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.
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
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.
Schools should really put much more focus on explaining what science is and what it does
Hard agree. The US is currently speed running to third world status and its entirely because of education, and i assume its happening elsewhere based on the rise of conmen in leadership. Anyone who thinks for themself who has ever had a conversation with anyone MAGA on why they believe what they believe, will know that it was just because they were told to believe it. They do not have any sort of internal reasoning, they look to someone that fits their world view of what a leader looks like and then they believe every word that they say. It is the same way most people relate to religion, do not think about it, just have faith.
So when you mix together a wildly de-funded and heavily politicized education system that turns out followers who outsource reasoning to authority figures, with modern American solipsistic culture that allows the worst human beings alive to be seen as role models, then it was always just a matter of time before conmen took the reigns of the country. Anyone who is ever trying to argue their point with reasoning and facts will appear on the defense to any conman that is just riffing innacuracies, and the uneducated masses will see the conman as in control, which will then make them trust that person, it doesn’t go any deeper than that.
Humans are fucking stupid.
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.
I have had “researcher” jobs that were not ‘doing science’. I needed either journal access, or scihub/libgen, putting together shit my boss wanted to know.
Or, we can hold the fucking media accountable for telling blatant lies about the impacts of tariffs.
Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.
Fox News got around that by claiming they’re entertainment, not news.
Per their own arguments in court, no reasonable person would consider Fox News to be factual.
They should have been forced to rename to Fox Entertainment
They should have been forced to air disclaimers every 30 minutes
That stop the broadcast, and cover the screen before commercial breaks. “ATTENTION: THIS PROGRAM DOES NOT PRESENT FACTUAL INFORMATION. IT IS AN ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM AND NOT A NEWS PROGRAM”
didn’t understand why he was told the other countries pay the tariffs
that’s easy: you were willing to vote for a guy who lied over 30 thousand times in his first term so he realized you’re a fucking idiot and he could say anything without you thinking even half a second about it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
The real Russian plot we’ve all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That’s the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.
The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they’ve done in other countries that they’ve subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what’s true or not. It’s frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation’s interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what’s true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what’s real or not.
It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don’t have communities around us, we don’t have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don’t have groups of people we care about telling us we’re wrong, we don’t have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you’ve never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you’ve been fed the “special birthday boy” narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don’t seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.
You can google “KGB tactics for destabilizing nations” and spend weeks reading about what’s being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because “how do we even know what’s real anymore.”
They willing pay the extra funbucks tariff monies for the privilege and honor of shipping it to America (at cost) on a chance some red-hatted half-wit will waste it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
Yeah this is grade school level reasoning telling you that it obviously doesn’t work that way.
A country’s aluminum exports for example aren’t extra aluminum they want to get rid of because it’s junking up their basements and America is 1800-got-junk taking it off their hands at cost. It’s a fucking series of material production companies in a different country. They too are based on capitalism and they too require profits in order to function.
Especially when tariffs go above 100%!
Like, do you believe French companies would be paying the shipping costs to give you free Champagne?
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.
This administration doesn’t believe in carrots, only sticks.
The sticks loose a lot of their scaryness when they’re not consistently wielded. See the on again off again tarrifs on Canada/Mexico and their constantly changing scope. The lack of consistency and predictability makes it very hard for businesses to make decisions.
Delete Elon and Trump from existence and nothing will get better.
Why?
Because Americans are dumb as fuck and they’ll still be dumb as fuck when and if those two are gone.
I’m old enough to have seen the same pattern multiple times. Republican leadership fails spectacularly, even pissing off many conservatives in the process. But as soon as the next cycle begins, those conservatives are back onboard voting for the absolute shittiest candidates.
Because to them an actual, literal dictator is better than a Democrat as president.
Our society is circling the toilet and it almost certainly won’t get better within our lifetimes. Prepare yourselves for that.
I actually don’t consider this an issue of being dumb. It IS an issue with being under-educated (often deliberately in R states) and fed a ton of propaganda
There’s ignorance and there’s stupidity. Stupidity will stubbornly resist any attempt to correct its ignorance.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
…
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.
That’s willful ignorance. While the willfully ignorant can be stupid (lack of intelligence) more often it seems to be due to arrogance and/or just being an asshole in general
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse. I expect instability in the us for the rest of my lifetime. I’m struggling to balance that reality and also living my life.
Also- I think COVID is to blame too. More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.
I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.
More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate
What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.
What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.
Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).
Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not. That is the long term future of the us.
The brain drain is necessary for the dictatorship to fully take over. Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Dictatorship only scares the non maga. Maga feels safer with it.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.
Absent that brief ill-conceived stint at empire under Mussolini, sure. But the roadways and the ports and the political connections and the religious iconography that centered Rome within the ancient world continue to persist. It isn’t the center of a sprawling intercontinental kingdom, but it holds a privileged place within the modern sprawling intercontinental kingdom of NATO.
Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Russia’s in a peculiar place precisely because brain drain and privatization and punitive sanctions and the latest round of pointless horrifying bloodshed has sapped it of so many talented and driven young people. But the dictatorship - the bourgeois dictatorship, anyway - came under Yeltsin, following the Gorbachev coup. It brought in an entirely illegal dismantling of public industry and services, a looting of pensions and public reserves, and a fire sale of military hardware which set off a wave of ugly overseas wars in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
Only after the country had been hollowed out economically, by a cartel of untouchable oligarchs, did the public warm to the idea of a new singular strongman dictator. And the call for dictatorship was, at its heart, a plea for someone to drag the cartels back into line as part of a national project.
People have to play along in every system, because we’re not self-sustaining little monoids. We are hugely interdependent and most efficient when we are working together in concert as collaborative specialists. What we’re searching for is leadership. But all we seem to be offered is different flavors of oligarchy or autocracy.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.
That’s because its called Vatican City now.
They’re symptoms, not the problem. Even if they were vanished from existing by will of a djinni or something, another would just take their place.
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.
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.
So ask yourself we someone who voted for Trump whines about tariffs. Is this person just dumb or a total piece of shit?.
I say both. They are stupid racist homophobic assholes and deserve any pain they get for their choices. And though we should do everything we can to help those who will be hurt by Trump’s policies, I sincerely hope that every single person who voted for that POS experiences an absolute fuck ton of pain and suffering in the coming months and years.
The most unfortunate thing is that the pain and suffering will not only be limited to the people who supported Trump and his policies. Everyone is going to pay for their poor choices.
I’m going to say something that’ll probably get me a lot of down votes here.
I think maybe we all deserve a little bit of pain. This country has done some fucking god-awful things to the rest of the world in the last 60+ years. I just watched a documentary on some of the crap we’ve done to Puerto Ricans, who BTW are actually full citizens of the United States. And they have been continuously and horrendously mistreated by our country all in the name of profit for the rest of the country. Look up the origin of the phrase “banana republic” and look at what we have done to 3rd world countries around the globe that have resources that our country has desired. So, maybe we deserve it. Maybe we deserve to feel some pain. And maybe that pain will help us to understand where we went wrong.
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.
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.
I think comparing this to a cargo cult is a bit misguided. These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips. I get finding factual information is incredibly difficult these days, but that’s just all the more reason to not blindly accept the bias of one source. The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.
These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips.
Unlimited inputs, certainly. But the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely fucked. It is easy enough to be fully insulated from useful information, and easier still to be insulated from actionable information. That’s before you get into how all the old-guard liberal(ish) news sources - your 60 Minutes and NPR and local papers of record - have been gobbled up by right-wing advertisers or shut down by corporate cartels.
The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.
Sure. At some point, you’re the guy in the DHS detention camp sodomizing an eight year old with a night stick because your ex-IDF police trainer told you it builds character. Or you’re a billionaire in your ivory tower, shoving ketamin up your nose and screaming “The Wokes want to destroy me!” at your third wife. You’ve given up even the pretext of your own humanity and we should treat you like the monster you’ve become.
But for the millions of middle Americans in states with failing infrastructure and polluted air and water and far-right mass media blaring into every eye and earhole, the demand that they line up to vote for Charlie Crist over Ron DeSantis or Jim Justice over Bill Cole or Eric Adams over New York Republican Placeholder Candidate becomes a fucking farce. The dogged insistence among Chuck Schumer liberals that we need more Liz Cheneys and Michael Bloombergs in the Democratic Party to save us from the Ken Paxtons and Pam Bondis of the Republican Party is fucking mental. And if people don’t go along with it, I can hardly blame them.
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.
First, I would like to thank you for responding as you did. It wasn’t just a dismissal of my argument, but an honest take from your perspective. That is rare to see these days.
I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation. If this is the case: I do feel for you, as I am in an adjacent field that has not felt any signs of recession. In fact, I have seen growth rather than loss.
I know this is probably not comforting, but I do want to punctuate that it is because I haven’t felt the effects of tariffs in my daily life that I feel the way I do. As I stated previously, I drifted into the field I am currently in because I saw signs that I wouldn’t be subject to getting laid off (I originally worked in a field that was happy to lay off half of their workers at the first sign of financial trouble). I saw the potential for economic turbulence and decided that a more stable field was worth more in the long term, even though I would be sacrificing higher pay.
Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.
I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation.
It’s a field I flirted with, back before I banked on college, thanks to a bunch of “Vocational Training is better than college because no debt!” older neighbors and high school advisers. I watched a few friends go through the ups and downs of the field, and it wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, the cushy office job with the six figure salary in the recession-proof health care industry ended up being the better choice.
But I’m not going to piss on my peers who took the other road, or suggest they are somehow slackers or losers or lesser people because they took a different set of hot tips from a bunch of blowhards. Downturns come for us all, one way or another.
Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.
I moved a lot because of my family. My dad worked O&G and we changed states several times before I eventually graduated high school. It fucking sucked, but it was the nature of a boom-and-bust industry. One thing we couldn’t do was reach back home and support the families of my mom and dad, precisely because we were so far away and my dad’s work consumed so much of his life. I got to watch the toll that took on extended family - that net of support torn apart by the push and pull of global economics - on both sides. My mom was the full-time caregiver, because we didn’t have grandparents / aunts / uncles / cousins around to help. And when her mom got sick, she couldn’t be there in turn. She had to book a red-eye flight just to hold her hand as she died.
The fact that we submitted to free market economics was fucking horrible for everyone… except our employers, who profited handsomely (and strangely enough would brag about how they were Sixth Generation Texans! without considering how they could afford such deep roots).
When I got into health care IT, one of the benefits was that I didn’t need to travel and I could spend time close to my family. I did get to be there when my dad passed. I did get to hold my mom’s hand. I did get to have a big family wedding, because everyone we knew was nearby. And I’m happy to have my mother in law home with my son right now, while I’m just down the road paying the bills.
I don’t find it hard to sacrifice because I’ve accrued more wealth bonding with my extended family and long term friends. I have more to give because I’ve needed less to spend.
You speak to them of how they aren’t an island. You speak to them of how even a recession-proof job is still subject to the rising costs felt by everyone. You speak to them of how these rising costs have over time reduced the actual value of what they’ve been paid, even with regular cost of living increases. You speak to them of how they have to work harder now for the same results. You speak to them of how much less stress having a good safety net provides, since a recession is not the only way one can fall on hard times. You speak to them of how a small decrease in take-home pay results in a much larger decrease in living expenses, resulting in a net gain.
You speak to them of how they need not be the sacrificial lamb, that they deserve to travel and learn and have a good life as well; and that their family should not have to give that up either to protect their health and well being.
You speak to them of how helping everyone is good for everyone, including themselves. The goal is to raise the standard of living across the board.
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Even if it were a tax paid by foreign companies, what difference does it make? They would just increase the prices the goods are sold at.
So, lets say, a smartphone that is priced at $1000:
With the 20% tariff in place:
If the Chinese conpanies pay the $200 per device, they just sell each phone at $1200 to the US importer.
If the US importers pay the $200 per device, similarily, they would tack on the $200 (on top of the usual markups), making it $1200 per phone.
There is zero difference, the end consumer always foots the bill.
This is so simple to understand, how are people this stupid
Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.
Example:
found the economics student
It’s why they’re called “pass-through costs.”
the end consumer always foots the bill.
Or the consumer can’t/won’t take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.
The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different
The difference is that this way it’s much easier to calculate prices.
If the tax were 20%, the exporter would have to do the inverse calculation. That is, “which price will result in me gaining $1000?” Which is not 1200, since 20% of 1200 is 240. x = 0.8y -> y = (1/0.8)*x -> y = 1.25x. so the exporter would have to price it at 1.25x the price, $1250. 20% of 1250 is 250.
So it’s unintuitive that a 20% tax would result in a 25% price increase. That’s my guess why tariffs are applied to the importer instead of exporter.
Wouldn’t refunding the amount of the tariff to the customer fix this? Ignoring the very important diplomatic and retaliation tariffs which makes the whole post unusable for real life
- Canada sells a product A $100.
- Tariffs makes it $120 when you buy it
- so Canada gets $100, USA gets $20, USA customer pays $120.
- USA has now $20, they can directly refund the customer for $20 via a policy to reduce the price of the category of A.
- So customer gets $20 reduction of the product A via tax something, so USA now has $0 and USA customer actually paid only $100.
- Except now if USA company make the product A they can sell it for like $100 and customer pays $80.
- There is a slight increase of imported goods price here because tariffs cannot actually refund $20, it will be a % of the local vs imported production.
- Over time you can expect to get a local advantage because of this price inequality, so local companies will be subsidized by imports until imports are no longer significant.
Where am I wrong here ?
In your scenario how is the local made $100 item bought at $80? Where is a $20 refund paid from? You are double spending it on both imported and local goods
In the scenario local good is still worth $100 but given that you refund all good by the amount added by the tariff later, you have $20 refunded (not really $20 as i tried to show previously, but
$20 x total_tariff / total_amount_of_good_bought_locally_and_imported, so somewhere between $80 and $100 net for local production and between $100 and $120 for imported good, depending on the ratioimport/import+localprod
The OP is battling against what Faux Newz, Dipshit Donnie, and other right-wing propagandist shitrags are telling his employee, all which the employee takes as indesputable truth. If he can override that much brainwashing he can convince anyone of anything.
“The Big Lie” is what Sanders is calling it.
How many “big lies” are we up to now?
But the guys in OP, they don’t turn on daddy Trump. It can’t be that they were lied to, then they’d have to do something alien to them like introspection. No, it must be…an honest mistake? Honestly have no idea how they’d justify it internally.
Because to these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. You may thank certain types of Christianity for this nonsense.
So the thinking goes something like: ‘I’m a Good Person. And as a Good Person, I only vote for/support Good People, because I am Good. So the people I voted for are Good, because only a Bad Person would vote for Bad People, and I’m not Bad, I’m Good. So Trump can’t be Bad; he must have just made a mistake.’
This is also why they favor punitive jailing instead of trying to reform criminals; criminals are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things. It’s also why they do stuff like try to get rid of abortion. If a woman got pregnant from ‘sleeping around’ then she’s a Bad Person and deserves to be punished by carrying the child to term.
How does the saying about selling a lie go?
Well, a lie can be half around the world before the truth even has its boots on.
That’s because the lie’s boots have already been licked clean.
Three liars makes a tiger
Trump & Co do love the uneducated.
I wrote a comment explaining Tariffs on a Fox News YouTube video a few weeks back, and the entire reply chain was people arguing with eachother about how tariffs work because “Trump said it’s a tax on other countries, so that’s how they work”
You’re doing god’s work in the hellish trenches
That’s front line in “Trench Crusade” level of trenches.
It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.
If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.
Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!
Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.
- I’m not dumb, I get how this all works, and it was pretty easy!
- we get to collect these taxes instead of having to pay them, awesome!!!
So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.
This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.
If you’re Republican it’s simple:
- A tariff is Trump’s special magic that saves you from foreigners and wokeness, and MexiCanada pays for it.
- Stuff costs more at the store because the Biden Crime Family hurt the economy so bad, not even Trump can fix it right away. In fact it might even take more than 4 years, so we better keep him in office forever.
I don’t think he’ll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does
The r’s are going to replace one clown with another. Approval isn’t necessary if you’re a dictator.
I’m really looking forward to the turmoil in the Trumpublican Party after he’s had his final Big Mac Attack. All the opportunists who’ve been using MAGA to advance themselves will be vying for position and clawing each other to pieces like the rats they are.
If you’re a republican at this point you’re one of two classes:
-
Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don’t actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.
-
One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can’t get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don’t understand why the good guys aren’t doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.
In truth I’d bet most of these people in numbers 2 are watching this stuff on their phones far more often than 30 minutes on Sunday night.
The wildest stuff comes up on my coworkers and acquaintances apps while scrolling. Like they’ll be watching a cooking video then scroll down and a video about why this trans woman is the devil shows up. Usually they’ll scroll right by but it’s a constant stream of hate/disinformation on top of the usual low quality click bait.
-
I recently learned that almost 1 in 5 Americans are illiterate.
How many Americans do you think are reasonably well educated, so that they would understand somewhat complex issues like tariffs? Or could seek out information if they didn’t understand?
Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that “1 in 5 are illiterate” statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here’s a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven’t validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It’s not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
For extra fun, look into where school districts allocate their funding and how it relates to their rankings. Some of the worst performing public schools spend a lot more on athletics than they spend on anything else. It’s like they want to be professional athlete mills instead of functioning adult mills.
It’s by design.
Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure “literate in any language”.
That’s still really bad. If 2/3 of illiterate people were born in America, that really highlights how inconsistent education is in America.
When I was a kid, I lived in a regular suburban neighborhood but the middle school and high schools that I was zoned for were so awful that my parents enrolled me into a charter school. (The elementary school was fine) Since then, some of the crappy schools in my city are now magnet schools and so my parents’ house appears to be zoned to different schools. There appears to be less public schools now. That’s probably not a good thing.
“Are you saying 1 fouth of Americans are removed?” “Yeah at least 1 fourth.”
