It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the region.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this. It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

To this point, I’ll restate that there is competition for profit (not in a single market but profit making overall) and therefore state control between billionaires since state control modulates profits. What tariffs are good for some are bad for others. E.g. lumber tariffs are great for the lumber industry billionaires but bad for the construction ones due to increased cost of lumber. They both compete for making profit because if say lumber makes a lot more than construction for a while, they could buy construction. Cross-industry consolidation happens all the time. So when a billionaire doesn’t want tariffs but there are tariffs anyway - then it probably wasn’t their call. Instead it’s either the call of another, or an uninfluenced politician. I think the latter is an endangered species given how much billionaires spend on lobbying and I don’t think it’s a more complicated explanation. In fact given how capital-intensive political campaigns are, the existence of an uninfluenced politician that rose to a position of power where they got to set industry tariffs might be more complex. Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

To be clear I am not excluding ideology entirely, I think the owner class is a much bigger driver, including significantly driving the ideology of the day at a given place and time.

E: In the hypothetical where the tariff-profiting lumber billionaire buys construction, their attitude towards tatiffs may change depending on how the profit maximization formula works now that they own both lumber and construction. It may turn out that getting rid of the lumber tariffs yields higher profits overall, in which case that billionaire and the politicians who represent them would become anti-tariff.

Lots of US and EU billionaires are working in deep cooperation with China. Tesla’s, Apple’s, NVIDIA’s (until they got cut off recently), Ford’s, VW’s, and many many others. Heck, Taiwan’s billionaires are all-in with China. There is however an intra-class competition for profits. If Elon was able to buy up all the major American and Chinese companies and collect profits from them, he would. Their current owners wouldn’t like that. My claim is that this is the major driver behind what sometimes appears as ideological or geographical misalignment. Depending on who’s billionaire political reps get in power, there’s a “shift in ideology” which serves to legitimize the state promoting that billionaire’s interests.

“EU is too far left. It’s overregulating AI and not paying its fair share for NATO” - an ideologically structured message that translates to Big Tech and the American MIC currently own this government. They want access to the EU market for cloud services and they want the EU to buy more weapons. If you pay close attention you could even catch how the ideological disagreements change depending on the state of negotiations.

At the same time this class works to reduce the share of profits labour gets among other class war fights anywhere they operate since that’s a common interest. Another common interest is not paying taxes. Or offloading negative externalities on the working class.

I recall recently when the EU decided to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs, VW started lobbying against the tariffs. I was initially baffled. VW said that the tariffs, protecting EU workers, many of which VW workers, would hurt VW’s bottom line because of expected losses in China, due to likely counter-tariffs. Think about that. There’s no Western values VW cares about. They’re ready to throw out meausres that would save their European factories in order to keep their Chinese factories running and selling product. They act internationally and prioritize cooperation with whichever jurisdicrion yields the highest profits. In this case cooperating with China and their Chinese competitors.

This is why leftists and unionists say that labour organization has to work internationally to be truly effective. Because the owner class cooperates across borders.

For me, this theory of the world has given me explanations with fewer contradictions and significantly better predictions. That’s a sign of a good theory and I’m sticking with it until it breaks. 😊

Yup. I opted for mininally computerized Whirlpool based on some of his stuff in 2020. Mainly because they’re simple and there’s plenty of parts and repair people who can fix them in Canada.

Yup. This idea of geographical, ideological alignments or lack thereof between blocs or countries entirely misses what’s actually going on. It’s why it’s rarely revealing and it fails to create useful predictions. Instead I find that looking at the owner class as acting against the working classes domestically and internationaly provides a much better picture of the world.

Geohot has always struck me as a bit of a blowhard.

Or maybe she’s just incompetent. But maybe you’re right.

Interesting. Thanks!

Is there actual science to predict IQ based on genes?

But the top 20% can still spend. That number is going to drop off a cliff when the stock market tumbles, and the spending with it.

If you look at the history of capitalism you could observe the stage where capitalism does put profits into R&D is temporary. Eventually capitalists reach enough power that lets them generate profts without significant reinvestment and instead spend them on luxury goods. Happened in the late 19th/early 20th century. It’s happening now as well. In-between that there was a massive state intervention that took significant economic power from capitalist class and put it into the state. The period when capitalism worked well for the majority was a deviation from the mean. Relevant.

Chromium was created by the KDE community which needed HTML rendering in… the 90s? Then it was taken up by MS competitors who wanted to make a rival of Internet Explorer and they “created” WebKit. Nokia, Apple, BlackBerry, later Google and many others contributed to WebKit which became Safari and eventually Chrome. At one point Google broke off from that codebase to create Blink.

I’ll give you that you’ve got a decent narrative and I wouldn’t have objected much if Google was the “Don’t be evil” company it used to be in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Which is also when they acquired Danger and released their src as Android. We’re not in that world anymore. I don’t give a flying fuck where the innovation is because I can rely on GCC being here 50 years from now, when the current corporate players be long gone.

Again, I really wish we lived in 2015 when people (and I) trusted Google enough to make it trivial for me to advocate for their projects and products.

For sure. I’m considering corpo software as a liability by definition.

Right, cause the US wants to grab it instead and then “invest it.” At this point either the EU takes or the US will.

Kinda. But also kinda not. The cost of getting a phone made has decreased and there are many, many manufacturers who can make one for you these days. From that perspective, if you have small niche where people are alright with paying a bit of a premium, it may in fact be easier to make a phone for them than say in 2012.

The total device cost will be 499 EUR or 599~699 EUR as the “normal” price with the voucher deducting from the phone’s cost if/when available.

This price for a low volume device would have been completely unachievable in 2012.

They knew they could be overlords and were that before The Great Depression too. We are just surpassing the level of wealth inequality that was reached prior to the system collapsing back then. What followed in the 40s and 50s was an abnormal period created by the implementation of a significant number of socialist policies that stemmed the desire for blood by the disposessed masses. These fuckers have been working to dismantle them ever since. If we find a formula that allows for such reforms to stick for longer than several decades, that would be nice. There’s good reasons for skepticism though.

Steve still doesn’t quite see that this is the capitalist system working as intended - serving the owner (capitalist) class, but he’s definitely getting radicalized by the current reality of it.

It kinda is, and it kinda isn’t. It’s got US-like federal powers in some respects but it lacks them in others.

Yeah. Cause Trump is using tariffs to coerce favourable EU policy for American corporations. Make the regulation changes exclude foreign firms and watch Trump screech about 100% tariffs on EU imports.

It’s still informative. His other stuff is good too.

Good vid but he’s falling a bit for the corporate propaganda that costs determine prices and that consumers have real power over price setting. Most firms maximize prices while minimizing costs. Consumers have especially little market power in a consolidated market like home appliances.