MayCaesar

Marxism is one of those ivory tower philosophies that make no sense whatsoever, but if you hypnotize yourself into them by thinking hard about them and trying to make it work in some imaginary world, then you may succeed. It is much like religion in that it is completely detached from reality, but you can be drawn into it through peer pressure.

What I see in your comments is an emotional reaction: "They mistreated us - time to mistreat them back! That will show 'em!" In Russia they have a saying for this: "I will gouge out my own eye so that my stepmother has a one-eyed stepson".  I would expect the top economy in the world to be above that. What I am interested is what improves the economy here, and tariffs demonstrably do not. Free trade does, and if the trade partner puts some obstacles in the way, it is still better to have unobstructed gates here than to create another bottleneck. "Allies" or not - who cares? Neither the US nor the Chinese government is my ally. I am interested in trading with Joe here and Wang there, and I see no reason why someone from the White House should step in between us and collect a toll.

To the idea that someone can look at Warren Buffet and want to emulate his business... Sorry, but this is not a serious one. How many American companies emulate his business and succeed? If it was that simple, then everyone would be a billionaire. Chinese "slavers" (whoever you meant by that - I am quote confused now) can look at Warren Buffet's business now; how will American tariffs make it more visible?

As for Sowell's quote, he meant by that that whatever policy one implements it will always have negative side effects. That does not change the fact that some policies are better than other policies, and some policies outright suck. I would argue that all forms of taxation - including tariffs - suck. But tariffs suck quite a bit more than many, for the same reason as mandated oligopolies in general suck. If only three local hospitals are allowes to operate unhinged and all other hospitals have to pay a toll, then the healthcare prices will skyrocket and quality will plummet. Guess what imposing tariffs on imported cars will do to the auto market? Basic math: supply lowers - the rest follows.

Corruption/dishonesty of some experts does not undermine the importance of expertise. If you get cancer, will you go to a certified specialist for treatment - or to a conspiracy theorist like RFK who believes that cancer treatments cause anthrax? 

In addition, some questions are questions of morality, not expertise. It is obvious that lockdowns save lives when a massive deadly epidemic is abound - but that the lockdowns therefore are justified is a moral judgement. In my moral system, there is no excuse for what virtually all governments did during COVID, no matter how many lives it saved. And in a free country people should be free to make such choices for themselves.

If I knew that a nuclear bomb was about to be detonated on Manhattan, it would be nice if the system incentivized me to warn the police, rather than to short a bunch of Wall Street stocks and become a billionaire while watching millions of people die on a livestream.

I am with you on not making insider trading illegal, but I think that it is healthy for information to be as widely available as possible, so people profit not on trading secrets, but on trading positive goods. I want my life to be better off due to my ability to buy cheap apples, not due to overhearing that apple prices are about to skyrocket because some Washington shmuck wants to appease farmers at the expense of everyone else.

Again, these measures harm both economies: the idea that the EU members somehow take the upper hand in dealings with the US is uneconomical. The US retaliating against European countries employing protectionist policies with its own protectionist policies is like a husband whose wife never takes trash out deciding to never take trash out either to have revenge on her - and now they are both stuck in a terribly smelling house.

When it comes to the US government plain investing into the European continent with military aid, loans that are unlikely to be paid back, infrastructure investments, etc. - I will be the first one to say that this should be stopped: taking money away from the US taxpayers and funneling it to another continent is a separate issue. This is not about John from Ohio wanting to trade with Ming from Guangzhou and both the Chinese and the US government standing in the middle and telling them, "Pay a toll for the divine privilege to do business!" - this is about one of said governments taking away from John and giving to Ming. Tariffs do not address the latter situation in any way, but they do exacerbate the former.

Because of a new tariff police from one country, a Chinese slaver will suddenly rethink his life choices, including the choice to practice slavery in the first place - which is as illegal in China as it is in the US - and start emulating American companies? The very companies that clearly are afraid of open competition and rely on protectionist policies to succeed? That is not a display of the strength of the American economy, and this theory does not seem to make much sense.

Empirically, it is the opposite: the least successful economies are also the ones featuring the largest amount of dark practices like slavery and mandatory child labor. In China slavery, actually, is quite uncommon, so it is a weird example anyway - and China has long ago restructured its economy to be more akin to the US economy.

Sorry, but it is hard to take these claims as anything other than rationalization of Trump's reckless and random economical policy. Trump himself has never said that the purpose of tariffs was to discourage slavery elsewhere, as far as I know. I am not sure why people are trying so hard to find new reasons to approve of his actions.

I would think that it is because the US generally handles economy much better than other countries. Or, at least, it used to... After the past 5-6 years, I am not so sure anymore. But the US economy is certainly run much-much better than the Chinese economy or economies of most EU members. If Trump wants the US economy to be more similar to those economies than it used to be, then it sounds like he, indeed, puts those countries before the US, by definition.

The second argument is weird. Suppose there is a Chinese slaver that sells the produce to the US. Will he stop his slaving practices if the US market becomes less attractive? Why would he? Because Trump asks him nicely? There is zero evidence that protectionist policies have effects like this - and there is plenty of evidence that they, in fact, have the opposite effect. Again, tariffs hurt both economies. Because now trading with the US is more difficult, the Chinese economy weakens, making everyone poorer - and guess what poverty produces, among other things? Shady labor practices.

The way out of slavery is modernization of economy, and the best way to accomplish that is to have access to the modern markets. By blocking off the US market, Trump encourages slavery in China. Sure, some people who just swallow whatever he says will sleep a little better at night, thinking that they are sacrificing their own well-being to help someone in China - but in reality, they are sacrificing their own well-being to help a bunch of guys and gals in Washington and their private sponsors. This is not exactly rocket science.

This is a strange idea, that one has to necessarily choose between either putting Americans first or putting foreign allies first. There is such a thing as mutually beneficial interactions, and there are mutually damaging interactions - and the fact that someone does a lip service to "putting Americans first" does not prevent their actions from contributing to the latter.

Trump's tariffs harm all sides involved, and aside from some crony politicians and business owners, nobody benefits from them. Which Americans is he putting first by making, say, aluminum prices skyrocket? Sure, companies mining aluminum here in the US will certainly profit from this protectionist policy; from the data I can find, it amounts to approximately 30,000 Americans. In contrast, the rest 340,000,000 Americans have seen aluminum prices jump by over 50% in some cases recently, upon the tariff announcement - driving up prices of countless goods.

<--- This American does not want to subsidize a small special interest group: I want to spend my money on me, not on them. But apparently, I am not included in that subset of Americans that are put first. Maybe... maybe there is only one American that Donald puts first, and his first name is Donald?

I served as a judge at a recent high school project competition in my county, and I was blown away by how good those kids were. 14-15-year old kids did AI projects that just 5 years ago would earn all of them PhDs, yet nowadays it is just something they clip together in their free time in high school.

I do not see how a Youtube video featuring one girl is supposed to support the thesis that "education is dead in America". Am I missing something?

This really depends on the assumptions you make. One reasonable assumption could be that you are a member of the human race, so your choice is somewhat reflective of the general preference - with only one data point, that is the best you can do, to say that this choice is likely to be most common. Another assumption could be that there is something special about your thinking pattern, that it is not reflective of other people's thinking patterns - in which case you could argue that you should discard the single sample as not being drawn from the general distribution and make a random guess. You might also think of yourself as a contrarian, tending to go against the general consensus - and in that case you would guess that the color you picked is less common than the other one.

This is the problem of choosing the prior in the Bayesian statistics. How reflective do you think is your sample of the general distribution? If you believe that it is not reflective at all, then you should simply ignore it and start with the simplest model possible which is the uniform distribution (i.e. blue and red hats are equally likely to win out). And if you believe that it is reflective, whichever way, then a skewed prior is warranted. As to whether your belief is justified or not... well, that is a fundamental question of epistemology, far outside of the scope of this discussion.

I have never understood all these claims on the Internet that women are looking for some specific qualities in men. Observing a large variety of couples, I can very confidently say that there is no such thing as "women want X". All that needs to happen for two people to get together is them being physically attracted to each other and having many similar values and interests. Heck, I knew a couple in which both did full time van-living: no money, no interest in intellectual pursuits, nothing. They met at some random campsite and decided to travel together for a bit, and the rest is history.

People who make "finding a girlfriend" into some kind of science are way overthinking it. People have been meeting each other and falling in love for millennia without any strategies or tricks. The problem today is that a lot of people have extremely poor social skills by nature of being surrounded by technology and living in virtual worlds, so for them finding a "real girlfriend" or a "real boyfriend" sounds like some kind of a fantasy story... But just going outside and starting to socialize will teach anyone quickly that members of the opposite sex are the same walking mammals as them and there is nothing special about forming romantic relationships with them.

Look around. People of all kinds are married and have kids: extremely obese people, extremely short people, extremely poor people, extremely sick people, even people in prisons... You do not need to have a 6-pack, or cite Plato frequently, or have a billion in the bank to find your special one. What you do need is to clear the rubble that the virtual space fills people's minds with and go out there in the world and meet new people, one of which will be the one.

Two wrongs do not make right. Tariffs, when their effects are properly tracked, are nothing more than a tax on domestic traders: it is an illusion that a tariff imposed on another country forces that country's taxpayers to pay it, and not a single serious economist takes this vision seriously. Suppose the EU does impose a 10% tariff on American car imports - and this tariff harms both European traders (who would love to pay less to import American cars) and American automakers (who suffer from a reduced European demand on their cars). What does the US imposing a "retaliatory" tariff do? It exacerbates the issue on both sides. These tariffs do not cancel out each other - they sum up and make the problem worse.

Again, all serious economists - even the ones supporting Trump - agree with that. The latter just, for some bizarre reason, tend to assume that Trump plays some kind of 3-dimensional Go game the ultimate purpose of which is to get other countries to lift off their tariffs. Well, how has it worked so far? How did it work in his first term? There is no 3-dimensional Go thing going on here; there is just a crazy old man who does not understand basic economics. Biden did not understand it either, to be fair - but, at least, Biden was not as petty as to shake fists and threaten old allies.

I think Trump's first term was mediocre - better than both Obama's terms and the Biden's term, but not much better... His second term, on the other hand, is some kind of a perpetual tantrum: the guy has gone completely off the rails. I will go as far as to say that this is the worst presidential performance I have seen anywhere in the developed world over the past 20 years.

It seems to me that ultimately morality of someone's economical behavior is determined not by how wealthy they get, but by the relationship between them and their partners. When I buy a Tesla, I voluntarily choose to part with a large amount of money, because the value of the Tesla for me is higher than the value of keeping that money in the bank or spending it on something else - and Elon Musk delivers my Tesla as promised and gets richer, for he values the profit he gets from his stocks growing higher than he values one of his thousands of Tesla's. If Elon Musk gets rich by doing this, then he is not doing anything wrong in my book. It is another matter when Elon Musk gets into the government and uses his friendship with Trump to push through proposals that harm competitors of Tesla and advantage Tesla and Musk personally.

But a better question is this: what is the source of the latter? Is it that billionaires are somehow intrinsically corrupt and inevitably use their money to buy up political power? I do not see how this can be the case: even if all billionaires were intrinsically corrupt, in a good political system any attempt by them to bribe someone would result in their incarceration.

A more plausible explanation was provided by Friedrich Hayek in his "Road to Serfdom". The source is the fact that the government is the only organization in the country that has a legal power to coerce individuals. This is where corruption originates. There is no corruption on a free market where all transactions are voluntary and anyone can walk away from an interaction they dislike. But when the system is more akin to a "king of the hill" game where whoever gets into this exclusive club of political players gets to force others into interactions they do not want to partake in - and have the law on their side - then everyone who has enough resources will do their best to befriend the king, or, even better, take his place.

Which is why the economy should be separated from the government. It should be impossible to buy any political favors legally, and for that, in turn, it is essential that the government is extremely limited. When the government is nothing more than a guardsman against coercion and violence, then there is absolutely nothing to gain for me or anyone else from buying "political credit". Being in the government actually would be more of a burden than an advantage, and only people who genuinely wanted to do good in the society - at the expense of their time and money - would be interested in pursuing a political career or proactively interacting with the government.

A lot of things are conflated in this discussion... Multiple statements may be true at the same time, and stating them does not imply having any particular bias. It is likely true that there have been a lot of "minority scientists" whose contributions to science were overstated for political and social reasons - and it is also demonstrably true that there have been countless "minority scientists" of objectively high level. There are women in science who get gender-exclusive grants and conference invitations, giving them advantage compared to men - and many of them would have done nearly as well as they did even without these grants and invitations.

On the West currently there is clearly a massive effort to put as many "minority groups" into the university system and academia as possible, the result of which is noticeable drop in academic and scientific performance of the average student: whether someone likes it or not, looking for a kid that can succeed at Harvard in a ghetto of suburban Detroit is a fool's errand. I am strongly against that: I think that all individuals should be treated equally by default, and group identity should not be a serious factor in admissions, grant distributions, etc.

At the same time, some of the minority-related problems are quite real. Women are not discriminated in academic physics or mathematics nearly as much as many feminists claim they are - but some discrimination does take place and is visible. To pretend that this problem does not exist at all or has been fully solved is to play a silly political game. Furthermore, in many areas of the world the discrimination is much worse: you will find far fewer women in academia in Russia or Iran than you will in the US or the UK, and not because women in those countries are magically less interested in science. There is certainly a space for some discussion to be had, and even if you - as I do - advocate for equal treatment of everyone, talking about the problem does not hurt anyone.

I am quite disappointed by lack of nuance in modern mainstream discussions of this kind. It is always one extreme against the other. Either women in science are almost slaves, or they are treated 100% equal to men and any attempt to even mention the topic makes one a "woke leftist". The reality is almost always somewhere in the middle, and without a rational discussion it is impossible to determine where exactly.

From the purely short-term-consequentialist perspective, and assuming the unrealistic scenario in which I knew at that time that this baby would become Hitler unless I killed him right there, and assuming I could get away with it - it would make sense to kill him. But these are some strong assumptions to make.

Even worse, the purely short-term-consequentialist perspective is extremely limited. First, what would it do to my psychology, to kill an (at the moment) innocent baby with my own hands? I might have ended up messed up for the rest of my life, and the fact that I have prevented some terrible atrocities would not have made up for that. Second, what kind of person would I become if I decided that killing someone harmless at the moment in the name of the "greater good" is justifiable?

Other minor problems have not been mentioned by anyone I know, but they are still there. How do I know that, by killing Hitler, I am not condemning Germany to someone else using the chaos of 1929-1933 to further his agenda - perhaps, someone far worse than Hitler? How do I know that the Soviets will not overtake Germany and the entire continent subsequently, causing even worse atrocities than what the Germans under Hitler did? And so on, and so on, and so on.

I think that people who instinctively jump to the positive answer - "Of course I would kill a baby Hitler" - have not thought the matter through well enough. Most choices in life are not just about one specific outcome: they propagate through one's entire life, even the entire world sometimes. Something as minor as indulging in a pizza at a party when being strongly committed to a healthy diet may become the difference between sticking to the diet, and remaining a sad chubby boy for the rest of one's life. Something as major as killing a baby? Well...