Baffled European

Category: It’ll never work

  • Brexiters tried this

    The USA’s new Golden Age starts today. It’s the president’s flagship policy, all based around his favourite word: tariffs. This is his opportunity to show that he can run the country just as well as he does his businesses.

    He started this on day one, raising arbitrary tariffs at random levels. Cancelling them. Reapplying them. Increasing them. Delaying them. Nobody seems to know what is going on. Fortunately, they can spend their time congratulating themselves on having such a strong and decisive leader.

    In the past, there were monolithic factories where raw materials went in at the start, with finished products coming out at the end. This is not the way things work anymore. Components are produced all over the world and supplied just in time to the assembly process. It’s more efficient.

    All that tariff increases do is increase costs at particular points in the process. Some components can even be hit several times by tariffs as they move along the chain.

    These tariffs will not recreate the old and inefficient processes of the past, at least not within the next five years. They will also do nothing to reduce the trade deficit, its stated aim. All they will do is raise costs for USAian businesses and consumers, and create loads of unnecessary trouble for everybody else in the world.

    In other news, Marine Le Pen has been convicted of corruption and banned from office. This sort of thing is possible.

  • Long term planning

    Irene Triplett died 31st May 2020 at the age of 90. Her death was possibly the most significant event of her life: she was the last living dependent of a civil war veteran, 155 years after the war had ended. In a similar vein, there are still many widows and dependents of WWI veterans, even though the last ex-soldier died in 2011.

    Things like this seem incredible, impossible even, but they happen all the time when you deal with big numbers. That’s why outliers appear.

    Whatever the case, it means that if you start a war, the costs and consequences are going to be around for a lot longer than you might imagine. Government is a century-long project.

    Moreover, all of this shows that the government keeps its promise. If you join up to fight in a war, the government says it will look after you and your family. It’s reassuring to see that the government takes this seriously.

    Inevitably, this leads us to DOGE and their new project. They have turned their attention to the social security computer system. It serves tens of millions of people, contains tens of millions of lines of code – mainly COBOL, with some assembler – and has not been significantly updated since the 1980s.

    DOGE plans to rewrite the entire codebase in a few months using AI and a team of script kiddies. No, stop. I’m not writing any more on this. I’ll just get angry.