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The Economist On Felon47’s Mindless Tariffs

The Economist:

On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers — like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.

And Mr Trump’s grasp of the technicalities was pathetic. He suggested that the new tariffs were based on an assessment of a country’s tariffs against America, plus currency manipulation and other supposed distortions, such as value-added tax. But it looks as if officials set the tariffs using a formula that takes America’s bilateral trade deficit as a share of goods imported from each country and halves it — which is almost as random as taxing you on the number of vowels in your name.

There is no way to report on these tariffs in a way that is honest and accurate without describing them as bonkers and nonsensical. News publications that are trying to present them as rational, or describing them as “reciprocal” just because that’s the word the White House is using, are beclowning themselves.

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Felon47 Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic

From Daring Fireball:

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is:

Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit.

Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are “fancy” — is even stupider, because the two Greek letters they chose to glam it up just cancel each other out.

Back to Masnick:

This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.

The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It’s that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They’re not the same thing. At all.

Let’s back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:

        1. “Deficit” sounds bad.
        2. Therefore, trade deficits must be bad.
        3. Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us.
        4. Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to “level the playing field.”

This sounds like it must be an exaggeration for comic effect, but it’s not. That’s how Trump’s mind works. This is what Trump has been saying about trade deficits for decades. It’s like how he understands “asylum” to mean “insane asylum” and so when he talks about political asylum he starts talking about “the late great Hannibal Lecter”.

We’re not living in the Bad Place. We’re living in the Stupid Place.

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Some Like It Hot

#someone pointed out once that he chose his female name because he liked it#whereas the other man just picked the female version of his existing name#because it was easier and that was his main concern#lot of interesting gender stuff going on here

Oh yeah there was a lot of “Hayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and we’re going to have some fun with gender identity” in this film. That’s why it still holds up. It’s not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns – there’s an integrity to the cross-dressing. Daphne is an identity Jerry realized he had when he put on a dress. Every time he chooses to keep his wig and outfit on and maintain his feminine mannerisms while alone with Joe, it shows his comfort in this identity, and it elicits laughter from the audience through the dialogue, ie. the audience isn’t laughing at the fact that a man is in a dress, but at the characters as fleshed out characters and human beings. The laughter comes from the situations the characters are put in and their reactions to them, not from a parody of womanhood presented through a male perspective. Similarly, Osgood’s classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if he’s Daphne. It’s a way of getting the audience to say, “this is fine, we’re comfortable” through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.

Joe’s masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as he’s less of a womanizer, there’s less of a point to be made with him). In a world where men and women often had separate social circles that overlapped only when romance was on the table, putting a man like Joe in a female space where he’s privy to the conversations and emotions that his actions elicit gives him a lot to contend with and understand because he can see the consequences of his actions as raw pain and secondhand, instead of as anger being spewed directly at him. Again, the joke isn’t that he’s a man in a dress, or that he’s parodying womanhood, it’s that as a selfish misogynist he’s put in situations where he’s forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.

There’s a whole lot more to unpack in the metaphor of these two men having to pass as women because their lives are at stake if they don’t.

[Source]

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What A Fucking Asshole Enemy Of The People

He’s going to destroy the U.S. economy. I’m not even sure this is the full list yet.

So basically almost every single country is going to have at least a 10% tariff tax on their imports. I haven’t even heard of some of these countries.

He’s calling it “reciprocal” because these countries will be imposing tariffs on us in return. Which is the opposite of what “reciprocal” means, but his fanbase won’t understand that. And it’s obvious HE still doesn’t understand how tariffs work. ASSHOLE.

What’s weird is that Canada and Mexico seems to be absent so far.

Of course Russia is also absent, but anybody who’s paying attention already knew that it would be.

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I’ve Been Busy Today

I’ve been avoiding social media. Even Bluesky has turned into an endless stream of nothing but angst-producing horrific news.

So I jumped into my hobby headfirst today. Started going through my iTunes collection last night and made a list of what I wanted to transfer to physical media. And of course, once transferred, I had to make labels.

Labels, labels, labels…so many labels. Still, it keeps my mind off the imminent collapse of the United States and/or WW3.

And speaking of WW3…

Have a good evening!

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Oh Noes! Elon’s Having Another Big Sad. Boo Fucking Hoo

From Jeff Tiedrich:

’nobody likes me, wah wah wah’

imagine what you could do if you had more money than god. one way to play it would be to fuck off and never be heard from again, and quietly enjoy a world of limitless possibilities. on the other hand, think of all the good you could do as a humanitarian. you could fund programs to end hunger, or cure disease. want to be remembered forever? build libraries, universities and hospitals, and slap your name on them, so your legacy lives on after you’re gone.

or — if none of that shit is for you — you could just be some broken-inside asshole who never stops whining about being insufficiently worshiped.

the Academy Award for self-pity goes to —

“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who’s a huge jerk, you know, running around on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price had gone in half. and he was overjoyed. what an evil thing to do. what a creep. what a jerk. like, who derives joy from that?”

who wants to tell him?

dude. all of us. we’re all deriving joy from that.

we’re all sitting here watching Tesla’s stock price plummet like Wile E. Coyote off the end of the cliff — and that shit is fucking hilarious.

Elon, have you seriously never seen a movie or a TV show? people love that shit, when the bully gets his comeuppance. it’s the plot of every teen comedy from the 1980s.

and oh fucking boy, have you been a bully.

nobody voted for you, bro — yet here you are, in all of our faces. you used your obscene generational wealth to buy yourself a government, and treat it like your own personal plaything.

you and your merry band of pimply teenage incels broke shit. you fired people, without cause, and without bothering to first find out what they did — and then you looked like a fool when you had to scramble to hire them back because it turned out they vital, necessary shit like maintain the government’s nuke stockpile.

hey Elon, remember this guy?

that’s Ned Johnson. he’s 82 and very much alive, but your flying monkey incels declared him dead and canceled his Social Security — because they didn’t understand the data they were looking at, and didn’t bother to ask anyone to explain it to them.

people see this shit happening — and then they see you fucking off to Motel-a-Lago, higher than a goddamned kite, playing with silverware.

you’re having the time of your life while the people whose lives you’ve turned upside down can’t get anyone to answer the phone at Social Security because you’ve pared their staff down to the bone.

on top of all that, you’re a penny-ante con man.

Somehow, four Tesla-owned dealerships reported to the Canadian government that they sold an astonishing 8,653 cars during a single weekend in January — enough to qualify for 43 million Canadian dollars’ (about $30 million) worth of government subsidies under a program just before it expired.

Now the Canadian government wants to know exactly how the electric carmaker managed to move two cars a minute off its lots — a rate that assumes those four dealers had stayed open 24 hours from Jan. 10 to Jan. 12.

can you explain that, Elon? those must be some awesome fucking salespeople, to sell two cars a minute for 72 straight hours. I hope you gave them all raises.

you want people to stop loathing you, Elon? then stop giving them reasons.

people are pissed. that’s why they laugh when your stock goes tits-up.

and that’s why they’ve been taking to the streets.

here’s a #TeslaTakeown protest from yesterday, in Glendale, CA.

here’s another #TeslaTakedown from yesterday, in Columbus, OH.

look, Elon. do you want to be liked? build a library. fund a cure for cancer.

stop whining. stop pretending you’re the victim. stop demanding to be worshiped.

and for fuck’s sake, own up to your bullshit.

“The goal of the left is to destroy my influence. So they relentlessly push negative propaganda about me like the fake Nazi stuff and ignore anything positive. They are evil.”

fake Nazi stuff? homeslice, we all saw you sieg heil.

how hard it is to say ‘yeah, that was kinda fucked up. I won’t do it again’?

hey, everyone — President Nine Iron won himself another golf tournament!

“I just played a round of Golf with Alexander Stubb, President of Finland. He is a very good player, and we won the Men’s Member-Guest Golf Tournament at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach County, with the Legendary Gary Player, Senator Lindsey Graham, and former Congressman and highly successful Television Host, Trey Gowdy. President Stubb and I look forward to strengthening the partnership between the United States and Finland, and that includes the purchase and development of a large number of badly needed Icebreakers for the U.S., delivering Peace and International Security for our Countries, and the World. President Stubb told me, in the most powerful of words, that the United States is STRONG, and BACK, AGAIN. I AGREE!”

so that makes seventeen hundred skilliontly consecutive championships that Donny has won at one of his vermin-infested golf motels.

but here’s a fun fact regarding Donny’s boast about scoring a shitload of polar icebreaking vessels from Finland: he’s taking credit for a pact negotiated and signed by the Sleepy Joe Brandon administration, back in November of last year.

Canada’s also part of the deal, but Donny left that part out — because he’s still throwing a big hissy over their refusal to become America’s hat.

I look forward to next weekend, when Donny plays golf with Napoleon and takes credit for the Louisiana Purchase.

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