a rock” is the technical term, I believe.
This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.
Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.
This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.
The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.
He’s now unimaginably successful at YouTube but at least I’m better at predicting the content of tomorrow’s newspapers.
After the extermination of Melos they could credibly say they were less responsible for the actions of the polis.
And had a higher chance of deflecting the inevitable revenge on to the non idiotes Athenians.
https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...
For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?
I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.
It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.
The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.
The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown.
Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?
I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.
National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.
The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.
That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.
If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.
Trump in 1989 talking to Diane Sawyer: "he would impose a 15% to 20% tariff on Japanese imports".
Trump in 2011 in his book "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again": "I want foreign countries to finally start forking over cash in order to have access to our markets. So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town — and that especially includes China."
Trump at a rally in Vegas in 2011, referring to China: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!"
Trump in 2018: If the Europeans are "not going to treat us fairly... then we're going to tax all those beautiful Mercedes-Benzes that are coming in."
Anyone who didn't think tariffs were coming is a fucking moron.
Second term plans were all written down for anyone to read but still far too many didn't believe it.
That simply isn't true. Here's a PDF from December 2024 (before Trump was elected) by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee:
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5c392e02-9eb0...
Throughout 2024, Donald Trump has proposed a series of tariffs on all goods coming from outside the U.S. or on goods from specific countries. His recent proposals include:
• An across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• An across-the-board 20 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• A 60 percent tariff—“or higher”—on all goods imported from China.
• An additional 10% above any additional tariffs on imports from China.
• A 25% tariff on products imported to the United States from Mexico and Canada.
Yes, everbody who was paying any attention at all saw this coming.
Filter out all the noise of people random ass guessing what will happen in the future and focus on people making big bets late in the game. That's your important "prediction".
See: Anonymous person who made $400,000 betting on Maduro being out of office, etc.
I'd be surprised if there weren't already people running HFT-like setups to look for these anomalously large late stage trades to piggyback their own bets on the insider information.
https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/04/30/amazon-wont-b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_first_Trump_adm...
The post documents issues like some assembly workers stuffing so much wire into the post that not enough protruded to make a connection. I will hope that in the US the workers are paid enough that they notice/care that the result can be connected. Or the managers.
Do you want documented experiences of Chinese manufacturing repeatedly attempting to cut corners? Like substituting inferior goods to increase their profit margin even after the initial product line is running smoothly.
That fact alone doesn't demonstrate nuance. It's possible that 5% of the population was innocent and treated as scapegoats, or chosen randomly, or that anyone high profile regardless of guilt was chosen to die.
Unless there's data on who was actually innocent or guilty, the mere fact that extermination was selective doesn't mean it was in any way accurate.
A few examples:
- The Printing Press
- The Steam Engine
- Factories
- The Internal Combustion Engine
- The Internet
- "Smart" Phones
- Social Networks
- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)
For this not to be a problem a worker would have to notice it and put two and two together, then investigate further and then persuade their supervisor to raise it with the customer and get a change made to the spec.
While enjoying your faith in the rigour and attention to detail of the US assembly line worker, I think this example tells exactly the story the article says it does - that you have to specify everything.
> China implemented retaliatory tariffs equivalent to the $34 billion tariff imposed on it by the U.S. In July 2018, the Trump administration announced it would use a Great Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), to pay farmers up to $12 billion, increasing the transfers to farmers to $ 28 billion in May 2019. The USDA estimated that aid payments constituted more than one-third of total farm income in 2019 and 2020.
Being able to set tarrifs and other stuff basically at random in real-time with no oversight is the main issue IMHO.
He tried to source from America companies first, but the products were actually worse and much more expensive than his Chinese vendors.
He has one blog post which details the quality differences, and the Chinese vendors were much better than the American ones. The American ones also took longer and we're less communicative to him than the Chinese vendors.
More than half of them went bankrupt.
One guys kept dumping money into a new gym buildout mere weeks before the months-long lockdowns commenced.
Of course nobody can prove either way beyond a reasonable doubt for something that happened so long ago.
Taking parent's cue of assuming lack of agency - you can even replace "politics" with "the weather", and gp's comment still makes sense, parents inverted riposte does not make sense under its own priors. We can't change the weather, but it's prudent to know which days to carry an umbrella.
My interpretation of the statement is that you can't ignore forces that affect you, even if they bore you. However loudly or frequently you declare or think "I don't care for gravity" matters not as it exists outside of your awareness or acknowledgement of it.