this seems to be the same presser where this came from:
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St. Peterās Basilica has like catacombs full of treasure if I remember correctly from reading a Dan Brown novel. Itās probably down there
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Undertalisman
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Anytime I see anyone poking fun at or complaining about these new tariffs, I like to remind them that although these will negatively impact us in the short term they will at least provide no tangible benefits.
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I donāt think thatās fair. Itās perfectly reasonable to think the tariff policy could bring hundreds or even thousands of low wage manufacturing jobs to the United States
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This is very true, I for one am very excited to make an enormous longterm investment in funding a domestic automation-less factory. This administration is nothing if not steadfast in their policy.
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Tremendous job opportunities opening up for American children and prisoners. Becoming a child or prisoner will become viable career goals for your kids I think.
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Are those mutually exclusive?
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If I may get a little ~bold~, I find it hard to reconcile my feelings on a lot of this stuff because yes, I donāt think itās good to bring low-wage, manual labor jobs back to America. But I also donāt think itās good for anyone to be working those sorts of jobs? Like, yeah, itās stupid to think that weāll want to make iphones in america, but even the process of making āsophisticated techā like iphones has workers choosing death over life.
Likewise, as stupid as Trumpās ā30 dollsā comment was, it is true that overconsumption is a problem for the envirorment (understatement of the year) and it is sad that disposable tech has become so accessible in america while other things, like housing and retirment, climb out of reach.
Iām not saying you could draw a neat correlation and causation line between any of these things and obviously I do not agree with the way trump is going about it, but I say all this to say the news has been causing me to reflect on my own consumption habits as a first-worlder and the sacrifices it takes from the rest of the world to give me the lifestyle i was born into. there are no easy answers or solutions of course, but i get a little squeamish when i see āleftistā type thinkers taking the opportunity to blindly dunk on the topic and inadvertently defend GDP growth. not accusing anyone here of doing that, just musing.
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Unprincipled Americans of all kinds be like yes!!! The violence of the periphery is coming home to the imperial core, baby!!! The chickens are finally coming home to roost!! America First!!!
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Probably getting off the subject a bit here, but Iāve been finding it very frustrating in general to see the right wing identify a real problem and then use their political power to work it in the most moronic, evil ways. I think about the RFK types a lot because heās definitely ārightā in the sense that they put things in our food and weāre basically consuming trash. Unfortunately, heās using the power heās been given to attack vaccines, fluoride, and basically just somehow coming to the conclusion that we eat garbage because things are actually over regulated.
I was thinking this too with the utterly asinine āmovie tariffsā Trump has mentioned. An absolute nothing, an incoherent idea containing nothing actionable or real and a total waste of our time to even discuss it, but of course American movies should be shooting in Hollywood or elsewhere in the country. Figure out a way to make that actually happen and grow that industry here if you want to create good jobs.
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yeah like havenāt we donāt that already, isnāt that why everything is shot in the state of georgia?
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nothing wrong with making shit, nothing wrong with workā¦ the problem is extracting maximal āsurplus valueā from human lives.
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Give it time.
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When heās right, heās right. Things are unhealthy in America and riding to work with your husband on the back of the bike is a nice, loving relationship
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Real Zac Oyama āI turned one hundred thousand dollars into sixteen thousand dollarsā energy from the federal government.
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Thatās been the conservative MO since, what, the Nazis? Acknowledge the contradictions of contemporary capitalism in the hopes that you can direct the yearning for something better back into capitalism itself. Better still if you can accomplish this by redirecting peopleās ire toward some marginalized Other whoās either exploiting an otherwise fair and just system or actively corrupting that very system. To pick but a single example: Peopleās futures riding on how they perform in sports because youāve over-professionalized it? Blame the transes for winning too much (which is to say: at all)!
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well, the good(?) news is that thatās not going to happen. And I donāt just mean that I donāt think the tariff policy is going to do anything, but that the Trump Admin seems to completely ignore the technological challenges of doing that. I saw estimates say it can take as long as a decade to convert a factoryās primary use (the average probably being shorter), meaning that any positive effects of this wonāt be seen during the Trump admin. Building new factories is also slow and costly
I have watched so many anti-fast fashion videos and stanley cup videos etc etc. They are mesmerizing in how horrible the subjects are. Itās appalling. But itās also a topic that I feel like itās hard to be prescriptive about. Personal values (I donāt buy fast fashion) can come off as privileged or out of touch when posited as solutions
I tend to see the opposite, (fellow) leftists inadvertently feeding into stereotypes (that the left is bad at economics) by championing nebulous degrowth (e.g. āthe stock market falling is good bc only rich people own stocksā). This irks me as it suggests that leftists are not to be taken seriously. (I should state Iām not talking about you or what you wrote at all)
We can object to the gross dystopian reality that every company is forced to grow every quarter ad infinitum (and all the human suffering that brings), but our economic systems are moreā¦ I guess Iād say consequential, than that line of thinking presumes. We shouldnāt want drops in GDP/production just because we have too many things - drops tend to be regressive, leading to recession (definitionally a recession is when GDP isnāt growing QoQ) and heavily correlated with mass unemployment, food scarcity, homelessness, etc. Itās tricky because GDP is often applied to things it canāt really describe (e.g. quality of life). But in general, we do want it to keep increasing. At the very least, holding everything else constant, as population increases, GDP increases, so it does ānaturallyā go up over time
Overconsumption isnāt the thing powering GDP growth, so I donāt mean to suggest we need to keep overconsuming to keep the economy going (A lot of that stuff is imported anyway, so itās not helping those numbers). Similarly, I donāt want an economy reliant on abusing underpaid labor and donāt mean to suggest we need to keep doing that.
I might be going off in an unintended direction but I guess I just mean to say that Iām skeptical of ādegrowth.ā Most of the world is poor and would benefit from economic growth, not degrowth. This is a very tricky topic though, and I find it hard to articulate all of the nuance at play here:
I just want to emphasize that thereās a very slippery slope - weāve seen right-wingers/the republican party co-opt degrowth/overconsumption to police economic growth in China/India/Indonesia, etc. and using leftist/environmentalist language to do so. Those arenāt bedfellows I like.
At the same time, it doesnāt feel good to give any nation deemed ādevelopingā free rein to polluteā¦
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You can achieve anything if you work hard enough!
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itās hard to meaningfully understand the policies of the present administration because theyāre incoherent and being managed by a number of sloppy weirdos
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