My two cents worth is that the Trump thread inevitably becomes about venting. There's a certain amount of baloney spouted by people on either side of the issue. It's just the nature of the topic, I think. We don't have an historical vantage point on events, so there's a limit to the depth with which we can analyze it. I'm hoping you ultimately decide to put it back in the lounge.

Your question presumes some higher law constraining the actions of the entity that's responsible for global trade in the first place. There is no such authority.

Why wouldn't you expect half of the world's population to produce half of the stuff and get half of the profits? — Banno

Why shouldn't we have robots produce everything and use the profits to avert climate change?

I see no world where Vance becomes president because either Trump succeeds in dismantling US democracy in which case he'll just stay in until he dies, or the democratic process continues as usual in which case given what we've been seeing from this administration means Vance gets annihilated electorally. The Democrats can run a corpse and they will win. They did the last time and hopefully they won't the next time. — Mr Bee

You may be right. I doubt it though.

The JOLTS jobs numbers were up. Powell is talking rate cuts. The sky hasn't fallen yet. But I did start looking at local printing costs (I make a lot of custom t-shirts). The locals are around 10x the cost of the same printing from China. It's higher quality here, but still. Damn.

With regard to the country turning on Trump, if they have an alternative, maybe. If the Democrats run AOC next time, Vance will be the president. He'll definitely keep some of Trumps policies.

It takes minutes to impose tariffs, but 5 to 10 years to build a factory. — Punshhh

Trump will probably be followed by Vance, unless a Democratic superstar emerges. And even if a Democratic president follows, remember, Biden didn't rescind the tariffs from the first Trump administration, in fact he added to them. Completely exposing American labor to competition with China was a pretty brutal thing to do. The consent to do that again would have to be manufactured (to garble one of the chapter titles of David Harvey's book on neoliberalism).

The left died. This is what's taking its place.

Yes. It's a challenge.

The futures markets say no bueno.

In order to doubt anything, one must rely on that which is beyond doubt. In other words, one cannot exit all language games and still be capable of doubting. — Joshs

Apparently you can't doubt that you exist (in some sense).

What are the philosophical / epistemological / logical grounds for hinge propositions being exempt from doubt? — Corvus

I guess you could doubt them, you just exit the language game when you do.

It’s “liberation day”. Trump’s tariff gamble begins and we’ll find out soon enough whether it pays off or sends the world into another depression. — NOS4A2

What's the metric for success exactly?

But Frank, who pays the costs and who gets the benefits?

Are they the same people? — Agree-to-Disagree

This touches on the philosophical conundrum I mentioned earlier. How do we plan for our children?

Some people plan for their welfare of their children and some don't.

I'm having an alright day. — BitconnectCarlos

Good. Me too.

Both Bitconnect and Tzeentch are having a permanently bad day.

Wow. That's clear enough.

Your point is well taken that it's precarious for any country to try to go it alone. The world we live in is a result of integration and we take that for granted until it's gone. The only extra point I would make is that NAFTA and other efforts to transfer the locus of economic activity to Wall St. was also a cliff edge. It was just a generation ago, so people don't remember the pain of mass lay offs and whole industries just disappearing. Americans sat helplessly watching their jobs going overseas. We were independent. That's the problem with the argument that the status quo grew naturally. It didn't. It was contrived, and for a very specific reason.

But I am optimistic that technology and/or AI will save us from reverting to the stone age. — Agree-to-Disagree

It's just isolated groups that lose skills.

Manufacturing has stagnated too, due to lack of skilled workers and the inability for manufacturers to truly operate from home in an interconnected world with just in time supply lines etc. — Punshhh

Doesn't the UK do automated manufacturing? Wouldn't that help the situation?

Some people will probably revert back to the stone age. People who are isolated will.

If American manufacturers aren't competing with the outside World, why would they have to extensively invest in technology and focus on competitiveness? — ssu

Have you ever heard of IBM?

What's being undone is Globalization. — ssu

Correct.

Or people will stop eating avocados — Benkei

They will stop eating avocados temporarily, but it's a very popular product in the US. I think demand will persist until American farmers start making them.

And GE might find it more efficient to sell in other countries than the US. Instead of moving production they change their logistics. — Benkei

They moved to Juarez after NAFTA specifically to take advantage of cheaper labor there. If tariffs eliminate that advantage, they'll likely come back to somewhere in the US.

If it would've been feasible to produce locally at a competitive price, it would already be happening. — Benkei

American farmers can't compete with Mexican farmers. A leftist would say that was the whole point of NAFTA: to cripple American labor and finally stomp out the power of American unions. In other words, what many don't understand is that increasing tariffs, especially on Mexico and Canada, is just going back to the way it was before NAFTA.

I'm not saying there are any guarantees that things will go the way Trump and Vance imagine, I'm just noting, especially to other Americans, that this is not rightist. The goal here is actually leftist, but American leftism died. That's what makes the present situation pretty fascinating.

If it doesn’t work we can close the door on economic populism. — NOS4A2

I doubt it. Populism was born to be hi-jacked.

The only way they can pull it off, as far as I can see, is if they do massive cuts to taxes, regulation, and spending to offset the cost of the tariff on consumers — NOS4A2

They're talking about stagflation again. The fed didn't lower rates last go-round.

The idea is that when Mexican avocados become too expensive, Texan farmers will have a reason to devote some land to them. When the electronic thingy GE is presently making in Juarez becomes too expensive, GE will pull manufacturing of the item back within American borders.

Since most American manufacturing will be automated, American robot manufacturing will take off, and the network of homegrown stuff will continue to grow in a self reinforcing way.

What's being undone here is neo-liberalism.

The Fair Trade concept is definitely interventionist, but according to them it’s aimed to produce the conditions for free trade. — NOS4A2

I didn't realize they'd said this. I'd heard Vance echoing stuff from Trump's previous presidential campaign, about jobs. It's hard to imagine Trump even caring about free trade. That's such an abstract goal.

One of the many solutions offered for global warming involved seeding clouds. It would be intentional pollution. It may still be on the table.

Vance's predictions that American manufacturing is coming back from the grave indicates a very interventionist, heading toward collectivist behavior on the part of the Executive. The status quo was set out by hardline laissez-faire dudes. I mean, the last time the US government was on the side of US manufacturing was never. If they carry it through and resist falling into corruption, this will be a big change for the average person. I'm looking forward to seeing what's going to happen with education and healthcare.

Cool. Thanks for your input.

I'm not interested in continuing if this is the level the discussion is at. — Christoffer

I second that. :up:

:up:

Does this mean I can't post a Spacetime video to explain what energy is? I've posted that thing about 5 times already.

Sounds like a wonderful future for any species that thrives in such conditions. Not much for humans, and especially any human who like to have some nature left to enjoy. There might be some who want to live in grey boxes, half-suffocating through all the technology used to make life sustaining in these conditions. Like cosplaying astronauts on another planet for thousands of years — Christoffer

Could you share the sources of these kinds of predictions?

I don't think any rational human being in their right mind would prefer any worst case scenario if the option means mild inconvenience right now. — Christoffer

And here is the well known philosophical conundrum. No rational person living today will experience the worst case scenario. That scenario wouldn't come into existence until well after we're all gone. How do we put in place a solution to a problem that our descendants might have? You might say we aren't evolved to handle that kind of problem. We have no experience with it. We don't even know how to approach the question.

What do we gain of not doing anything? — Christoffer

The wise say, "First do no harm." Approaching the problem in a childish, semi-psychotic manner is a recipe for making things worse than they would be otherwise. It's better to start with a sober evaluation of the parameters of the problem. What are the long-range predictions? What sorts of efforts now would actually make a difference in the long run?

It will not "take its course". You think there's an end date to this? — Christoffer

In practical terms, no there isn't an end-date. In strict scientific terms, if we exhaust all available sources of CO2, then yes, the atmosphere's CO2 level will return to present day levels in about 100,000 years, with the cost of acidic oceans. The climate will go through an extreme spike in temperature that will last for a few thousand years. This is per David Archer, although I haven't seen him update his figures to account for fracking capability, so it may be off.

If we continue, the temp is going to rise further and then it's pretty much bye bye in a couple of centuries. — Christoffer

There are no scientists predicting that the human species won't survive the worst case scenario. Will civilization as we know it survive it? We don't know.

Phenomenology-wise it would be a collection of experiences starting in infancy, probably diverging significantly around puberty. Some of it is imposed, some of it one actively seeks out.

Maybe it isn't really one concept. It's a fusion of ideas, some related to biology, but in some cases male and female are used sort of metaphorically. In other words gender and sex are like a psychic lightning rod, pulling in whatever clouds of charged air happen to need expression. So in one generation blue is feminine, in the next it's masculine.

Each person is responsible for his or her own behavior.

Partly wrong in that a Wittgenstein sentence, such as "snow is white", does correspond with the reality of the world. The Tractatus is basically setting out a correspondence theory. — RussellA

There are a lot of interpretations of the TLP, changing in character over time. I don't think any of the various interpreters can claim to have more sway than the others. Witt is so in the category of food for thought.

I came to the TLP from having been immersed in Schopenhauer. It's really obvious that he's responding to Schopenhauer, especially chastening him about getting transcendent in the speculation department.

So I see what you're talking about, but I don't think he's talking in terms of a correspondence that a realist would approve of.

more in a bit

For me it's a liberal left version of mysticism. — fdrake

For others it might be about living in a country with an outsized homicide rate. That's not about misogyny though. It's just a cultural thing.

A believer in Transcendental Apriosis is a Rationalist who proposes that a solitary thinker using pure reason can understand reality. — RussellA

I think the point of the TLP is to show that when we talk about "understanding reality" in some rarified sense, we're doing something with language that it's not designed for. What sorts of things go on beyond the realm of language? There's nothing to say about that.

In other words, Witt wasn't trying to say that consciousness excludes anything beyond the word circus. He was just pointing out that going on and on about things that are beyond language is foolish.

"Noesis (a non-discursive, non-linguistic, reflexive grasp of truth) is impossible." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is that line actually in the TLP?

Not only Wittgenstein, but many modern philosophers don't accept the concept of Transcendental Aprioris, of which noesis is a part. — RussellA

I don't think he would accept or reject it. He would say we have no way of definitively answering the question.

I am just pointing out that Wittgenstein starts from assumptions about the nature of truth and knowledge that were common to his niche — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you expand on that? What assumptions about the nature of truth and knowledge do you think he started with?

So are you claiming there's some foundation to knowledge? What is it?