For today, sure. People act like 365 days is long enough to change consumer spending habits, and onshore production facilities that took years to offshore.
If tariffs are held strong, there will be two possible outcomes:
1) Domestic production will be increased (via American businesses as well as onshoring foreign businesses), providing jobs and ultimately lower-cost products
2) International tariffs will be decreased across the board - resulting in a more level field for American businesses to compete in foreign nations
Few realize American goods have been tariffed internationally for decades, resulting in a difficult-or-impossible business climate for American businesses.
The situation is akin to Wall Street's infamous short-term outcome favorability. Tariffs are a long-term game, and people have to be willing to trade some short-term outcomes for the long-term economic health of America and it's businesses (and jobs, wages, etc).
Reduced competition is a near-term affect. Demand will remain constant (or increase) for goods, so businesses will open and compete over the long-term. In the future it will be cheaper to purchase domestically produced goods vs. import them from half a world away...
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - nothing you have said is incorrect. Given the parent comments my guess is that it's because you're speaking in purely economic terms and not grounded in political ideology.
why would I agree to that when I'm not at risk of that? (Assume for discussion I have had this tested - whatever it is). I have my own life and like everyone more things (including vacation...) I want to spend it money on than I have money.
Some of us think that a key aspect of society is that we take care of each other. If something terrible happens to you before you manage to amass a fortune, it’s nice to live in a society that won’t leave your family destitute.
True, but reductio ad absurdum is a good way to make any argument look silly without actually considering nuance. Of course, there's some limit to what society will do to save an individual. If someone is lost at sea, we'll try to save them, but we won't spend $1T rerouting all of our available naval capabilities to do it. How much should we spend? The math isn't clear, and thus the economics aren't clear. But, where we should fall is somewhere on a gradient between "Every man for himself" and "Save every individual at all costs."
The question is, where do we fall on that gradient?
Some of us don't like paying for other people who make objectively bad decisions that cause them to need to be bailed out in some way.
There's nothing wrong with taking care of others, but there has to be limits. Hopefully the limits are designed in ways that encourage objectively good choices and discourage objectively bad ones.
Things are not that simple. Spending money on the toys/experiences I want also increases my community. As does investing in the future. Helping the poor does increase society as well, but it isn't clear which investment helps society the most (there is no one correct answer).
Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.
I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.
A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.
The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.
Food supply is something I though about but the problem is that we put a lot of it in storage and it's never clear how much because sellers may want to wait until markets are more favorable.
With modern technology/knowledge, we have a lot of high-density calories lying around, in the form of grains, potatoes, oils, etc.
It might be possible to get a rough picture tracking the perishables that are often animal products but poor countries don't use a lot of it because, well, they are poor. So it makes everything very complicated.
> Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.
I used to not mind my kids watching Youtube on the home TV, but lately when I walk by they are doom scrolling one short after the other. I tell them not to watch shorts, but a day later I walk by and they are back to doom scrolling. I'm finally forced to remove Youtube from the TV. On the phone, Instagram is the same way, I see my teenager doom scrolling it quite often. They claim it helps them relax.
They have a good price on take out pizza. Unlimited toppings, and with Prime membership it's $8 something for a large pizza. It was probably their loss leader to get people in the store. I felt like the store was usually pretty empty when I was there. I wonder if Amazon will keep Whole Foods too.
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
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