"Adam Becker: I've got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they've misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they've got to grapple with it because it's the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase."
Readit Newsmcguire commented on Silicon Valley billionaires want the impossible arstechnica.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/mcguire
We need jobs for everyone for various reasons. However we do not need factory jobs for everyone. The manufacture more with less people means those other people can move on to other jobs. They can start another factory to make goods.
There are plenty of jobs. Every person who isn't manufacturing is a person who can do something else. A modern car uses a lot more engineers. While we don't need many spa mangers, it is nice that spas exist and so some of those spa managers are needed.
Don't forget that people don't really want factory jobs, which suck; they want union jobs that pay well and don't kill them.
While there are more peaceful ways of rebalancing trade, unilateral tariffs would be able to rebalance things on the long term. The problem is that alot of people in HN think in terms in export-driven economy, when in reality the majority of USA's economy is consumption, it's the largest consumer in the world. Loosing access to foreign markets dosen't mean as much to USA as it does to the rest of the world loosing access to USA.
Long term, manufacturers will come back or be created to grab all those customers. But for the rest of the world, it's much harder for suppliers who lost a massive chunk of their customers to suddenly find new customers beyond what's already existing. Creating demand is notoriously harder than increasing supply. And it dosen't help that the majority of other major economies are also export-based, so unless if some are willing to run deficits (and they won't), there's literally nowhere else to go other than a global recession. Developing countries are far too poor and would essentially be turned into captive markets bereft of industrialization.
I don't agree with the implementation of Trump's policies, but this is going right back to Keynes' concerns about limitations of global trade balancing, it's a long time coming, and much of the blame does come back to the surplus economies that doubled down on manufacturing rather than transitioning to consumer based economies.
is it not obvious the oligarchs control the globalist politicians and not the nationalists?
Is it controversial to say that if you really wanted to "fight the oligarchy", your policy positions would be pretty similar to the America first agenda (sans social issues)?
Don't confuse the Goldman Sachs branch of the Democratic party with Musk/Bezos/et al bankrolling the Republican party.
Recession is the base case. The worst case is ... worse.
Well, now, that depends on when and who exactly is involved in large scale protests against the Trump administration.
If they call out the active duty military against middle-aged, white, protestors, they'll have a problem. If it's against students and minorities,...
The real lesson is that nuclear disarmament is a fool's choice.
This is the biggest lesson of the first quarter of the 21st century.
"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."