Voroxpete @ Voroxpete @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

This is why these "zero for zero" offers are going to go absolutely nowhere.

By their own admission, the administration is simply inventing these numbers for "tariffs applied against the US". What they are, in actually, is the US trade deficit against that country as a percentage.

But the thing is, you're never going see an even trade balance between the US and Vietnam while still having trade between those countries, because nothing made in the US is affordable to the average person living in Vietnam.

The only way to get that fictional "tariffs applied against the US" number down to zero is for Vietnam to stop all exports to the US. That means that a whole lot of clothes, electronics and other consumer goods will need to be made in the US instead of being made in Vietnam.

No version of this works out well for Vietnam, and even for the US it either involves prices increasing to reflect the higher average wages and cost of living in the US, or US wages decreasing to the point where you've basically got all these goods being made by utterly impoverished workers in American sweat shops.

I'm not going to say that American consumers exploiting poorer Vietnamese workers to subsidize their own cost of living is a morally good system, but it sure is one that was working pretty well for the average American consumer.

It's also worth noting that even the administration's own formula assumes a tariff pass through rate of 25%. Obviously this is much, much lower than the 95% Cavallo calculates, but even taking the administration's numbers as being accurate, they're still saying that prices will rise by 25% of the tariff rate.

The average weighted global tariff across all affected goods is now 40%. By Cavallo's numbers that means a 38% average increase in the price of all imported goods. But even by the administration's incredibly sunny numbers, they're still saying that all prices on imported goods will rise by at least an average of 10%. That's, effectively, a new 10% tax on most of what you buy.

(Also, because of how much of what the US buys comes from China, that 40% weighted average will go higher if Trump applies additional tariffs on China, as they apparently intend to, to the order of over 100%)

This guy gets it. Maybe one of the only Democrats that does, sadly.

Insanely bad idea. You should not be honebrewing anything with the capacity to kill people.

Not that Tesla's solution is any safer, but that's a separate discussion.

In Soviet Canuckistan, moose rides you

Actually this is hitting Russian markets too. And Putin is apparently not happy about this talk of annexing Greenland either.

This is the selfhosted community; Who are you training? In most cases there's literally only one person who would ever need SSH access to this server. Maybe two or three in a tiny handful of cases, but anyone who can't figure out Netbird in 30 seconds absolutely should not be accessing anything via SSH.

And you've clearly never used Netbird, Tailscale, or any similar service, if you think that update, maintenance and config constitute any kind of meaningful burden, especially for something as simple as remote access to a VPS.

We're in selfhosted. If you have to bring up use cases that are in no way relevant to 99% of self hosters to justify your argument, you don't have an argument.

A lot of things are "fine", but the cost of adding Netbird to your VPS is effectively zero, whether counted in dollars, time, or convenience.

Given the massive security benefits of using a VPN, and the lack of any meaningful downside to doing so, you'd be an idiot not to.

And mine. Clearly one of us is better at it.

You seem like a fan of the "pull out" method.

This is the correct answer. Never expose your SSH port on the public web, always use a VPN. Tailscale, Netmaker or Netbird make it piss easy to connect to your VPS securely, and because they all use NAT traversal you don't have to open any ports in your firewall.

Combine this with configuring UFW on the server (in addition to the firewall from the VPS provider - layered defence is king) and Fail2Ban. SSH keys are also a good idea. And of course disable root SSH just in case.

With a multi-layered defence like this you will be functionally impervious to brute force attacks. And while each layer of protection may have an undiscovered exploit, it will be unlikely that there are exploits to bypass every layer simultaneously (Note for the pendants; I said "unlikely", not "impossible". No defence is perfect).

IIRC, Apple moved most of their manufacturing back to the US. If not, substitute some other US made product, it's really not essential to my point.

And yes, Trump's idea is to force it to happen, but that just doesn't work. You can't magically create a market for America trucks in Vietnam, because they simply do not have the money to buy those trucks. The only way to change that is to make Vietnamese people much wealthier, or American trucks much, much cheaper. No amount of "gunpoint" will change that fact. It's like expecting to make a million dollars by mugging a stranger in the poorest part of town; no amount of threat or force can make people hand over money they don't have.

Which is generally very good evidence that it's an effective strategy. If it didn't work, they wouldn't be complaining.

A - Read the rest of the article. He addresses this.

B - I think it's a reasonable description. As the author says, it's a stupid, bad plan, but its more or less coherent, in the sense that there's a basic A+B=C logic to it. He's primarily contrasting this with the absolute incoherence of the execution.

Well, one half of Congress has. The Senate actually voted to strike down the declared state of emergency in regard to the tariffs on Canada, but the House is refusing to take up the vote on their side.

Can they even do this? What leverage does CA have here? Presumably any goods imported into the state would be subject to US tariffs because those are imposed at the Federal level, so it's not like Newsom can offer to exempt other countries imports from tariffs if they're bound for California.

Well, OK, in one sense he could, but he'd literally have to direct officials in California to defy US federal law, and possibly get into direct conflict with Federal agents operating in the state, right?

Assuming he's not going to do that, how does this play work? What does he offer in return for other countries exempting CA from their counter tariffs?

Also, how is this not a stepping stone towards an independent California? (I strongly suspect the answer to that last question is "it is, end of answer")

It really doesn't. You're just describing the "fancy" part of "fancy autocomplete." No one was ever really suggesting that they only predict the next word. If that was the case they would just be autocomplete, nothing fancy about it.

What's being conveyed by "fancy autocomplete" is that these models ultimately operate by combining the most statistically likely elements of their dataset, with some application of random noise. More noise creates more "creative" (meaning more random, less probable) outputs. They do not actually "think" as we understand thought. This can clearly be seen in the examples given in the article, especially to do with math. The model is throwing together elements that are statistically proximate to the prompt. It's not actually applying a structured, logical method the way humans can be taught to.

I've heard a few different theories about big plays that might be the intent here, and they all fall down on that same basic problem; The US, doesn't have the reliability or the leverage to make it work. That's not saying that the theories are bad - they're all plausible enough - just that no matter what the White House thinks their play is here, it won't work because no one has enough incentive to play nice with them. The US no longer has the economic dominance needed to force these kinds of changes, and they're too unreliable a partner for anyone to willingly enter a a long term arrangement with them.

But then I suppose none of this is surprising when you look at Trump's business dealings. He's never understood any way of operating other than being an unreliable partner and screwing everyone around you, and it's why his businesses all failed. He's never understood the value in being a reliable partner.

Ironically, this would largely achieve Trump's goal of lowering America's trade deficits. A big reason why America runs such deep deficits is because the strength of the dollar makes it less attractive to buy from the US, but the dollar never weakens because it's the global reserve.

Of course, when OPEC discussed moving away from the dollar Trump lost his shit, so it's not like this is his actual plan. There's no 5D chess here, they're all idiots. Nor would intentionally devaluing the dollar to increase US exports be a smart idea, but it is something that has been seriously proposed by one of Trump's economic advisors.