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1,825
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Oh, to be clear, I don't think the US has been dethroned on the world stage in terms of being the largest single elephant in the room. It's just that the weight between the US elephant and all the other elephants (combined) has evened out quite a lot.

    These tariffs might well do a lot to swing that even further.

  • Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.

  • Ok. The bottom line is, either it "won't do all that much"-- meaning it won't affect prices, it won't affect the economy, it'll be basically useless--or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The "disastrously expensive for ordinary people" is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it's the mechanism by which the plan operates.

    There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.

    Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out.

  • 125% agreed. I was responding only to "If it's clogged, you'd know beforehand when you look in the bowl." I think there's potentially an engineering solution--a fluid dynamics engineering solution--but definitely not an app.

  • They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don't or can't. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.

  • Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don't even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.

    I'd prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that's beyond my meager skills.