Donald Trump

[stevebrooks]

And, Wisconsin Supreme Court election, wasn't just a win for Democrats, was a landslide!

58.1 to Dem, 41.9 to Rep, good news indeed!

Also while the Reps won in 2 district election in Florida, the Dems cut the expected winning margins hugely. Mind you these were seats that were always expected to go Republican, huge margins in both Presidential and District elections basically forever. While these went Repub, as expected, swings were in the order of 20% towards dems, that's huge by any standard, most districts are won by far less than 10% either way so a 20% shift on a deep red district, that's got to be scary to the GOP.

[pipbarber]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -democrats

I spent some time watching bits of Brooker's marathon. In retrospect i think it was brilliant. The symbolic start of the DNC resistance perhaps.

Anyway, the dried orange idiot is currently liberating americans from their need to buy stuff. Oh...34% tariff on Chinese goods! LOL. I didn't catch the Mexican tariff - somewhere between 10-49%.

I suspect that many will be liberated from their capacity to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, along with just about everything else.

[two dogs]

...
Anyway, the dried orange idiot is currently liberating americans from their need to buy stuff. Oh...34% tariff on Chinese goods! LOL. I didn't catch the Mexican tariff - somewhere between 10-49%.
...

He claims that he's generously only tariffing "countries" half of what they're "tariffing" the USA. So, his 34% tariff on Chinese goods is in retaliation to his claim of China's 67% tariff on goods from the USA.

I thought that China imposing a 67% tariff was unbelievably high, and it seems my thinking was correct.

Several individuals have analysed the figures, and it appears that the claimed "tariffs" imposed by a country are calculated as:

The US trade deficit with that country, divided by US imports from that country, expressed as a percentage, and hence does not represent actual tariffs.

e.g.
The EU has a $235.6 billion trade surplus, with $605 billion of exports; 235.6/605.8 = 39%, which matches the figure on his chart.

Jesus fuckin' Christ, he's too fuckin' stupid to come up with that himself, but I expect he believes the figures he's been fed. It's probably the doing of his Commerce Secretary Howard Nutlick Lutnick, but why in the fuck would you do that?

[stevebrooks]

...
Anyway, the dried orange idiot is currently liberating americans from their need to buy stuff. Oh...34% tariff on Chinese goods! LOL. I didn't catch the Mexican tariff - somewhere between 10-49%.
...

He claims that he's generously only tariffing "countries" half of what they're "tariffing" the USA. So, his 34% tariff on Chinese goods is in retaliation to his claim of China's 67% tariff on goods from the USA.

I thought that China imposing a 67% tariff was unbelievably high, and it seems my thinking was correct.

Several individuals have analysed the figures, and it appears that the claimed "tariffs" imposed by a country are calculated as:

The US trade deficit with that country, divided by US imports from that country, expressed as a percentage, and hence does not represent actual tariffs.

e.g.
The EU has a $235.6 billion trade surplus, with $605 billion of exports; 235.6/605.8 = 39%, which matches the figure on his chart.

Jesus fuckin' Christ, he's too fuckin' stupid to come up with that himself, but I expect he believes the figures he's been fed. It's probably the doing of his Commerce Secretary Howard Nutlick Lutnick, but why in the fuck would you do that?

Now work out how they came to the tariff for Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French overseas territory that now has a claimed tariff rate of 99%! Trump has generously discounted his retaliatory tariff to 50%. They export 3.4m worth of goods to the US and only import $100,000, fuck that's than one cybertruck, think about that for a moment, if they had purchased a single large car from the US that's what the tariff is based on! It's very likely they don't have any tariff at all on the US because, I mean, what industry do they have to protect that the US might try and take over?

There's a chart here, table 1, that calculates the actual tariff as opposed to the Trump Admin calculation, using WTO Trade Weighted calculations, you know, actual calculations and not made up voodoo! The actual tariff rate which they have calculated for the European Union is 2.7, if they had used that and then halved it well no-one would even noticed the effect and probably no-one would have complained, the markets wouldn't even have blipped, they could work with that, but no, they had to make their own shit up. Australia for the record is actually at 2.5%, not 10%, you can tell it's all shit because they have a baseline based on, well, nothing at all. Brazil, which has a trading surplus with the US, they actually import more from the US than they export therefore they should be getting negative tariffs according to the Trump calculations, are being hit with a 10% tariff.

https://www.cato.org/blog/more-about-tr ... al-tariffs

https://imgur.com/gallery/everyones-tal ... er-bxjkCsT

[pipbarber]

True stupidtopia. The tariff on Heard Island for 'machinery and electrical' products is the most hilarious, in my view. I say that simply because i have an interest in things Heard Island due to it being such an important ocean bird breeding site as well as home to penguins and other unique wildlife. No one lives there, it has zero permanent residents, as we all know.

Put aside the batshit formula they used, invented out of thin, to make these calculations and consider why there was no one to double check any of this? No one available to make sure that listing Heard Island or Norfolk island (zero exports to the US but a 19% tariff) was right? No one to raise the case of Saint Pierre and Miquelon and maybe question how it looks to place a tariff on a $3 million trade deficit? No one at all?

Do you think that maybe working for this administration is a career killer, and anyone with any actual competence is running a mile?

[stevebrooks]

True stupidtopia. The tariff on Heard Island for 'machinery and electrical' products is the most hilarious, in my view. I say that simply because i have an interest in things Heard Island due to it being such an important ocean bird breeding site as well as home to penguins and other unique wildlife. No one lives there, it has zero permanent residents, as we all know.

Put aside the batshit formula they used, invented out of thin, to make these calculations and consider why there was no one to double check any of this? No one available to make sure that listing Heard Island or Norfolk island (zero exports to the US but a 19% tariff) was right? No one to raise the case of Saint Pierre and Miquelon and maybe question how it looks to place a tariff on a $3 million trade deficit? No one at all?

Do you think that maybe working for this administration is a career killer, and anyone with any actual competence is running a mile?

From what I understand ChatGPT was used to calculate the tariffs, so keep in mind this is what an AI run future will look like.

Now as to illegal stuff, remember that Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ole Musky tried to rig by offering $1 million to two randomly chosen recipients who could prove they voted for the Republican candidate, it appears that not only was it election interference, strangely enough the two winners actually worked for Musky, so it was illegal and rigged so ordinary Wisconsinites never had a chance of winning!

https://imgur.com/gallery/was-always-scam-xbkOxto

[stylofone]

From what I understand ChatGPT was used to calculate the tariffs, so keep in mind this is what an AI run future will look like.

I also read a comment suggesting that whatever "process" was used, it tried to apply the formula not to countries, but to regions assigned a top level domain internet suffix. I checked the the list against TLDs and it seems to check out.

The uninhabited penguin colony on Trump's AI gibberish tariff list has been assigned the .hm TLD for Heard Island and McDonald Islands.

Likewise Curacao, which has .cw, but is administered by the Netherlands.

Svalbard and Jan Mayan (.sj) seems to be a peculiarity of internet domains, because Jan Mayan is an uninhabited volcanic island. Really only Svalbard has any relevance even though it is officially part of Norway. In fact the .sj TLD is not even used, they just use .no in Svalbard if they want to use a domain which looks local.

And Norfolk Island has .nf, so it is on the tariff list.

[stylofone]

Anther bit of trivia about the tariff madness...

The non-countries were included on a list circulated to media outlets and tweeted by the White House, but the silliness seems to have been left off the executive order itself, so if Norfolk Island, or the Heard Island penguins ever develop a thriving export industry with customers in the US, they should just cop the same 10% tariff Australia has, but I suppose it is possible that the White House communications could still be used to justify any anti-penguin reciprocal actions.

Also the official executive order retains more than enough stupidity which will have a far greater impact on places like Cambodia, a poor country being singled out for arbitrary punishment by the richest nation in the world.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump ... -penguins/

[stevebrooks]

Well, chances of recession in the US this year, yes THIS YEAR, is now at 60%. I think I saw a video earlier about the last time the Republicans fucked up this badly, way back in the 30's when dems took control and basically ran the country for 60 years. Following that period, long enough for most people to forget I am thinking, from 1993, the Republicans came back and then started the cycle of Republican disaster followed by Democrat recovery etc, but each time the Republican disaster was worse and harder for the dems to recover, until finally we get Trump, history repeating itself?

It's very likely if the US survives there will be another long period where dem's control everything for decades, but that is predicated on the US surviving, kicking out Trump and the Republicans should follow on from there. The damage is so severe this time that even surviving as the US is in doubt, but that's simply because of the globalisation. The world was starting to become a more cohesive unit, all working together, but them's the breaks I guess. It's remarkable that it's only taken one idiot to bring it all down. Oh I know the MAGA, but they were in fact always there, like racists and others, they don't simply vanish, they have to be educated out of the system and that can take many years.

https://imgur.com/gallery/obama-advisor ... ng-3lTGryP

[stevebrooks]

Ah right, remember the Trump admin gutted FEMA and USAID, the disaster recovery agencies, and as a result couldn't dispatch any teams at all to help with the big quake in Myanmar? When criticised for this abandonment of people in need they said they sent a team of 3 coordinators who had everything under controls, well guess who just got fired, while sleeping rough in the quake zone while trying to help, yes you guessed it, the only 3 people sent to Myanmar:

BANGKOK, April 5 (Reuters) - Three U.S. aid workers were laid off while in Myanmar helping the rescue and recovery from the country's massive earthquake, a former senior staffer said, as the Trump administration's dismantling of foreign aid affects its disaster response.
After travelling to the Southeast Asian nation, the three officials were told late this week they would be let go, Marcia Wong, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usaid- ... 025-04-05/