Baffled European

Tag: trade war

  • 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.

  • Academic freedom

    I saw a scatter graph recently, showing how many Nobel prizes each country had won over the years. Germany was the clear Weltmeister until 1933, when the number of awards suddenly dropped, never to recover. The USA, followed by the UK, have been dominant since 1945.

    There’s a good chance this will change. The USAians are happily destroying their university system. Some reasons are transparently ridiculous, such as withholding $175million from Penn because they had a trans swimmer in their team. Florida has sacked a professor because he is a Chinese refugee. Harvard and Columbia are both knuckling down to suppress unwanted opinions or disband departments that the government doesn’t like.

    These elite universities have collected literally billions in endowments over the years. I get that there might be a tight spot in the short term, but they don’t need government money. Instead of compromising their charter and sacrificing academic freedom, they are genuinely in a position to say no. For whatever reason, they don’t do this.

    The exodus is starting, with academics seeking new positions in Canada and Europe. This is indeed a good opportunity to attract the brightest and best, if the USA doesn’t want talent anymore. Not to mention that many foreign scholars are too scared to enter the country even for conferences, let alone for permanent positions.

    We won’t see the effects of this for a few years, but it’s pre-programmed.

  • Secret Service

    “Dominos Pizza Service, how can I help?”

    “Yeah, hello, do you have any war plans?”

    “I’m sorry sir, we don’t have any war plans on the menu.”

    “Then they need to be on the menu. You gotta get used to the idea of – yeah, bourbon, please… large, thanks – yeah, the idea of war plans. We’ll get these war plans rolling and then it’ll be margarita time!”

    “One Margherita. Do you want coke with that?”

    “Obviously. I tell you, if you haven’t got your own war plans – another bourbon, yes, that’s lovely – I got some war plans of my own that I made myself. Those Pentagon plans, that’s for those goddamn pathetic Europeans. They just freeload off of us – if it looks like it’s going down, just top it up, cheers – like they’re on vacation in Hawaii.”

    “One Hawaii. With extra pineapples?”

    “As many as possible. Yeah, where are they then? Anybody seen the war plans? Don’t tell me I left them on the S-Bahn, I was sure I had them when I got off. What’s that James? You got a copy on Google Drive? Email it to me, but remember what happened last time – what, empty? there’s a bottle of Drambuie in the cabinet, I think there’s some left in that – got them, great. War plans, now listen. You remember what happened to Hallo Pizza, you don’t want that to happen to you …”

  • Texas sharpshooter fallacy

    Rain here at last. First time this month, we really needed it. It’s not enough, but at least it hasn’t forgotten how to rain.

    Meanwhile, over in the USA, measles is spreading in eighteen states. Doctors are telling people to get vaccinated, but they are shouting into the wind. Decades of undermining medicine and science are paying off.

    RFK is again responsible for this. But good news, he’s found somebody to lead his vanity project which will definitively establish the link between vaccination and autism.

    This man is David Geyer. He has no experience in research, clinical or otherwise. He does however have medical experience, at least he did until they took his licence away. That was for lying about his credentials, and maltreating autistic children.

    The last point is the clue. It’s depressing looking through his record. You can extrapolate the entire anti-vax movement just by looking at his madness. Now RFK has got somebody who knows the conclusion to the study, all they have to do is find the evidence to fit.

    So typical for the new administration. Loyalty and ideological purity are the watchwords here. Here we have them wasting a lot of money and the expertise of what remains of the CDC in order to prove a logical fallacy.

    All of this and then I read that JD Vance is now calling bullets “freedom seeds”. They are insane, the lot of them.

  • They really mean it

    Lovely warm spring day today. I put a cat tree out next to my front door. Both of my cats have found it and immediately recognised its strategic advantage. They started fighting over possession of it at any rate.

    This being a laboured link to indicate that my cats display more intelligence than the US government at the moment.

    Thousands of government workers have been sacked by DOGE over the last two months, with the destruction still in full swing. I thought this was all inspired by a love for small government. In fact, it looks as though they want to maintain government capabilities by using AI. This is astonishing. It appears they actually believe their own hype about AI.

    Have they ever used AI for anything? Like a google search? It’s useless. It produces walls of readable text, but it can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth or lies. It gives every appearance of doing the same job as a human, much faster, but the results are worse.

    In one sense, this explains why the rulers of the USA are a bunch of amoral liars. They actually believe the things their computers tell them and they don’t have the critical faculties to evaluate the results. On the other hand, they think they can use this unreliable and immature technology to run the country.

    Maybe it will work.

  • Make America Healthy Again

    Outbreak of measles in Texas. The result of a long campaign by anti-vaxxers.

    RFK Jr is responsible for the outbreak. In the sense that it is his job at the moment, as well as him being one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers of the last 25 years.

    I see RFK giving an interview in a fast food restaurant. He’s saying how good the food is for you. Endless anti-vax drivel. He sounds more like an activist trying to get their points in rather than a government minister.

    He seems to be settling scores as well. He’s sacked a load of researchers from the CDC (disease control) and set the rest over to researching the non-existent autism-MMR link. They all know it’s a waste of time, but that’s their job now. He will want results though.

    This is in addition to all the other closures in his department. Some look like revenge from the covid time, others are just wanton vandalism. Is this “small government”? At some point, things will actually genuinely stop working.

    What is worst about all of this is the rejection of reality. It’s like he takes every single piece of medical advice and rejects it. Deliberately and knowingly. Why? This looks like a common feature in the government as well.

    And the title of this blog? That is literally his slogan.

  • Freedom of speech

    One of those minor calamities today, in which most of a pizza topping, but none of the base, landed on a hot pizza stone. I will have to scrape that thoroughly to atone.

    Meanwhile in the USA it’s great to have protests against the disaster that is befalling the country, but authoritarians don’t like protests. As a result they are paying particular attention to silencing their critics.

    The easy stuff is things like the climate institutes. Maga doesn’t want to hear about subjects like this, why should we pay for it then, so just shut them all down and the problem goes away, simple.

    Other institutions like universities rely on government money but can’t be got rid of so easily. They are therefore being extorted to either ban student protest or become more racist. They will make a bold stand this time, but they will be worn down over time. That’ll sort itself.

    What do you do with the rest of the population?

    There have been a series of blatant violations of the First Amendment, arresting people merely for expressing an opinion. I presume the courts will sort these cases out fairly. As they will to the others that the government arrests in order to harass, threaten and quieten. The point is the arrests.

    The present government will continue to terrorise its opponents until people stop criticising them, or until somebody powerful enough tells them to stop it. Which is going to happen first?

  • Nothing to see, move along

    With all the enthusiasm that is to be expected with a new blog, I set about this morning, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, and read the news.

    Five minutes later, after picking through the wreckage that those lunatics have left in the last 24 hours alone, I became tremendously cross. At this point, the only thing that could help was to make a nice cup of tea and rethink my life entirely.

    What puzzles me is the “business as usual” approach to reporting this putsch by the USAian press. I have only read the US press occasionally in the past, but it all seems so normal. The WSJ is even looking forward to “a thrill a minute”.

    Yeah, yeah. Thrills, yeah. Hmm. Me too. Can’t wait.

    Can’t they see what’s happening? The regime is purging the government and military, installing a bunch of criminals and drug addicts who happen to be loyal to The Godfather. They own the Supreme Court. They’ve got Congress stuffed with yesbeings.

    They’ve got everything in the bag and they’ve only just started.

    Couldn’t happen in the USA. Land of the free.

    ____

    A piece of graffiti from the 51st state: the stars & stripes in a crossed circle with the slogan “There is no enemy like a friend betrayed”. I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way about USAian treachery.

    I’ve just realised my operating system is from Canada! Isn’t that great?