See, the tariffs are already helping American businesses. Temu might have threatened Amazon, but now it’s been defanged.
The Grand Old Creed: love the work, hate the worker.
It will be interesting to see if the adjusted prices remain competitive with similar clothing on Amazon, or if the Amazon clothing prices will increase enough that Temu and Shein will still be less expensive.
Trumpist firefighters who were all for Trump’s cuts to government are not so pleased when he cancels in-person classes at the nearby National Fire Academy.
If the administration doesn’t restore the cuts, “It will change my outlook to say that they’re not being fair,” says [Emmitsburg, MD, Mayor Frank] Davis, who also serves as emergency medical services captain at the local firehouse, known as the Vigilant Hose Company. “They’re just going in to cut and not caring what they cut.” (My emphasis.)
Emmitsburg voted for President Trump in November. NPR interviewed about two dozen people here. Almost all of them voted for Trump, and many said his plans to cut federal spending were a key attraction. Now, they say they are puzzled as to why the administration would cancel national training for firefighters.
Beck, who runs a landscaping company, works for free as fire chief. He voted for Trump and supports cutting waste and making government smaller. But Beck doesn’t see how training first responders is wasteful.
“We’re only 100-plus days in,” Beck says of Trump’s current term. “I wish things were going differently.”
Beck doesn’t regret his vote — yet.
“I’m not 100% there yet, but it may not take much more,” he says.
Now, they say they are puzzled as to why the administration would cancel national training for firefighters.
Maybe, just maybe, they should ask what the administration thinks the training firefighters require is.
‘You got to the fire, you sprinkle a little water on it, you go home. What else do you need to know?’
~ DJT
It makes you wonder why these folks think that he’s recklessly cutting the things they are personally involved with, but somehow think that his other actions are well considered.
Exactly. Remember, Donald Trump knows more about [insert any subject] than the [insert appropriate experts here (economists, doctors, generals, scientists, PhDs, statesmen, etc)].
Shades of “The only good abortion is my abortion”. One guy was quoted as having seen “A lot of waste” in his career as a civil servant, but yeah, you have to wonder how much of that “waste” was him just not understanding the reasons for something.
That’s a version of Chesterton’s Fence:
- (public policy) The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
Short video explanation: Chesterton Fence: Don’t Destroy What You Don’t Understand!
Jefferson was a physical coward who ran from the redcoats in his nightie. Franklin never fought anyone either. They were wordsmiths. Fuck them.
They just need to rake the houses.
Into necrophilia, are we?
Only loser’s houses burn down anyway.
Franklin was 70 years of age in 1776, so I think it’s forgivable that he worked for America by charming French aristocrats rather than hauling muskets.
In other news, tech bros are flaming out. First 9 paragraphs of paywalled article:
The tech industry itself will likely be hit hard by Trump’s tariffs. Hardware companies like Tesla will have trouble sourcing components, increasing their costs substantially. Companies like Apple who design their hardware in America but manufacture it overseas will also take a hit; Apple CEO Tim Cook says the tariffs will cost his company nearly $1 billion this quarter.3 E-commerce companies like Amazon will suffer from more expensive imports, too; when Amazon protested by listing tariffs explicitly in their price breakdowns, Trump called Jeff Bezos and bullied him into changing the policy.
Most importantly, AI companies — which at this point includes almost every big tech company, and a large fraction of startups — will face higher costs for their compute, since data centers use tons of imported parts and components:
Also, everyone hates Elmo:
Also, tech bros are bad at politics. Exquisitely bad.
Who could have predicted that these folks who gravitated to their tech-oriented careers because it minimized the headaches of having to interact with other people would turn out to be bad at a discipline that requires them to understand and influence people?
Or how much of that waste was actually due to him.
While I understand that stereotypes make things easier sometimes, we should really fight the urge to pigeonhole whole swaths of the population like this.
How about “who could expect a self-selecting bunch of ‘get-rich-quick’ douchebags that gravitated to a market sector that allowed a fortunate few to indeed get rich quick, often poorly correlated with ability or talent, would also gravitate to a related grift”?
Musk, for his part, likes interacting with other people. It seems to be his primary talent. I mean that sincerely - his wealth was built by leaving the technical bits to others and being the guy who inspired other people to invest vast sums of money in his companies. That does not translate well to politics, it seems. And in the distance, the world’s smallest violin plays…
Half of being smart is knowing what you’re dumb at and he’s hardly the first one to fall into that trap, e.g. Linus Pauling and vitamin C.
Pauling never purposefully set out to destroy the Federal government, though. My brother bought a Tesla S back in 2015 and I got him a magnet to put on the back of it: Bought back when he was just the cool ‘space guy’
Noah Smith discussed some of the problems tech bros have in politics. Musk is exhibit A. Federal spending is higher than it was under Biden, notwithstanding the inane firings and court mandated rehirings. His efforts during the Wisconsin Supreme Court race may have been counterproductive. Elon fought the tariffs and lost. Musk is returning to Tesla with this tail between his legs and perhaps 1/3 less net worth. Noah Smith:
Why? The likeliest explanation is that Musk has spent his entire career dealing with the best and the brightest. When employees at Tesla or SpaceX prove not to be the very cream of the elite, Musk ruthlessly fires them. Thus, he lives most of his life surrounded only by smart and competent people.
But politics is simply a different animal. Dealing with geniuses all day simply does not prepare one to understand and connect with the masses; Trump has plenty of charisma, but when it comes to the average voter, Musk has much less. Musk is also used to being the absolute ruler of his workplaces, and the adaptation to a subordinate role was probably unfamiliar.
These two issues certainly don’t apply only to Elon. In fact, they’re general reasons why technologists’ forays into politics are typically so disappointing — and why the new Tech Right of the 2020s has so far been unable to make much headway.
…
The big lesson here, I think, is that our intuition from previous decades is still correct: Tech people simply aren’t that good at politics. Their expertise lies in managing cold hard symbols rather than the passions of the masses, and they’re used to relating to genius engineers instead of working-class voters. They live in a world where functionality, rather than popularity, wins the day. And that world isn’t Washington, D.C.
I’d ask when these people will learn but pretty sure they will never lean. I feel sorry for their son. His parents have done him a disservice.
His parents were happy to fuck over someone else but now it is their problem and they are upset. These people are called “assholes.”