alt Hacker News> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
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I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.
It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.
The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.
I had a university friend who spent hundreds of hours on his YouTube channel whilst the rest of spent hundreds of hours arguing about politics.
He’s now unimaginably successful at YouTube but at least I’m better at predicting the content of tomorrow’s newspapers.
> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not
I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.
National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.
All the main retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot/Lowes etc. should band together and pull out the tariff costs as a separate payment line on the bill like sales tax. They shouldn’t include it in the bill and pull it out to be paid at time of sale.
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
What I find particularly galling is that he failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson: Maybe he wouldn't have these kind of problems if he hadn't outsourced his manufacturing to China but kept in on-shore instead.
Nobody saw this coming. Trump's first term might have been crazy inside US, but outside... it's the least interfering US govt we've had in a while for the world. So as far as geopolitics is concerned, he is right.
Classic hindsight bias. In fact, you could be paying a lot of attention to politics and still think tariffs were not going to go so high. Here's [1] a betting market that regularly was below 5% chance of tariffs above 40% on Chinese imports in first 100 days of Trump's second term.
https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...
I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
You could also say politics is downstream of other forces that are less global and more local. Some people choose to stay aware of their more local forces rather than the grand ones.
In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.
This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.