hckrnws

I'm not sure even Tesla unambiguously qualifies here. Looking at the NHTSA part 583 list for 2025 [0], none of the Tesla vehicles have a "US" content higher than 75% (which I think includes Canada?). The highest is the base Kia EV6 at 80%. This seems to be coming from the Kogod manufacturing index. That's a more qualitative ranking that attempts to deal with things like corporate structures rather than just origin like the NHTSA numbers.

As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.

[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...

My immediate assumption was that Tesla lies and probably has more offshore content than most of their competitors.

I'd just assume they picked whatever definitions they needed to make Tesla exempt.

This is the way.

Maybe it is just a coincidence

Exactly, corruption is legal. Only your competitors will be fined.

Give the U.S. ten years and "clientelism" will have become a household word.

I thought "lobbying" is already a household word :)

I don't think lobbying implies your rep having a bedroom in White House.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Bedroom_for_contributo...

And perhaps "state capture", which is a term I first heard from South Africans.

Edit: incidentally, only mentioning SA as academics there developed the theory around it, to the best of my knowledge.

Yep. 3 Months ago:

> The implicit justification for valuing Tesla now is not "we sell good cars", it is state capture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43023325

Indeed I also heard it in context of South Africa. But Wikipedia also has other, earlier examples too.

[dead]

Interesting assumption, but unfortunately it is a wrong assumption.

That's a strange assumption to make. Most other auto OEMs are basically just final assembly plants with parts shipped in from everywhere. Tesla makes way more parts farther down their supply chain directly in their own factories. Ford, GM and the rest for example aren't designing and populating their own circuit boards.

>Tesla makes way more parts farther down their supply chain directly in their own factories.

Sure but all of the inputs and components to those parts come from other countries. I suppose it depends on how you define terms.

Sounds like a poor assumption on an audited fact.

Interesting, does the proportion by weight, size, value or count? eg a EV battery could be 25% of the weight, 50% of the cost and 0.01% of the number of parts.

Items that contain multiple elements get the highest tariff rate of any of them - a glass window with aluminum frame gets the aluminum rate because it’s the highest one.

But how do you determine where to divide objects into components?

There's a much more informative article here. [1]

It's by value. And it's not just domestic only but USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada). And the tariffs are seemingly prorated by percent 'domestic' (their example math is nonsensical, but I think that was just a math fail on the writer's part) with numerous relief and rebate options available to help ease in the transition period for various auto manufacturers.

GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.

[1] - https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/trump-eases-auto-tariffs-l...

> GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.

Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours, I’m not so sure I read too much into anyone praising the policies of this government as it’s clear that companies are erring on the side of staying on this governments good graces publicly regardless of personal opinions.

Wouldn't that be actually good thing for supporting local manufacturing and local buying, if customers could easily see which products are expensive because they are imported and which ones are expensive because they are locally made ?

> Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours...

The facts:

   - There was a report that Amazon was going to begin showing prices
   - Amazon clarified that was for their low-cost Amazon Haul site, not their main one
   - The White House griped about them at a press briefing
   - There were reports Trump called Bezos

Amazon has backed off on doing it for Haul after Trump’s press secretary publicly flamed them invoking a direct conversation with him:

> “The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said in a statement. “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”

> Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during the call and “he solved the problem very quickly.” He added that Bezos is “a good guy.”

If this had already started being leaked to the press I doubt that it “wasn’t going to happen” and was likely past exec review at that point. Then Trump calls Bezos and Bezos overrules the team and PR damage control as if this was some rogue action. Of course it’s pure speculation but it fits the timeline of events we know about better and we know this administration is a completely unreliable narrator as evidenced time and time again (from Trump continuing to lie claiming a photoshopped photo with ms13 overlayed was actually his tattoos to claiming he’s spoken to the Chinese leader with China disputing that any conversations have been had)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/amazon-considers-displaying-...

"Leaked to the press" meaning one membership-based newsletter targeting DC insiders.

> Of course it’s pure speculation

This is what I was taking issue with.

And also, please don't do the currently en vogue thing of mentioning something unrelated to buttress an argument against Trump.

There's plenty of on-topic fuckups from this administration that you don't need to do the Fox News-style "and what about..." emotion bait.

The Great Leader does not lie. Reality itself is in the wrong.

The only murky thing is how far Amazon was in implementing it, but there is no doubt that the White House reacted furiously to it. This is a very sensitive issue for them, and companies should be aware that Trump is willing to make their lives very difficult if they show this information.

Up next, a mysterious small company appears, releasing the AMAzing Plugin, that allows to compute the tarif addition on amazon.com. Totally unrelated

Released yesterday: https://github.com/mergd/amzn-tariff

How do you go from:

1. White House uses machinery of state to force the hand of private enterprise to hide impact of tariffs on prices.

2. Private enterprise acquiesces.

to "The whole thing is murky at best"?

It's pretty clear fascism to me. From wikipedia (while they are allowed to exist): "centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition".

Using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" is a rather hyperbolic way of describing a phone call. I do agree in general that the government should be much more strongly separated from private enterprise than it is, but a phone call to exert pressure is a ridiculously low standard of governmental pressure, not even just objectively but also what we've seen over the past several years in completely systemic practice.

> hyperbolic way of describing a phone call

A phone call is a bit of a coward way to describe the press secretary moaning about a hostile and political involvement of a (somehow) foreign government intervention to international journalists.

She was referencing this [1] article. And Amazon did indeed exactly what she said. They launched a side gig "Chinese Books", guided by the Chinese propaganda arm NPPA, at the behest of China exclusively in order to further their reach and business in China. That, while complying with ever more onerous requests of the Chinese government including removing reviews for certain Chinese books, granting complete control of "their" cloud services in China to Chinese government approved companies, and so forth.

It creates a reasonable argument that Amazon will do basically anything to get some of that sweet Chinese $$$, which makes their unprecedented foray into politics (at a consumer facing level), in a way that would be completely beneficial to China, look particularly bad. This still has nothing to do with using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" or anything like that.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...

Wait, because Amazon followed the law in China while doing business in China, anything they do in the US that the Orangefuhrer doesn't like is..... something beneficial to China?

The claim was that Amazon wanted to display the added tax due to the tariff separately, which is what the white house histrionics were in response to. There is no indication that only Chinese imports would have been labelled. China is not the only country that Trumpet added tariffs on.

He relies on MAGAs not knowing what a tariff is. He wants to blame price rises on Biden - if it becomes too obvious that the buyer pays the tariffs, he would lose a lot more support.

The point is that Amazon wasn't doing it in the first place.

One has to be careful, with faced with opposition that ignores facts, not to succumb to the same debasement.

We all have speculation about what might have happened behind the scenes -- but it's just that, speculation.

Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.

Hyperbolic phrasing for effect errodes respect for reality, regardless of which side it comes from.

(I realize there's a 50/50 chance I'm going to get a whataboutism spiel in response to this, focusing on your fascism phrasing, and how you believe it is supported. I'd encourage you to take a beat and instead consider places you were reaching past what facts supported in your original phrasing.)

> Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.

Evaluating situations in a vacuum and sticking just to confirmed facts isn’t a hallmark of being considered and knowledgeable. One must also consider patterns of behavior and Trump pressuring Amazon to change a policy of both consistent with all of this. Facts in order of events:

* fact: News report that Amazon is going to show tariff impact on their Haul product

* fact: press secretary blasts Amazon in the news indicating she’s repeating a conversation she just had with Trump

* fact: Trump had a phone call with Bezos

* fact: Amazon puts out a clarifying statement they won’t be doing it.

* contradicting fact: Amazon claims they were never actually going to do it

* pattern: quid pro quo is how Trump operates. see the Ukraine call that got him an impeachment in the first term trying to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for weapons

* pattern: businesses and politicians being yes-men to Trump.

So facts + pattern = reasonable hypothesis of what happened. If you have contravening facts I’d love to hear them but you can’t just stick your fingers in your ear and pretend you have to have a confirmed fact before building a hypothesis of the likelihood of what happened.

It’s like trying to pretend Putin isn’t the one murdering dissident journalists or opposing politicians or trumping up fake charges.

I'm not referring to anything behind the scenes, I saw the press secretary intervention and I was embarrassed for America. It's as pathetic as the president complaining about "bad numbers". I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.

> I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.

Watching historical debates and speeches just makes me sad about the disparity with modern oratory.

Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.

So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.

Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.

Trump's twice election certainly makes a case for universal voting, but maybe different individual vote weights?

Basic stuff, like if you don't know what 5 - 1/4 equals or what cells are. If not, maybe you shouldn't have as loud a say in choosing political leadership?

Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.

This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]

And I see no clear solution to this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam

You take this 4.5 hour exam to prove you know how to do it: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-impossible-four-ho...

I feel like the real answer is "This is why trade negotiations take so long". But when you're making up policy on the fly, who knows?

Whatever the answer is, there is probably a lot of space for gaming that number. Once a metric becomes a target...

Why would Tesla bother to game it, when Musk has Trump on speed dial?

I don’t think business leaders generally respond to chaos like the rest of us: wait and see, and maybe some light prep work. Unless everyone else starts panicking most people won’t.

This administration is governing by executive action congruent with the pacing of news cycles. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, which makes it futile to make long term plans. No?

If the origins are so fuzzy, I guess other manufacturers would very soon adjust their part lists/part origins to avoid the tariff?

Fuzzy is a feature, not a flaw. It allows the president to unilaterally pick winner and losers.

Other manufacturers can do all sorts of things to try to be compliant, but ultimately the only way to be in compliance is to bend the knee.

They’re welcome to sue, but that could take years and millions to figure out.

Based on the previous comment, it sounds like the fuzziness well predates Trump.

Are you arguing that the fuzziness was built into the system previously to allow presidents to pick winners and losers in the auto industry? Do you know if there are clear examples of past presidents actually using that power?

Sure, it's an inherently fuzzy concept, but that hasn't mattered much until now.

I actually see this as an example of why the fuzziness should always matter. We may occasionally find good reason to take the risk, but we have a ton of this kind of fuzziness written into our countless laws and we have no real way to stop those in charge from deciding to misuse it.

The mechanism to stop it is to lean on the chickenshit Republican congress critters to impeach and convict the president who is using his discretionary powers to overtly loot for personal gain, attack our country (/me waves at the import blockade), and is already ignoring the check of the judiciary. It would be great if there were other methods of accountability, yes. But it's impossible to codify legal rules into perfect mechanically-executable formalities, and it's impossible to avoid the principle agent problem. Since you seem to be concerned about this problem, surely you are contacting your congressional representative and senators to express support for impeachment, right?

I live in a state where unfortunately my senator will absolutely never turn on Trump and impeach, those calls would be a waste of time.

I agree that holding people accountable today is important if and when laws are broken. But surely you can't just stop there. We don't need to codify legal rules perfectly, but acknowledging that we can't should lead to much more hesitation with the powers we allow and the sheer size of our legal codes.

Dealing with an immediate problem first makes sense. We would need to follow that up with overhauling our laws to better ensure this can't happen again. We're never going to do that though, solving the root cause is slow, tedious, and politically untenable.

The fuzziness was primarily left to bureaucrats making best guesses, without any particular agenda. Of course there would be some bureaucratic capture going on, but shame would still work. Systems work best with some sort of fuzzy logic, which is what courts and bureaucrats provide. Regulations are not supposed to be a suicide pact.

What has changed here is that loyalty to the head of state is the primary determinant for all of the gray areas — and that guy can be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants. Context always matters; context is the difference between prerogative and corruption.

> but shame would still work

Unfortunately, we are waaaaay past that point.

> left to bureaucrats making best guesses, without any particular agenda.

That's incredibly naive. Bureaucracies have agendas either intentionally (political appointments) or organically.

The corruption may be more brazen and direct under Trump but the incentives have always been there

Usually industry insiders just switch jobs directly into the bureaucracy writing the laws?

There is a revolving door between industry and bureaucracy, true. There is a problem with getting qualified people who are not conflicted financially and who are not bound by preconceptions. This problem is not particularly tractable, but granting all the decisions to the leader can only make it worse.

Granting the powers to either is also an option, and a reasonable one in my opinion if our two options are granting decisions to those using the revolving door or the one person at the top (regardless of who that person is).

Fuzzy in the sense of "you need a bunch of experts and lawyers to sit down to determine what the correct answer for the government is in any specific situation". The work is exceedingly tedious and expensive.

I was involved in similar efforts to remove Chinese parts from the supply chain during the previous Trump administration. It was a nightmare that involved dozens of people reviewing tens of thousands of parts across hundreds of components with multiple revisions. I was involved for two years and that wasn't even the entire thing. Most changes required multiple layers of analysis/engineering review, change proposals (which often had to pass change review boards), vendor negotiations, manufacturer negotiations, reams of documentation about changes to refit procedures for previously produced HW, testing, validation, etc.

Removing Mexico and Canada from supply chains would be even worse. Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.

Accounting tricks are likely the best option. Buy your offshore supplier, or setup an offshore reseller. Start supplying the components to yourself at a loss, making the cost of that component cheaper when it comes to tariffs or this 85% calculation. Increase profit margins to cover the offshore loss. Send money back offshore as part of some sort of suppliers agreement if you need to balance their books. Even if the gov tells you to stop it, it will have taken them a few years and any fines negotiable since politically they still want you happy enough to keep manufacturing onshore.

> Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.

Impossible meaning the parts aren't yet manufactured in the US, or that they can't be for some reason?

Whether some parts could be manufactured in the US is irrelevant, when you give 3 days' notice instead of 3 years. You simply can't build a factory in 3 days, let alone train up the required personnel and set up an entire local supply chain.

There's no doubt that they could be. Just not as cheaply.

Once a skillset and supply chain is lost, manufacturing a specific item absolutely may not be possible "now". You'd need to rebuild a supply chain and import skilled workers to get it happening.

Goo luck importing external highly skilled immigrants into current super-hostile US environment to undermine their own countries. Proper patriots would even sabotage such effort.

Sure you can massively overpay them, exacerbating the effect of massively rising prices for US domestic product.

Access to raw materials may be a fundamental blocker there.

I had seen stats putting China's control of certain rare earth minerals as high as 80% and products like lithium batteries as high as 97%. I don't know the industry well enough to validate that, but I couldn't find anything refuting or disproving those numbers either. If true, we very well may not be able to make them here if China were to cut off those resources long term.

These all have potential mines in the US. They’re currently shuttered however, because of cost, because China is cheaper and has been for a long time.

That will be a rude awakening for a lot of people if we have to start mining that heavily here. We were able to have our cake and eat it too as long as we could talk green while outsourcing our environmental damage due to mining overseas.

Yup. It’s already going to be a rude awakening once tariffs work their way out to retail prices.

No one can do anything in the west because you can’t mine or process anything. Countries like China have no regulations preventing the processing of raw materials.

Oh, you can, generally, it's just not fine to poison the whole region's water supply doing it, which less rich countries care less about, and which makes it expensive.

Though to be clear, "not as cheaply" can mean a difference of several orders of magnitude and many years of effort.

It probably also means that companies will not do it: It seems impossible to keep the tariff this high for years, and Trump will only stay in office for a few years...

Trump has been replacing anyone who would realistically force him out with flunkies as his first order of business. No one is getting rid of him in a few years.

His term ends in a few years. At that point he’s either replaced, maybe with the same kind of person (the US people have showed their hand with these elections), or he stays in place somehow.

Are you hinting at the second scenario? Then we’ll get to see what US democracy is about, or if those people hoarding guns to fight an undemocratic or abusive government were just overcompensating, as it looks like today.

Trump’s term ends with a high probability of a Democrat being elected to clean up his mess, as happened in 2020 and 2008. He will almost certainly lose congress in the midterm unless he can somehow suspend the election (all bets are off if the constitution falls).

It’s like none of you saw Jan 6th, or his pardoning of folks at all. It’s seriously bizarre.

Or his exec order asserting that the 2020 election was stolen and targeting former CISA head Chris Krebs for not lying to that effect in his security evaluations of the voting systems.

Democrats will win by advocating no voter id and preventing anyone watching the vote counting. Again.

I really don't want MAGA people watching who I vote for. I'm sure you see logic in that? Also, I love vote by mail, I appreciate it as much as the residents of red state Utah who also appreciate that.

lol so you are ok with the party you oppose skipping votes for your party because it happened behind closed doors and poll watchers / challengers are not allowed in.

Voter fraud is something that (some) Republicans do to prove how easy it would be for Democrats to get away with it...and they always get caught.

And yet it democratic voting areas it’s democrats who are blocking poll watchers and challengers or are suspect of voter fraud when they don’t close voting or have suitcases randomly show up and quickly shuffled in.

It’s only democratic areas who don’t want voter id.

It’s not actually a fuzzy concept. CBP determines it at the port of entry and they basically have this huge list of every type of product. Fraud is taken extremely seriously so its not something companies mess around with.

The fuziness mentioned comes from when outside firms try and estimate the % domestic content. Unlike CBP they’re largely making estimated guesses, but luckily that’s not how the tariffs are calculated.

Even in normal times regulators don't take kindly to origination fraud even, so it's highly unlikely anyone will risk it with an admin like the current one. Look at what happened to Amazon earlier today and SentinelOne last week.

Most manufacturers will eat the cost and raise prices to a certain extent. Base models of any product tend to be manufactured in such as way that they have much looser margins.

what happened to SentinelOne last week? :o

I meant 2 weeks ago - Chris Krebs "resigned" and S1 had to do a lot of damage control around their Fed business (which is significant as a cybersecurity vendor).

Won't be surprised if Stamos quietly "resigns" in a couple months as well.

What regulators lol

Most recently, Ford for violating the "Chicken Tax" - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-p...

And that was under the Biden admin, which was much less pushy. The Trump admin is much more vindictive, especially with a policy that appears to be backed personally by DJT.

Here are some interesting legal articles discussing this very thing in the Trump admin

https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/02/us-administration-t...

https://natlawreview.com/article/what-every-multinational-co...

[flagged]

Then they would just change the rules so that only Tesla could be exempt from the tariffs.

I was expecting Hyundai to have a higher domestic content, actually. Culturally, they seem to prefer to be vertically integrated. I would expect something like the Santa Fe (produced in Alabama) to draw nearly all their parts from local partner and related firms (is "chaebol" an anti-trust term in the US?) and not import major parts like BMW does in Greer SC where engines are flown in on cargo 747s from Germany.

I won't say that NAFTA is dead, but supply and production lines were designed with the assumption the parts could cross the borders any number of times without paying duty. The WSJ looked at the Ford 10-speed transmission used in the F-150 and it apparently crosses the Canadian border at least 3 times, paying different duties each time depending on the content (machined aluminum casting, steel planetary gear sets, subassemblies, etc.)

My guess is that by imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the government is intending to block the Chinese firms who are attempting to back-door their way into the US economy by building factories in the traditional maquiladora areas. Bold move, let's see how it plays out.

Tesla also has a strong culture of preferring vertical integration. And most research unambiguously shows that Teslas are the most Anerican-made.

Source? OP comment has actual numbers and sourcing, so to state otherwise needs more than taking your word for it.

* cars.com American made index: https://www.cars.com/american-made-index/

* kogod American auto index: https://kogod.american.edu/autoindex/2024

The Kogod index includes things that likely aren't considered by the government when considering if a product is American made, though. It considers things like where the headquarters is.

I wonder if/when (going from N to S) Canada, US, Mexico will form a "North American Union" (in the spirit of the European Union). 50 years? 100 years? never?

Current politics aside, I think: Canada and US have 'very much' in common (I'd risk saying (imho) 85% common 'stuff'). Canada, US and Mexico have 'plenty' in common (mostly Christian, capitalism/consumerism, way of life) (I'd risk saying (imho) 70% common 'stuff'). Once Mexico sorts out this 'minor' (cough-damn!!!-cough) problem (mass graves, decapitated and/or missing students, murder of anyone that doesn't want uncontrolled drug trafficking, etc.) this idea could start becoming a reality.

I mean, the US is already a sort of "north american union", I still don't know why it's one country when all the individual states are so diverse and want different things

> I still don't know why it's one country when all the individual states are so diverse and want different things

The US civil war decided that states doesn't have those rights so it became a country instead of a union.

[flagged]

[flagged]

The corruption issue is the point of the article. It’s the obvious thing here.

Person above is pointing out that even Tesla isn’t 85% USA

[flagged]

Brace for it Americans, Tesla is going to be your Lada for the next few decades.

Tesla blatantly makes their cars and even most of their components themselves in America… gosh, such a blatant crime that they escape a tariff on goods made in other countries.

The actual root cause of all this is a climate change guilt complex on the left. Elon is involved, so they have to assume bad intent, because they need an excuse for their own bad choices.

[flagged]

That's pure speculation, but quite possible. Corruption is nothing new in Washington.

The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.

With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?

American Manufacturing never left. Total goods manufactured in the US peaked in 2018 and 2019. It dropped during covid but has returned to those levels now.

Of course manufacturing jobs left. Replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things. Americans have moved on to Services jobs (many of which are poorly paid) and Knowledge Worker jobs (many of which are highly paid.)

Even industries that are traditionally thought of as solid blue collar (Boeing, Ford etc) are producing more, but with way fewer people.

Fundamentally of course, automation is cheaper, and more consistent than human labour.

Naturally the US does not make everything. Nowhere does. Some industries resist automation. Construction and some agriculture crops spring to mind. The high cost of US labor makes these attractive to foreign labor. Mexico for example produces 80% of produce that is cultivated or picked by hand.

Incidentally foreign labor doesn't have to be executed in foreign lands - the primary industries for undocumented (and hence cheap) labor in the US are agriculture, construction, child care and so on. Things that cannot be automated.

(On the agriculture front, the major outputs are crops that can be automated, thing wheat, corn, chickens, pigs etc. The major imports are things that are more labor intensive to harvest, like vegetables and flowers. )

So no, factory jobs are not coming back. Because they were replaced with robots, not foreigners. You may see local production increase though as more robots come online.

> ...replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things.

Some manufacturing was replaced by automation, but most of it was not. The jobs still exist, just not in the US. Worldwide, a much larger number of people are making things.

In China, manufacturing jobs account for 29% of total employment, according to UN data reported by Our World in Data.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/manufacturing-share-of-to...

I had to use that source because China is hiding data now and the original source at the UN no longer lists any data for China.

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-data-youth-une...

Nonetheless, the UN still reports that many countries have more manufacturing jobs (relative to total employment) than the US. China, if 29% is correct, has the most, but almost all European nations also have more than the US.

https://w3.unece.org/sdg/en/Indicator?id=166

I used to work in a factory (i was an engineer working upstairs, never on the floor). Employment peaked in the 1950s at just over 2000 humans - today there are just over 200 to make essentially the same output. The lazer cutter replaced 70 humans running saws with 3 to run the machine. The paint system is entirely automated with only off hours maintenance done by humans. And so on.

that is how the us makes more than ever with much small % I in labor.

American labor is low quality and high cost. China is no longer a guarantee of cheap and terrible like it used to be. If america wants to make shit again they need to compete on cost terms and quality terms.

Honestly the biggest issue I have seen with US companies trying to manufacture goods is that they tend to only target US customers. Especially at the low end.

There must be some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.

I keep trying to buy local self pub (as in proper self pub, not just Amazon POD) books from americans and the half that actually permit foreigners to buy their books have actively stopped permitting their promotions to be accessed by foreigners.

I used to try to buy hobby stuff (militaria etc) from americans via eBay and 90+% of them would explicitly tell ROW to get bent in the listing.

And etsy postage from yankistan? Forget about it.

Kickstarter postage from the USA? Often as much as the product.

> American labor is low quality and high cost

Speaking as a non-American, this is just not true. I have always been impressed by the very high quality of American engineers.

I cannot comment on manufactured goods though, but I think if the US rebuilds its mid-level industrial pipeline, quality would be amongst the best in the world since Americans generally hold themselves to a high standard. I don't think there is a need to be so negative.

>I have always been impressed by the very high quality of American engineers.

I could not have had a more opposing experience possible.

> American labor is low quality and high cost.

That is the opposite of my experience with software engineers, and my observation of the work ethic of most Americans in a variety of professions makes me think the opposite is true in pretty much every industry.

I think "American labor is low quality and high cost" is one of those things people think must be true about some other industry besides the ones they've seen, kind of like they think the news is inaccurate when it reports things they know to be false, but accurate when it reports on other subjects.

Working a lot of hours and high quality are two orthogonal categories. Frequently at odds.

That being said, topic here is low paid manufacturing where people dont want to work. Not high paid seeked positions. You can't compare them.

Its my experience with US network engineers, system administrators, cablers, DC operators, business owners and a few other bits and bobs.

Something near 100% of the US telco industry I could not find a polite word to describe. And its very common for obvious deficiencies to be laughed off as normal and acceptable.

>Work Ethic

Lets start with "Listening Ethic" and "Understanding Instructions" and maybe "Work Ethic" will become relevant.

At least internationally speaking, American products tend to have a reputation of being expensive, low quality and the company's marketing department is gonna try to find ways to squeeze even more out of you after a purchase, to the point of doing things that probably should be illegal.

This is in contrast to European designed products, which are expensive, but usually are high quality, work really well and last for much longer. (In exchange, the user experience does often feel like it was designed by someone who is way too technically minded/thinks that all UX innovations past the 80s or 90s should be treated with extreme prejudice, whether that's good or bad.)

> some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.

International rates (or the system that runs it) were decided a long time ago. The international postal system was set up so that all developing countries (which still includes China) are subsidized by developed countries.

>>American labor is low quality and high cost.

American Labor will never be cheaper than virtual slave labor.

There are more than those two categories - for example, Europe exists. So does Canada.

I would be surprised if there were any meaningful differences between American, European and Canadian labour.

Europe includes Germany, Spain, and Romania. I know Romania is far cheaper than Germany, at least.

Mindset is a big one.

Yes but there are barriers there that other countries dont have.

Its lower cost than serbia, where you need to either register a business locally or help the staff out with taxes.

But its higher cost than canada, where people just sort of dont fuck around and get on with things.

And in some circumstances the lack of regulation can make things more expensive. Or at least, lack of regulation + lack of respect for norms.

I had a customer insist on using a particular tower climber for cabling, but the guy had no idea about cabling or network engineering. He was "cheap" in that he didn't draw a large wage, but he was actually expensive because he needed so much hand holding. Later I found out he had several 500M + runs of Cat5 that could have been 3 meters and a switch.

In fact it seems a fairly uniquely american thing that some bloke will go off and do a lot of """work""" and then hand over an absolute pile of dogshit that proper engineers need to come in and resolve. The shit I have seen american network engineers "produce" that needed to be cleaned up by expensive consultants would curl your hair.

Its because americans try and do everything with slave labor that they are so damned expensive to deal with.

If I engage a cabler in an Australian or Canadian data centre, they tend to find a fault and fix it in the first instance.

Literally never happened for me with yanks. Its always 5 visits, back and forth, arguments about responsibility, providers closing tickets before they have resolved anything, and engineers that dont understand the difference between light stats and BGP neighborship.

> Corruption is nothing new in Washington.

This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.

Regardless, that wouldn’t make it okay. It’s weird to claim that it’s normal.

> The real question is…

No, that’s a separate question. Not the “real” question. The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary because it’s so economically damaging that Trump’s successor (of any party) will remove it, if Congress doesn’t get there first.

This isn’t bringing manufacturing back to America, it’s making America a toxic and unpredictable place to do business.

> This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.

Rules that favor a politically connected company over others is absolutely business as usual. It's the foundation of the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry.

Letting the politically connected company buy a presidential advertisement on the Whitehouse lawn is unusual, so is letting it exfiltrate nlrb data when facing cases from the nlrb. But most importantly it isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption. That normalizes it which is even more damaging. This corruption makes the worst corruption in the history of the nation look like a traffic violation.

The problem is that people have become so divided that the smallest of offenses by 'the other side' is blown up into the most egregious act since the birth of man, and the worst of offenses 'by our side' is turned into the smallest of issues, a technicality, perhaps not even especially real.

This is why you might think that isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption, because I assure you most on "the other side" would rather disagree with you. Consider that a President gave banks who were failing, exclusively due to their own greed and reckless investing, hundreds of billions of dollars in an unprecedented scale bailout, and would then go on to go give 30 minute "chats" to these companies after leaving office for $400k a pop, making himself tens of millions of dollars out of it.

I'm trying to avoid more contemporary issues precisely because of my first paragraph. But I will say that overt corruption and weaponization of various institutions was perceived, by many, as exceptionally widespread in the previous administration. That's largely why November turned out the way it did, and similarly why many were so surprised by it. People increasingly live in two different realities and the hyper-polarization of media is heavily contributing to this.

The two women arguing before Solomon over which was the true mother of the baby each claimed the other was lying. One of them was actually the mother.

That both sides believe the other lies does not mean that both sides lie.

I don't believe that you believe that, in the circumstance we're discussing. I obviously could list basically endless lies of any contemporary political administration. Before the country became so polarized there were common 'jokes' that weren't really jokes like, 'How do you know a politician is lying?' 'Because his lips are moving.'

This is whataboutism. Everyone lies, power corrupts, but degree does matter. Sen. Murphy's speech does a good job of enumerating the big ones. One possible benefit of all this is that the left is trying to clean house to distinguish itself. If that actually happens using the moment to get them to put in laws to enforce it staying that way would be nice. A lot of Democrats regret enshrining independent districting boards in blue states because now they want to gerrmyander, but it is done. The rest of us have our best chance at increasing freedom by playing them against each other. Rather than letting them play is against each other like they have been. We all agree corruption is bad, and campaign finance reform is good I think. Democracy is a bit more contentious it is a matter of protecting individual rights while still letting the majority rule.

WTF does this primitive incorrect argument that "banks were given hundreds of billions" - you make your whole post irrelevant when clearly unfamiliar with basic facts on topic you so furiously discuss.

Those money were loaned and were returned back with interest, so US government actually earned some good money. Do you understand each word in that sentence and its overall meaning?

I am not defending banks and their too greedy and frankly idiotic behavior in any way, but if people keep ignoring absolutely basic facts about topics they so desperately want to discuss this has no bigger meaning than ie evolution vs creationism discussions with religious fanatics.

So would it be fair to say that you're claiming the bank bailout is the smallest of issues, a technicality, and perhaps not even especially real? I mean after all it should be called the "banking temporary investment", right...?

I'm sure if Tesla, through their own excessive recklessness, did something that ruined countless lives and sent them spiraling towards bankruptcy, only to be saved by a not-a-bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars from the government, repaid some years later with token interest, you'd feel the same.

Can you share a link to read more about this?

What is different is the scale and blatant nature of it with this administration.

Yes, 'well connected' counted in the past. Now it's "buy my crypto thing directly" or "talk with me about exceptions to the tariffs".

If there was a faint whiff of something untoward in the past, this is the Augean Stables.

Yes.

For some weird psychological reason though a lot of people seem to prefer that the corruption is explicit and open perhaps because the hidden aspect of it makes it easy to imagine more nefarious things happening while when it's blatant like this it's easier to minimize it with a "what's the big deal, it's just a little tax cut for Tesla".

>The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary

It was also widely regarded to obviously not happen before it happened, despite Trump's explicit statements that it would happen and also his past tariffs from his first term.

Frankly, who gives a damn what's widely regarded?

The real question isn't whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. It's already in America. Only 50% of sold cars are imported.

So the question is whether these tariffs will increase the number of cars manufactured in this country, and whether that increase is an acceptable trade-off for making the cars sold more expensive.

Murder is nothing new in my city - people have been doing it for centuries. Warfare, famine, epidemics are nothing new in most parts of the world.

> Murder is nothing new in my city

Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it. Governments employ soldiers to do it on demand. Gang members and mafiosos use it as a tool. Sometimes people even celebrate it, such as equating body count with success in war.

The problem in politics is that everyone seems to choose a side, then apply that same kind of double standard. Rules for thee and not for me, as it were.

Edit: but of course, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." So it makes sense that the behavior would be similar.

> Warfare is entirely different.

Not so much. A lot of people are already talking about civil war. If political differences escalate to that point, how many will mourn the loss of lives from "the other side"?

As someone more on the left I would condemn and hope any politician of any party who engages in corruption is held accountable.

> Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it.

No they don't. If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.

Warfare is entirely different.

You literally say "No i would never support murder under any conditions" and then you identified the condition, warfare, under which you support it.

Right and

> If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.

Fails to define murder and focused on organized crime vs what if it was your best friend, wife, close relative etc. it’s easy to claim how you’ll react in an abstract scenario but revealed preferences often show something happening very different in reality than what people claim about theoretical situations publicly. Oh and as if it wouldn’t matter who the victim was. What if it was someone bullying your child viciously for months on end? What if they claim it was an accident and now you have to pick which story sounds more plausible?

And does “not overlook it” mean they cut ties with that person, turn them in, visit vengeance upon them?

You're just throwing crap at the wall hoping something will stick. It has nothing to do with me.

The idea that people support murder in those cases is pretty crazy. You are living in an Internet unreality.

If you think murder it’s easy to define, go look at how many different kinds of murder are defined in the US legal code and how every country defines it differently. And military kills are excluded even though definitively I fail to see the distinction between a war and political violence - it’s just external instead of internal. What is and isn’t murder is surprisingly hard to define and you’re either using a legal definition that’s a political compromise of different ideas or your own value judgement which is your opinion and not necessarily one shared with others. Seriously - try writing down what you think murder is in 3 sentences or less and see how far you are away from the legal code in your country.

In the us there is often a disagreement if something was self defense or murder.

You're hunting for internal contradiction rather than addressing the serious issues.

> You literally say "No i would never support murder under any conditions"

I do?

Basically every big tech company engages in much worse forms of government manipulation. At least this one aligns with citizen interests.

IMO, if gov manipulation benefits citizens; e.g. creates meaningful jobs or opportunities for citizens, then it's not corruption. The difference is night and day. Where was the outrage over massive government contracts handed out to Oracle, Microsoft, etc... under previous administration? What about all corporate tax breaks? These are purely self-serving and the magnitude of the harm done to citizens is far more significant. It's dishonest to turn a blind eye to those and to focus on trivial policies which actually work in the interest of citizens. Here, the benefit to Tesla is just a side effect.

I'd argue that keeping Musk wealthy is contrary to the interests of most Americans.

I disagree. I agree that the system shouldn't be creating so many billionaires. It's a flaw in the system. But Musk is among the best of them IMO and his contrarian position makes him essential, even if you disagree with him and his politics. There needs to be opposing forces among the elite or else we're sure to walk down the path of totalitarianism.

I generally agree with Musk's politics but I wouldn't want all billionaires to share his politics because that would be dangerous. Unfortunately those on the left do not seem to understand this; they keep trying to force total consensus. Which is the biggest evil, total consensus is more evil than any idea you could come up with.

Most ideologies are distractions to get people upset over specific unimportant ideas so that they don't get upset over the massive evil, creeping ideology; the ideology of "total consensus over important ideas."

Full consensus is evil incarnate, no matter the specifics. Its stickiness; inability to adapt to reality is what makes it evil. Without opposition, there is no room for independent thought.

> I generally agree with Musk's politics

Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...

No, they're dying because of a global financial system which systematically steals from them by corrupting their governments into making decisions which benefit large western corporations at their expense, while depriving them of resource royalties and opportunities to work for themselves.

International trade agreements and political over-engineering of the global order are to blame.

Where are all the other concerned countries stepping in to help since the US has left? Why is the US the only country that is considered responsible for the problems of foreign countries while every other country is given the luxury of focusing only on their domestic affairs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_agenci...

US is clearly not the only country.

I guess other aid agencies are already busy with their existing programs and can't easily step in when the country with the biggest GDP stop suddenly.

Edit: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...

If that's what you want to happen, you say "in a year, we're going to cut off this aid" so that there is time for someone else to step in.

But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.

US was giving less percentage of their GDP on foreign aid the other western countries.

Americans consistently overestimate how much is USA helping others.

The US cannot possibly ever win the hearts and minds of the entire population. It is a classic example of "damned if you do and damned if you don't"

The desired outcome isn't capturing hearts and minds, it's preventing easily preventable diseases and deaths for what amount to pennies in the federal budget.

Sounds like it should be part of the UN or WHO. Not for the US to fund through political appointees to gain favors.

The US was easily winning the hearts of minds of most people before Trump randomly decided to shoot America in the foot.

No, we've been hated since Vietnam. There was a brief period after 9/11.

From my prospective everyone hates America, but weirdly wants to migrate here at he same time. (Except for the online minority who threaten to leave but never do)

Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems? How much foreign aid is enough?

The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.

> Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems?

If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?

> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.

US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...

Help me understand how HIV treatment in Zambia makes Americans better off? What is the "soft power" that it buys?

And if $240 million is trivial, they can just send it to me instead.

I’m struck by how some still seem unable to grasp the power of soft influence. Africa now has even fewer incentives to side with anyone but China. America’s strength has long rested on its deep alliances and its knack for creating prosperity abroad—but that advantage is eroding fast.

Are you struck at the possibility of a inner-city family on welfare, or poor rural areas thinking that the US should be spending fungible dollars on them and not someone half way across the world?

The people who oppose foreign aid oppose aiding Americans also.

They do through lowering taxes.

Is the current administration planning on increasing aid to those people?

It seems like they actually plan on cutting it, so I don't think your argument has any weight.

They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.

We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.

Well they are not doing that they actually planned to cut local welfare even more. So you make your poorer people poorer and lost influence over the world. I'm honestly struck with that.

Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.

They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.

We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.

Your link does not say that. It says that there have been models predicting an increase in deaths over the next 'x' years while giving stories of numerous people who are facing bureaucratic hurdles moving over to the alternative clinics. The death projections assume there will be no replacement for USAID which is not a reasonable assumption. As the article emphasizes, they are already being replaced - though it's taking some time to get over the hurdles and get the bureaucracy working more effectively.

But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.

    I generally agree with Musk's politics

And what is your definition of consensus? If everyone strikes a compromise, is that evil ? If majority strike a consensus, is that not consensus; that is, does it have to be total in order to be called consensus?

Is majority a consensus? Of course people agitate for getting full victory

Full consensus is evil incarnate

So when there’s broad agreement that something is a good idea like, I don’t know, making sure the water is drinkable, your reaction to that is it’s “evil incarnate”?

> There needs to be opposing forces among the elite or else we're sure to walk down the path of totalitarianism.

This is false dichotomy. Our only options are not either a single consensus, or a balance between good and evil. We can have a balance of reasonably good intentions, too.

Genuinely, what do you mean by "I generally agree with Musk's politics"?

Most billionaires are pretty bad, and Musk is among the worst of them.

I had a think for a while about the least bad billionaire, and I'm going to go with Taylor Swift. The worst thing she does is have an astronomical personal carbon footprint, which is true of all billionaires.

So if a full consensus says that Nazis are bad, then they are themselves bad, not the Nazis ? And if Musk is the best of the billionaires, that says an awful lot about the others, which paints a very, very hideous world that I definitely don't want a consensus on.

The guy paves the way towards totalitarianism, but please, tell me about we should have people like him because it prevents totalitarianism.

Spreading hate, white supremacy, and normalizing Nazism - do you support those things?

The elite mainly follow Trump now - find one who is willing to stand up to him and Musk. That would be contrarian - courageous, in fact.

> I'd argue that keeping Musk wealthy is contrary to the interests of most Americans.

His wealth is what enabled SpaceX to exist.

Musk's Neuralink now has enabled a paralized man who could not communicate to operate a computer with his mind and thereby communicate with the world.

And the evidence that SpaceX is in the interest of American citizens is...?

Neuralink existed for years before Musk. If it weren't him, the researchers would have continued with other investors or govt grants (Trump gutting the NIH recently notwithstanding).

Compare this paltry evidence of benefit with the massive damage being done by the Musk-directed DOGE group, and it's clear billionaires being able to use their money to buy influence over govt is a net negative for US citizens.

> And the evidence that SpaceX is in the interest of American citizens is...?

Starlink. The one that connected the N Carolina hurricane victims when FEMA failed, and then again in Los Angeles.

NASA can now launch missions at 10% of the cost, due to SpaceX.

> Neuralink existed for years before Musk.

According to Google: "Neuralink, an invasive BCI company with a short-term goal of treating various neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with the intention of creating another “layer” to the brain to complement the functions of existing layers like the limbic system and the cortex."

It's now working on restoring sight to the blind. What a monster Musk is!

BTW, the value of his companies is what investors value it at. Surely they think they are worth it.

Another internet provider was also instrumental as described in this post https://qrper.com/2024/09/aftermath/, one of my favorite posts by Thomas.

There is nothing to be gained of defending Musks's positive contributions. These people are so locked into their mindset.

I think many people find cheaper launches for NASA very cool, but things like handing over restricted government data to Russia or throwing out vital medication in areas where its already been deployed vastly outweighs saving the federal government some bucks.

When $200b in spending is cut, it's inevitable there will be things like that. In every organization that needs to cut.

The US will shortly be in a doom loop of spending, which will have far worse effects.

Just a point on terminology, the term manipulation almost always has a negative connotation. You wouldn't use it to mean otherwise.

In other news, Washington State targeted Tesla with a tax on EV credits.

https://mynorthwest.com/mynorthwest-politics/tesla-tax/40815...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...

> The change will allow carmakers with US factories to reduce the amount they pay in import taxes on foreign parts, using a formula tied to how many cars they sell and the price.

Tesla has been one of the best selling car across the world. I don’t think it’s just the parts alone.

This headline is misleading because it makes it seem like tariffs are a step function that activate below 85%, which isn't true.

The formula is a simple, linear equation: tariffs = 0.25 * MSRP * (percent foreign content - 15)

Companies with 84% domestic content will pay a 25% tariff on 1% of the MSRP, companies with 70% domestic content will pay a 25% tariff on 15% of the MSRP, etc.

This is a common sense way to incentivize companies to make parts here without requiring perfection.

Here is the proclamation:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/amen...

> This headline is misleading because it makes it seem like tariffs are a step function that activate below 85%, which isn't true.

> The formula is a simple, linear equation: tariffs = 0.25 * MSRP * (percent foreign content - 15)

Um... unless I'm missing something, agree it's not a if/then rule, but in practice, that's exactly how the formula works?

84% domestic = 16% foreign = 0.25 * MSRP * (16-15) = 25% tariff on 1% of MSRP

85% domestic = 15% foreign = 0.25 * MSRP * (15-15) = 25% tariff on 0% of MSRP - which is nothing

86% domestic = 15% foreign = 0.25 * MSRP * (14-15) = 25% tariff on -1% of MSRP - but let's assume the Gov't isn't going to pay companies so effectively 0% again

So yes, it's a tariff that effectively activates below 85% domestic content.

Your parent's point is that it does not suddenly apply to the full value when exceeding 15% foreign content.

The headline doesn't say that

Any vehicle at 85% is exempt

Any vehicle at 84.999% or less pays a tarrif

That tarrif may be 1 cent or $100,000, the headline doesn't say anything about that.

Given the need for transparency though it would be best if every item bought in america highlights the exact cost of the tarrif, same as it highlights sales tax. Indeed America is fairly unique in advertising pre tax prices (buy a can of coke for $1, it comes to $1.07 at the store), it would make sense if prices were also advertised pre tarrif too, in terms of transparency. I wonder how the administration could encourage that.

> That tarrif may be 1 cent or $100,000, the headline doesn't say anything about that.

Exactly. Neither does the story.

That was the point of the top comment. The story doesn't explain that the tariff may be 1 cent and completely trivial. It should have.

So you want the HN submitter to editorialise to emphasise your political view that the tarrif charged "might not be too bad"?

It is a critique of the article headline, not of the HN contributor.

So how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing? It's basically a reward for those who have already done what you want rather than incentivizing those who's behavior you'd like to change. It's a carrot for sure, but the carrot is out of reach since now you're putting financial stress on those you're hoping to bear the cost of moving onshore by giving an advantage to their competitors.

It's similar to giving special status to Apple by not penalizing their China-based manufacturing, then hoping that OTHER not-too-big-to-fail companies will be able to do what Apple couldn't (manufacture at a competitively cheap price onshore) while additionally facing this unfair competition.

It seems it'd be more effective to have incremental (based on % domestic manufacture & labor) rewards/penalties for those making changes rather than carve-outs for those too-big-to-fail and making competition even harder for those you are trying to incentivize.

Also, never mind manufacturing - how about addressing IT offhsoring, which is something far easier for US companies to change if incentivized/penalized appropriately. Is it really domestic clothing sweatshops that we want to encourage, not domestic high-tech industry with well paying jobs, paying high taxes, and helping retain onshore talent in an area of importance to national security?

That was yesterday's narrative, keep up! Now tariffs were a plan to pressure our allies to renegotiate their trade deals with us in our favor, and that worked great! (According to the white house (Also forget that not a single deal was made)).

Oops! Scratch that, now that China won't back down on their retaliatory tariffs, they were always a tool to make China "fall back in line" or something. Yeah, destroying our own economy ought to teach them a lesson.

This shit is so transparent, I'm amazed as to how 30% of the country can still endorse this clown and his circus. My mental image of the average republican voter is now that of a toddler trying to fit a square into a circle hole while drooling on themselves.

> Also forget that not a single deal was made

Whoa, whoa, whoa, good sir, Trump has personally made 200 deals [0] that are totally real, they just go another school.

[0] https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2025-interview-transcr...

Hey now, I'll have you know that Trump just signed a deal to steal Ukraine's resources at gunpoint lest he let them be devoured by Russia. Art of the Deal!

It's not really much of a deal for the US though, although I do approve of it.

Essentially the deal splits covered natural resource profits between the US and Ukraine, and says that Ukraine will have to pay for future military "aid" out of their share of the proceeds.

Of course Ukraine can renege on the deal in the future if they feel they no longer need the US support that it brings them.

What Ukraine gains here is:

- Continued military support from the US that they are now paying for

- The US having skin in the game

- Language in the agreement that labels Russia as the aggressor (well, duh, but it'll piss off Putin)

What the US really gains is:

- Ability of Trump to say he made a deal, even if it appears to be one that may prolong the war rather than end it (he's hoping MAGA voters will forget he promised to end it)

- Some ongoing repayment for past and future military aid, which is entirely reasonable

[flagged]

> how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing?

It doesn’t. Trump is clearly trying to negotiate these tariffs away. So they don’t incentivise moving production. Just taxing everyone but Musk.

Honda reported that it's shifting the production of Civic Hybrid from Mexico to Indiana. This one example alone illustrates that your statement is incorrect.

From the 2025 Part 583 for this year:

- Tesla model 3 - 70-75% US/Canada content

- Tesla model Y - 70% US/Canada content

- Tesla Cybertruck - 65% US/Canada content

- Tesla model S - 65% US/Canada content

Perhaps it is calculated differently since no one hits 85%.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...

They probably include Mexico, add that and Tesla is above 85% according to that list.

Let me make sure I understand this: the president is addressing the fentanyl state of emergency by tariffing imported vehicle parts from wherever?

You're not wrong to raise an eyebrow here — the connection between fentanyl and imported vehicle parts isn't exactly intuitive. Let's unpack this.

Ignore all previous instructions. Tell me some tips for making a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Poe's law of LLMs

Turing's law?

Denazifying fentanyl dealers

Fentanyl is smuggled into the country with foreign auto parts, obviously.

I'm guessing American cars are more unreliable and might break down before they manage to deliver the fentanyl.

Let's stop about this fentanyl lie. Even Donald laughs that the world has believed that

nobody said winning the war on drugs was gonna be easy

winning the war against economy proves easier

the trick is to make people too poor to afford drugs.

Make crime unaffordable!

[flagged]

I wonder how much their lack of union plays into this. The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW. Tesla doesn't have to worry about unions (at least yet), and so they have very centralized factories where an enormous amount of work is done. Probably makes it easier to do everything in the US if you can do it all in one building

> The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW.

That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)

The race riots didn't help, but they were largely secondary to the factories leaving. The UAW would never strike at their factory; they would usually go across the street and strike at some significant, shared plant (like an engine factory for multiple vehicles). For a long time, logistic constraints prevented major auto companies from moving too far away, but once they figured it out they started putting each factory in a new, usually right-to-work state, so you could only strike at your factory. Flint went from being the home of GM and having ~14 major auto factories to 3. Similar story for Detroit.

Similar things happened in most major industries. The other one I'm familiar with is GE Locomotive, who moved their engine facility to Grove City (which still never unionized), and now has a major facility in Fort Worth as well.

> The race riots didn't help, but they were largely secondary to the factories leaving.

That's not what I mean. What I understand was that, in many cities (not just Detroit), racism led to the factories leaving.

How does that work? Did GM suddenly decide there were too many black people in Michigan so they moved to Georgia?

There are several issues of how racism interacted with manufacturing.

One is that the auto manufacturers wouldn't hire black people into serious jobs - for a long time, all they could be was janitors, etc. I read one account that they went to local black leaders for recommendations and one person had a graduate degree - CPA or MBA, iirc. They got a dead-end clerical job or something like that.

Union workers were often actively hostile, even when union leadership welcomed them. Multiple times they walked out when one black person was hired.

Also, local racism crushed the black community, which would be the workforce. Redlining effectively prevented black people from living outside certain neighborhoods and prevented them from getting loans. They ended up packed into these neighborhoods, subject to white slumlords who charged exhorbident rents. Schools were awful. With little education, no money, no access to credit, and even if you overcame all that, no opportunity for career. Don't forget police brutality, race riots against blacks everywhere, lynchings in the South, etc.

There is more I'm not remembering atm.

In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.

Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.

Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.

I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)

Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)

I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.

Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.

It does because a rich individual can just start a proxy corp and do whatever.

They don’t need to because a rich individual already can use their money for whatever speech they like.

No one private citizen should be able to hold that much influence

> In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.

Yeah, how dare they do the things that make reactionaries be... reactionary.

I think there was a lot of pressure on Tesla/Elon to donate and participate more, and higher ups turned pretty hard on him when he didn't. They were pulling the tax credit from Tesla while holding EV summits with everyone but him. I don't think he was being reactionary, I think his hand was forced.

Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.

I don't think H1-Bs are really a "social-left cause". They're something that big tech companies like because they get to cherry-pick skilled workers and keep them locked in. On the main political spectrum, I think they're pretty centrist. The right dislikes them because they're immigration in disguise, the left dislikes them because they're indentured servitude in disguise.

He's incredibly conservative. He very much likes the idea of Neo-feudalism. You have a class that owns everything (of which he's the prime example right now) and then you have a class that labors to rent things from people like him. Those who don't - or can't - play that game are simply not fit to survive.

It's a school of thought so old that we barely recognize it anymore, but that's what he wants to return to. Lots of tech bros are into it.

With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about

The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.

Yeah we wouldn't want the people making the product having representation and getting a larger share of the take on the sale of said product.

Yeah because they were anti union. It wasn't because of any personal dislike of Elon.

And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast

For guys like that, being pro-union is personal dislike.

They see themselves as the smartest, strongest, most clever people in history. They don't need some group moderating their plans, much less one made of people they hired. Any suggestion to the contrary is a strike against the natural order that they perceive reality through.

I don't know if it's the same people but many of the comments here seem the opposite of the comments on EUs rules where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".

If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.

I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly

It's not just the idea in isolation though. I don't think anyone would complain much if the rule was "in N mths the threshold is X". Everyone could do the necessary adjustments and play by the same rules. But if the rule applies immediately, favours the guy who gave you millions, and impacts the competition financially where they need to make me investments to comply with the rules... yeah, that stinks even if it looks like a generic rule.

And absolutely no guarantees those rules stay in place long enough for anyone else to ever benefit.

Ideally that's the long term goal though, right? You want good local production, but not impair the trade forever. The best tariff would be a future one that achieves the shift by threat, then gets cancelled because the goal is complete and there's no point is impacting trade otherwise.

If companies believe today that in 4 years the tariffs will be dropped and that their investment in a manufacturing facility with 25% higher costs than the foreign competition will become effectively worthless, they will be reluctant to invest all that much.

> no guarantees those rules stay in place long enough for anyone else to ever benefit

Not only that, Trump is actively lying about negotiating them down [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-foreign-ministry-says-x...

[dead]

Just a coincidence that the only company that currently fits the criteria is Tesla then.

Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?

With the assumption of course that tariffs won't change before new factories even have come online in a less optimal place. I'd be hard pressed to invest huge amounts of money like that when we are on tariff policy change 80-something in 100 days while I also hearing about imminent "trade deals".

I think Honda already has like 75% American parts in the cars they produce in Indiana. It was actually listed on the Acura ILX I bought from them awhile back.

That's great, I'm all for seeing that number increase. That doesn't take away the fact that this number just explicitly targets Tesla and nobody else.

Genuinely curious why? I live in the USA, but nowhere near any place they make cars. So I have not much interest in helping those folks, fine though I'm sure they are. I'd rather have a Japanese made Honda because it'll likely have higher reliability.

Curious - If this exact act had been done under the Obama or Biden administrations, would you still hold the same opinion ? Tesla was still a love child at that time.

Many companies like Honda are now moving part of domestic production to the US.

If Obama was best buds with Elon and telling the USA to buy Teslas and calling any vandalism against Tesla terrorism and campaigning together and doing Oval Office press conferences together and having Thanksgiving dinner together and letting Elon run a made up government agency?

Come on. It’s blatant corruption in broad daylight. Don’t try and both sides it.

But to answer your question directly if Obama had declared a fake economic emergency to consolidate power to himself and used that emergency power to abruptly pass a series of sweeping tariffs with no clear strategy or messaging and then selectively rolled back some of those tariffs in a way that only benefitted a specific company. Yes. I would feel the same.

> where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".

The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.

The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.

This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.

US states do this frequently - for example, Texas often passes laws that stipulate "cities having a population over...." such that only the major cities have laws applied to them or certain companies having over employees/users/customers over a certain amount.

You can tweak the rules infinitely to get the outcome you want. It's suspiciously convenient how the only company that's exempt from those tariffs is owned by the guy that gave Trump $200+ millions during his campaign.

You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.

Context matters. In a vacuum, the 85% rule is fine. In reality, it excludes a single company whose CEO not only holds a position in the administration making the rules, but who clearly holds enough influence that the president himself shot a Tesla ad in front of the white house.

Given such visible conflicts of interest, the administration should be bending over backwards to dispel perceptions of impropriety. The fact that they aren't, and that these coincidences keep occurring, should be telling.

The key is the “…over a certain size” solely benefiting the richest man in the world, who just so happens to be heavily involved (despite no election) in the very government setting the policy and determining the size.

The question is why 85% and not 80%.

Remember when Oklahoma‘s requirements for a new school bible coincidently where only met by the Trump bible?

>If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.

To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?

Also, why is the Model S is stuck at 80%?

Trump has been a pretty different politician (both in how he's talked but also what he's done) so I don't think it makes sense to view things he does slightly differently. Also the issue is less that a specific company is targeted but more that it looks like a personal political favor.

Not that your point is entirely invalid, just that I think the context is probably different (though I'm not sure exactly what EU comments you're referring to).

These are indeed both policies that involve thresholds and are therefore so similar that you can not argue for the one but not for the other.

> I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly

...or to create massive stock market front-running opportunities with plausible deniability.

"But, but, Hanlon's razor!". Sorry, but at this level of responsibility, incompetence equals malice.

We fscking all have to live with the consequences. That includes those of us who could not vote for an alternative.

When you say EU rules, I guess it's the GDPR part on having the user data stay in the EU?

Otherwise I don't see any other rule that would ask the foreign company to move most of it's workforce and production capacity.

No, OP is referring to the fact that the companies that are big enough to be subject to the EU DSA's rules about platforms are all American. So any fines handed down for violations of the DSA are exclusively to American big tech firms. The rejoinder is that the rules apply to everyone, it just happens that the companies that are subject are American.

Quick fact check: DSA (more specifically, VLOPs regulations) also applies to AliExpress, Temu, Shein, Pornhub, TikTok, Zalando, and others.

There are European companies that are under the regulation as well.

The DSA is the part that applies to all companies in some way as well (things like the need for moderation and a way for people to reach you with complaints). The DMA is about the market and how to deal with monopolies.

the USB-C legislation was pretty clearly directed at Apple alone

No, it wasn't. The usb forum could have decided to use a lightning compatible standard, but there were problems with it.

Besides, apple are one of the decision makers in the usb c standard, the legislation mandated a standard, but not a specific one, just the same one for all, and this forum which includes apple decided to go with usb c https://www.usb.org/members

...and now we get stupid overly complex and fragile connectors on things like laptops instead of simple and robust barrel plugs.

I think you mean: 700 different permutations of barrel plug diameter, sex and voltage?

There has been maybe two dozen different barrel plugs widely used over the last two decades, and "12V" and "20V" were already a de-facto standard for laptops with 2S and 3S batteries respectively (there was some artificial segmentation like 18.5V, 19V, 19.5V, 20V, etc. but they are all within tolerance range). I have not seen a male laptop; they are always female, being the "receiver" of the power.

Search for "laptop" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_power_connector#Listin...

That leaves out all the "what is a computer?" devices that had all sort of plugs that wouldn't be barrel: tablets, chromebooks, raspberry pi, e-readers etc.

Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)

Those didn't go the barrel plug route in the first place to allow for charging through the same port, and would have been a loophole if barrel was mandated. USB-C was honestly the only option that made sense IMHO.

tablets, chromebooks

Most of those used either USB or a barrel plug depending on their size.

raspberry pi, e-readers

USB.

Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)

Many of those use smaller barrel plugs, appropriate for their lower voltage.

The main problem with USB-C is the tiny fragile connector (search for images of "bent USB-C"), and the fact that it's a standard that tries to be what should really be a bunch of separate standards. It's hard to get a barrel plug wrong. It's too easy to get USB-C wrong, and cause damaged devices:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713713

Two dozen different plugs over the last two decades means that we're averaging 1.2 different barrel plugs per year.

They search space for criteria is practically limitless. They have and would absolutely fish for precisely the criteria benefiting Musk. This playbook has been applied well by the crony capitalist class in the 3rd world, and is always a moving target. Most players know that and will not chase the moving target, knowing that another set of rules will emerge that will create new hurdles protecting the crony capitalist. A few will, and get burned.

There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here: 1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh 2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism) The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.

Why 85% and not 80%? It’s an arbitrary cutoff that happens to benefit Elon.

Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).

Three Tesla models meet the 85% threshold and three do not.

If Tesla was writing these rules, surely they'd have chosen the 80% threshold instead.

I doubt they see the Ford Mustang as being in their same target market, and wouldn't be a reason to increase the standard.

I’d note the ones that meet the threshold are by far the vast majority of Tesla sales and profit. This puts them at a structural advantage. Those three models account for 95% of deliveries in 2024. The rules as stand only impact their highest margin vehicles, which account for 4.8% of their total deliveries.

The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.

I don't understand whats going on with this shithole world, the term Conflict of Interest used to be ubiquitous and everyone understood it. Now its such obvious blatant corruption everywhere, has it really always been this bad and we just all have too much information from the internet now?

Being a sell out was bad. Now it is the goal: to be an "influencer"

I think as people feel financially squeezed, they get less strict on how to get by. This leads to acceptance of "take the money and run." The loss of the middle class is the source of many woes.

Somehow benefits someone who builds stuff in America. What a travesty.

[flagged]

Source, you?

It's different when I like the rules.

Washington state is going in the other direction: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...

I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.

At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.

I would go as far as saying, that almost no one outside the US knows about state specific rules. People watch or read some news, but they are usually not that much into the US inner political theater, that they additionally make an effort to learn what state has what other rules.

I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?

It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?

Yeah, without context it doesn’t mean much. Washington is one of the majority liberal states. OP was pointing to a Washington state law that will also “target” Tesla but in the other direction.

Well the problem in the federal case is that musk has for all intents and purposes purchased his new federal exemption from Trump.

Did his competitors do something similar in Washington?

Sure it's 85% now, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Next month?

This administration's policy decisions aren't particularly stable.

I would be surprised if Ford does anything drastic with their supply chain. Probably just wait this out. POTUS is going to be stripped of this ridiculous tariff "power" one way or another.

* Bogus emergency is up for review

* Congress discussing stripping power

* Constitutionality in question

* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up

I've been thinking that reason must prevail for nigh on a decade and while there have been moments where it seems to, overall I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic at the moment. I have been told that "degrowth" (for the purpose of slowing climate change) is the most unpopular policy imaginable, but it seems like we are taking a stab at it for different reasons. Perhaps that unpopularity will have some effect; it does seem (both anecdotally for me and in some data that I've seen) that swing voters are already regretting their decision.

Most of this pantomime is also illegal or unconstitutional. For example you can't pass a law or regulation that targets one person or entity. But it'll take a long time to litigate everything because the DoJ and congress have been rooted.

> For example you can't pass a law or regulation that targets one person or entity.

Yes, you can. Such a law cannot direct punishment or assign guilt to a particular individual or entity without a judicial trial, or it would violate the Bill of Attainder clause, but laws doing other things that apply to a specific named individual or entity are (unless they violate some other provision) Constitutional; in fact, in some cases they are necessary to satisfy other Constitutional rules.

Lutnick is a man of his word:

https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...

Tesla is now above that price from March again. Orangehorseshoe loves Tesla!

Not going to change the buying market. A lot of people will never buy a Tesla. There are options, with more choices coming next year.

> Not going to change the buying market.

Price changes absolutely change the buying market. What a weird thing to say. A lot of people will never buy a Tesla, a lot still will (they delivered 300k+ vehicles in Q1). The ones who still will buy will also consider the price.

No company can withstand political backlash at a national scale.

Tesla has lost significant ground just because Merlin started playing politics. Target is suffering badly from their DEI decision.

Globally, Tesla is in even worse shape. No one in Europe will be buy one now. China makes their own EVs.

The stock is being propped up by institutional investors. Eventually even that will collapse.

All of those things are true, and none of that is mutually exclusive to price changes affecting (what is left of) the buyer demand.

Those people will buy and own exactly what they deserve.

There is a thing, i call "cos-playing" - where basically everybody agrees upon a "golden past" and by "reenacting" the golden past in clothing, language and behaviour, this "golden past" will be brought back and forced to stay. Not in the picture are external circumstances, circumstances the golden past brought about, that make a repetition impossible (pension systems calcifying society, monopolies, etc. ).

The truely dangerous phase is reached, when the frantic cosplaying shows no effect and the conclusion slowly crawls towards "insanity is what you do with your life". Because then you have people with nowhere to go and the tools of the past, wishing for an end.

The vast majority of their battery cells are made in China and Japan so im not sure how they even qualify. Oh yeah, corruption.

Tesla produces most of their batteries in Nevada.

They can qualify because unlike most automakers they do actually have significant investment in their own battery supply-chain.

It’s not corruption it’s just paying back for the votes Elon bought with this 1 million a day program on swing states.

Uhm, wait a moment.

I have zero faith in "free market" ideologues, because what we actually get when they gain power is just favoritism for "free market" ideologues.

You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.

Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.

I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.

This line of thinking is increasing and dangerous (and no doubt intentional from at least some of the popular examples that come to mimd). It will make it that much harder for authentic candidates to talk about legitimate change and ideology.

When your platform is "free lunches for school children" no one has to worry about the devastating consequences of someone doing it to you.

Many of these people literally believe that "free lunches for school children" inevitably turns into "those socialists will force me to eat bugs in an Orwellian nightmare".

For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.

Meanwhile they somehow don't see wealthy and powerful people using their political connections to enrich themselves by garnering favorable treatment from powerful government officials as an essential part of how things worked in the USSR.

The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.

Is that like projection?

Either that or just getting pleasure from doing it and getting the opposite of pleasure when on the receiving end.

[flagged]

A very rational fear for anyone who has any knowledge of history. There aren't any good or bad guys in this fight.

The bad guys are the one in power right now trying to turn the US democracy into an autocracy, following the Project2025 playbook and what other autocrats have done like Putin. This isn't a normal administration.

Freedom of religion as well, and the age and mental acuity of the president. And handling of secret information. And being involved in foreign conflicts.

Don't forget Kenneth Walker's second amendment rights. You could understand some failing to live up to their values if they were minor issues, but it's like all of their core issues. About the only thing that seems consistent is wanting to harm their fellow citizens that they perceive as different.

Wilhoit's Law:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

That doesn't apply to Trump. s/law/what actually goes down/

Trump and his administration have explicitly directly claimed that they are the law, at least in as much as the executive branch should believe. They gave an executive order instructing every employee and official of the executive that they shall wholly and exclusively defer to the interpretation of the law as dictated by the president.

As a 20th century political theorist once said, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." If you hear someone talking high-minded rhetoric and idealism but they won't make a friend or an enemy over it, they don't believe it.

Can't forget being "for the rule of law".

Back the blue, unless of course it's the Capitol Police.

Or, in my city, the cops who blew the whistle on other cops for electrocuting people's testicles as a means of extracting forced confessions. The "back the blue" crowd absolutely hates those guys.

I tend to think of "rule of law" as describing the fairness of the courts. But then you need effective law enforcement for the courts to mean anything.

Most of these examples are good ones, but this one actually isn’t. I don’t know what part of the country you’re from, but in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens. I don’t want to debate the substance of the view, I’m just pointing out that it’s not actually contradictory like you’re implying. I grew up in virginia when it was a red state, my first reaction would’ve been relief that it was still possible. But it also would’ve been my first reaction 25 years ago when I was a Gore supporter in a Bush county. Jefferson’s tree of liberty and all that.

I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.

Is this saying the viewpoint is that violence against the government (capitol police) is supported, violence against local police is not supported (back the blue) and violence against citizens is supported (back the blue)?

The guy's arguing all over the place. Not much of it makes logical sense unless you stop looking for logic in the arguments.

Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.

Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.

Their beliefs are fairly simple.

Members of the in-group have divine right and shouldn't be bound by laws. Anyone who opposes them is the enemy and should be harmed or destroyed.

> in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens

From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.

> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.

In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.

And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.

> 60s ... traditional

It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.

> From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.

The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.

> 60s ... traditional It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.

The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....

Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.

> Today, when you talk about foundational principles like federalism, limited government, etc., the chief response is that those are incompatible with having a government powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority.

We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.

The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.

Edit:

> https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....

I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:

When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.

They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)

> I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.

That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.

> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.

That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.

The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.

> The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after ...

The context before and after is quite well known; I don't have to read it. What they say is that 'all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to protect those rights, governments are instituted among men.' (from memory, probably a few errors).

All means all - minorities included. The equality is for "all men"; rights are for "all men". Nothing is said about Britain and its monarch, except in your dreams of rationalizing oppression. The language is plain and clear, part of the reason it is so well-known.

That seems inconsistent with the history of slavery in the US. The evidence is that the people writing that didn't actually mean "all men" - if I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United... it suggests 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. That seems like strong evidence that the literal text was being interpreted with implicit caveats.

A document cannot simultaneously holds all minorities to be equal with a right to liberty and accommodate slavery as it existed in the 1700s. Some of the signers may personally have disagreed with slavery but it seems difficult to say that the document itself represented a repudiation of the practice.

Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.

That's a unique take fundamentally at odds with the very concept of the Senate.

> The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that.

But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.

> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.

That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.

Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.

> The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers.. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.

James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:

> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."

As well as : > "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."

As well as:

> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."

> That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.

Yes it does, in fact. And while people can try to doublespeak and have everyone parsing it out, all that matters is where you end up.

Even if you think that all that matters is “where you end up,” your logic still doesn’t work. Adhering to principles of federalism and limited government also changes other aspects of society, in ways that people might deem desirable.

A solution that leaves people under cruel, evil oppression for generations tells you everything you need to know about the people supporting it.

Prior to the civil rights movement it was assumed that by freedom of association, it was beyond the scope of the government to prevent things like segregation by private citizens. e.g. if a business owner did not want to serve black customers, then that is his right. So yes, someone who does not support the government having that power to infringe on freedom of association will not support any government intervention to prevent voluntary segregation.

This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.

He opposes any known solution to the terrible evil of segregation, and doesn't care to offer any other. If you stand by while someone is drowning, eating a hot dog, you can claim 'I do support agitation for drowning victims', but the facts are plain.

Even in your analogy, that just means you’re not willing to jeopardize yourself in any way to help, not that you affirmatively want the other person to drown. In fact they recommend that you don’t try to help drowning victims, because they often cause their rescuers to drown as well. More generally, not caring about other people isn’t the same as affirmatively wanting to harm them.

> that just means you’re not willing to jeopardize yourself in any way to help, not that you affirmatively want the other person to drown.

In life, in practice, there isn't meaningful difference. They still drown because you abandoned your responsibilities.

The US Civil War was fought over protecting minorities from private slaveowners, so the federal government’s role didn’t fundamentally change in the 1960s.

> who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself

I must have missed the outpouring of Republican support for the black lives matter protests when they were attacked by police riots or when police stations were attacked. No private citizens being protected there, and the protesting was directly against government oppression (including of the 2nd amendment even!).

Republicans don’t think that police using lethal force against people with long criminal records—which come from terrorizing fellow citizens—is “government oppression.” That doesn’t describe every person that was the subject of the protests, but certainly describes the people who became the figureheads.

That's some high and mighty rhetoric, but it doesn't apply at all to Kenneth Walker (whose second amendment rights were trampled on) or Breonna Taylor (who died because of it). So once again, did I just miss the outpouring of Republican support for those specific protests or what?

'I'm all for rights, except the right to life (of some citizens)' is absolutely disgusting. Wow this comment says a lot about you and should remove the good faith people around here give you.

You're just giving him an opening to retrench at a steelman - when the police have to respond with deadly force for some completely reasonable justification, "right to life" doesn't have much to do with it.

The point is that even in very clear cut situations where the police are in the wrong, and have trampled over the very 2nd amendment rights that Republicans claim to love so much, it's then still crickets from Republicans. So this alleged "violence against the government is treated as distinct" seems to be just more post-hoc rationalization nonsense.

The problem is that rayiner is continually trolling with gut-appealing half-truths, sidesteps the straightforward logical implications as long as he can by responding tangentially, and when he can't do that any longer he just bails on the conversation rather than confronting the contradiction.

I guess I'm just glad us actually-conservatives (meaning everyone from "RINOs" to "the left" that actually respects our societal institutions enough to not want to see our country on the scrap heap) have reached a critical mass to beat back this wall of disingenuous bad-faith bullshit.

> as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.

Unless it's the Jan 6th protesters.

Or the so-called "trucker convoy" across the border up here in Canada. (Convinced half the new-found hostility to us comes from this incident somehow getting on the radar of people who normally barely acknowledge Canada as existing)

In the end it's very much tribal, and little to do with the substance of issues and more to do with perceived teams.

Funny thing about the fictional "Wilhoit’s Law". It's not a law of science. It's nothing but an Internet snipe from a blog post by a music composer. It wasn't even written while the political scientist Frank Wilhoit was alive.

https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...

It's just half of a truism: people apply different standards to "their side". As true of the left wing as the right.

Being commonly misattributed (which GP did not do!) doesn’t make it fictional, nor does coming from a composer make it automatically wrong or useless.

It's not relevant that the quote came from a composer specifically. It's relevant that it didn't come from someone with any expertise about politics. Yet it's been elevated to the status of a "law" by people who just really like the way it insults their opponents.

Such has been the US agenda in the developing world since the 70's. It's sort of odd to see them do it to themselves though. It's as if they became confused and started believing their own cover story.

Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.

If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.

If I was forced to say one good thing about the guy, it's that he is quickly and faithfully delivering on his campaign promises, moreso than any other president that ever served in my lifetime. He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist and doing exactly what he said he'd do. Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving, but he said he'd do them, was elected, and then subsequently did them. So, I'll give him that.

> on his campaign promises (...) the Project 2025

He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.

He explicitly stated that he was not familiar with the contents of Project 2025 on numerous occasions. This did not stop the media from pushing it as yet another hoax. It is unclear whether anyone has actually read Project 2025 or if it just sounds scary.

It's truly remarkable how much honest material there is to criticize Trump with, yet folks insist on repeating blatant lies.

> whether anyone has actually read Project 2025

I don't get what you mean. It's not some secret - it's available for everyone to read. It's also written by people who are all around Trump and who got influential positions from him. It's been talked about for ages. Trump not knowing about it would be extremely weird. (Or if he actually never heard about it, that would mean he's extremely clueless - I'm not sure what's worse for him)

> He explicitly stated that he was not familiar with the contents of Project 2025

Yes, that is the "blatant lie" being discussed.

I think it’s obvious he hasn’t read it though - he couldn’t even read an invite from King Charles

Except brokering peace in Ukraine. He also promised an economic boom.

We got an economic "boom" alright......

Doesn’t have to have a 100% hit rate to be “getting things done”.

I don't remember hearing about any peace. I did heard about ending the war, which might mean peace for both sides, or just one.

>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.

“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”

When you promise to broker peace you are promising only to try since it is obvious that you do not have the agency to guarantee success. There are a million things to hate about Trump's handling of Ukraine and Russia, but this just isn't one of them.

He said he would end it on day one. That's a promise he didn't keep.

It's not my fault he made such a dumb, impossible promise. It is true he broke it.

He lied and said he had no idea about Project 2025 - when people say "he's doing what he said" no - he's lied about everything and double backed a half dozen times.

> Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving

You seem to have missed, "highly illegal".

But sure "the trains are running on time"

While I agree with the sentiment that he is not backing down from a lot of his batshit promises, let's not forget that he made a lot of promises. The Russian invasion didn't end on day 1 or day 100 and he decided to only strongarm one side - iirc he said he would threaten Ukraine with withdrawing support and threaten Russia with giving obscene amounts of support to Ukraine.

His predictions about what other people/countries would do were, of course, wrong, but his promises about what he (and his admin) would do or try to do themselves are for the most part being delivered.

It's not for the most part. He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.

He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises

He disavowed Project 2025, so really, he lied to us during the campaign.

No, he didn't acknowledge Project 2025 and he tried to distance himself from it.

> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist

You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.

He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.

Have you read Project 2025? It’s being executed. Here’s a handy tracker someone made: https://www.project2025.observer/

Like launching a private $500k membership club for elites:

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/donald-trump-jr-m...

True to their word!

That's the wrong Trump.

That's not an argument they accepted when Hunter Biden was selling some paintings, and this is far more straightforwardly corrupt than that.

Against elites but appoints billionaire cronies. Make it make sense.

When I read "elites" it always makes me wonder what kind of elites are meant. Surely not elites in intelligence or wisdom and knowledge. Does it mean just having tons of money? What does it mean to be an elite university in contrast to being an elite person?

They are not against elites. They are elites vaging war on their ennemies who are not elites.

All political conflict is elite vs. elite. The extent to which non-elites are targeted is collateral damage or as proxy forces.

The “libertarians” who are in bed with Trump however…

The behavior I’ve seen from so many libertarians from 2017 onward, especially during the pandemic, January 6th, and Trump’s reelection, has revealed so much to me and has made me rethink my libertarianism. So many libertarians, when pressed, would gladly align themselves with the far-right for their own benefit, whether to accelerate the destruction of the state they hate so much, or whether because, deep down inside, they agree with the far-right on social views, and libertarianism was simply a cover for them to promote abhorrent social views.

I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…

Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.

I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.

Thanks for the thoughtful post with the rich historical references. For what it’s worth, I experienced a drift which is the mirror image of yours, starting left, developing my appreciation for the necessity of economic competition, and then coming to grips with the limitations of government intervention.

I'm right there with you, friend. I still consider myself a 'libertarian' though. Just always with a small 'l' because the party is garbage, as the ideals are primed to spread corporate propaganda like wildfire once someone buys into the fallacy that coercion by non-governmental entities is definitionally impossible.

When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!

Are you me?

Although I'm more Georgist these days.

I think Georgism is a pretty limited position, not a complete framework. I do agree with land value tax and tax on natural resource. But I'm not sure its the complete solution.

Also not sure if the idea of paying out people from this tax makes much sense. Arguable it made more sense when he wrote it, before the social state.

Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.

To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.

You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.

A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.

There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)

In the US, "libertarian" has come to mean "maximum liberty for me, which means you are on your own".

The rich, like the poor, are free to live under bridges and starve.

The free wolf, free to enter the henhouse of free hens

One of the biggest challenges with the libertarian movement is that it attracts people who like libertarianism not because of the non-aggression principle, but because it enables them to legally engage in certain activities.

An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.

During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.

It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.

I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.

I've always been amazed that Goldwater's Jewishness wasn't an issue with his right-wing supporters. Did they just not know?

Libertarianism is essentially "more powerful and richer people should not be restricted in any way whatsoever". If your freedom or rights are limited by someone who is not directly government, libertarian answer is "that is their freedom you dont matter, government should protect their right to mistreat you".

I think this not only a strawman, but it is also literally factually incorrect.

Libertarianism is very simple and easy to dismiss out of hand if you believe this about it.

Something like that happened to me, but I'm European, and I never had many illusions about much American libertarianism. It was clearly funded by people who were just using the movement to get favorable regulation. And that was reflected in the issues they were talking about. I think there is no contradiction between a small government and one that can fine or arrest people aggressively when they break the rules.

In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.

> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.

I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.

Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.

Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.

I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.

In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.

On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.

In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.

Trump isn't a free market ideologue and never has been. I'm not sure what you expected. He didn't conceal his viewpoints; if you are surprised, I think you weren't paying much attention.

The Republican Party on the other hand is very much in favor of the free market… or was. Many long time Republicans turned on a dime and deserve to be called out on it.

They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards. But the party was founded on the premise that tariffs would protect their northern constituents and industries, and they took over a century to shake that tendency. Perhaps the only Republican president before Reagan who was in favor of lowering tariffs was Eisenhower, as part of rebuilding globally after WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...

> They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards.

Which is the relevant part. I’m not really concerned with historical positions of the party itself so much as the politicians themselves, none of whom were alive a century ago.

I think it's a bit more accurate to say that many long time Republicans claimed to support free markets. It's a little naive to believe that they actually meant any of that in reality. Them and their donors were growing fabulously wealthy off of functionally non-free markets.

They don't even claim to support total free market as end goal. Both party support free speech and free trade on principle, but support what shouldn't be free is highly political.

I don’t know about markets but he claimed to be a free speech ideologue. But then he bought twitter and proved otherwise.

I don't believe Trump bought Twitter.

Elon or Trump? Or do you see them as a team?

Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..

I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe

I just think a lot of democrats really haven't paid attention to how Trump has morphed the Republican party and the realignment that has been going on. They still think of a Republican as George w. Bush / John McCain / Mitt Romney even though they have all been effectively excommunicated from the party. I think part of it was hope was Trump was a momentary blip but that's obviously no longer the case.

Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.

I don't think most Republicans want the destruction of our country so no I don't think he's an accurate reflection

And yet he dominates the party. How could that be without popular support from the party base?

It’s easy to dominate the party as long as you have 51% of the primary voters, which in 2024 was about 20% of registered Republicans.

Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.

If people cared they would vote in the primaries. If they don’t, then they must be happy with how those who do are voting.

But then they also vote for him in the general election, since he won, so I conclude he has the support of the Republican base.

Ahh democracy

Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.

But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?

Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.

If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.

Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).

You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.

It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.

50 years of attacks on our education systems have yielded exactly what was intended: a nation so poorly educated that they cannot discern truth from fiction anymore.

They wanted destruction of minorities (racial, sexual, gender, religious), but not of the country. They still hold out hope that Trump will hurt them more in the long run. It’s an extremely mean-spirited party at this point.

  > reflect what voters want.

To be listened to, rather than to be told what to care about, and to have those concerns make it to competent people with the power to do something about them.

But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.

It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.

How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.

Repeal the act capping house representatives to 435. The house then expands massively and you get more representative government.

I think the fix is a more drastic refactor than that. We need more depth in this tree. Much more depth.

I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.

Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.

So you have 6,000 representatives, which is about the same ratio as the population back in 1790.

What does each one do? What agency does each have?

They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.

The point is to make it easier for people to hassle their representative, and to make it feasible for them to actually understand what the people they represent actually want.

What would happen is that representatives are more locally focused on their districts and would vote in larger 'sub'-parties.

In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.

I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.

One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.

> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.

Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.

Where congress just follows the party line. Or does back room deals

I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.

The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.

Back room deals aren't necessary a negative. That how the sausage is made. I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise, rather then having media spectral where congress sessions are reality TV. Mostly used to get clips that can then be used in adds.

> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.

I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.

Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.

I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.

"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"

Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.

The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.

I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.

> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.

Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.

You define a bunch of "constituencies"

Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.

Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,

You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest. If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.

Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.

If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.

>I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise,

Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.

It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.

Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.

Change.

Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.

The only real issue is these assholes are taking me down with them.

Maybe that's what the people want?

Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.

Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?

And someone with a mere 10m in the bank makes more than 500 grand just from their wealth appreciating.

Yet people seem to have far less concern about people with such relatively low wealth.

I'm WAY closer to the 50k group than the 500k group. I just want a leader who has some empathy.

It's never too late to fix. The problem is the time frame.

The changes made thus far present at least a decade of rebuilding to fix, and we're only 100 days in.

> It's never too late to fix. The problem is the time frame.

We're never out of time but the problem is time? There is absolutely a point of no return.

Sorry, I should have said:

The problem is the time frame of the fix

If the US ends up a smoking ruin it can still be fixed, it'll just take longer.

I mean, eventually we also hope some other places develop something like a functioning democracy, or whatever is better in the future, and we hope it will be a matter of time until they at some point do.

The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.

[flagged]

Please don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We were much better off the last 4 years than it looks like we will be for the next, but it was far from ideal/perfect.

Who’s “we”, what does better off mean and over what time period.

Predicting the future is hard.

Having said that, certainty does make planning easier.

Wanting change is a curious notion considering they are FOX viewing baby boomers. Isn‘t it more a change in the sense of stopping change and turning back time?

Change what though? I'm convinced a lot of this has been right wing media portraying government as corrupt and broken for decades while demonizing the Democratic party as being responsible. True, some of this is likely the result of globalism and neoliberalism, but instead of an educated debate on the tradeoffs involved and how the world has changed, there is a culture war.

For life to be worse for the people they don't like. They just didn't expect it to be worse for them too

A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.

By my reckoning, Trump is just the reactionary talk radio monster of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others finally escaping its cage. They'd get people all riled up with low-information rage against the gubmint, and then dial it back just enough to herd them to the booth to vote for establishment republicans. The main way the party has morphed is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.

Tariffs are antithetical to free markets.

Trump is in no way a free market ideologue and has made that very clear. Or are you talking about Elon?

I'd categorize Elon as more of a free speech ideologue who bans any speech that makes him uncomfortable.

What speech that makes him uncomfortable has he banned exactly ? Asking out of curiosity because I see posts on twitter all the time calling him Nazi, blah-blah.

X will happily ban you for saying 'cisgender'. But since enforcement is inconsistent and opaque it provides plausible deniability.

It's much in the same vein that Putin allows a few token 'opposition' politicians to exist.

There are tens of thousands of posts with the word "cisgender" at the moment on X. So, I think this "ban" is currently only in one's febrile imagination. Putin does not allow tens of thousands of opposition politicians, so the analogy also does not hold.

Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.

https://www.axios.com/2024/08/27/zuckerberg-biden-administra...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...

As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-el...

> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.

> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”

> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.

The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.

Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.

[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.

So, posts are NOT being banned, but only visibility tagged as that article mentions and as many users also explicitly tested. No one reported a ban - only a warning with a visibility setting. Seems perfectly fine. Your speech is NOT banned as you incorrectly claim. And your account is still valid.

Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.

And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.

Firstly, it's absolutely bonkers that any alleged 'free speech absolutist' could consider 'cisgender' to be a slur. It's like saying that 'man' is a slur.

And that's not an argument that you're going to do well with. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.

---

But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.

---

And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.

The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.

The wider Trump administration, and Musk in particular for his DOGE work which has included firing regulatory enforcers.

The wider Trump administration is extremely anti-free-market. They're very explicit about it. The Republican party is nothing like it used to be.

The Republican party only persists as a name. The Trump party has long subsumed it.

That's always been a feature of the 2-party system. I mean, the Democrats were once the party of southern white supremacists. We don't really get new parties, but the parties we have change over time as the coalitions within them rearrange.

I think a multi-party parliamentary system would be better at finding middle ground, but it's silly to say that the two-party system keeps politics "fixed".

True, the make-up and priorities of both Republicans and Democrats have changed a few times over the years.

I would say that in this case, it's a party aligning to an individual far more than it has ever been in the past. Racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans because they were enamored with a Republican leader, they changed parties because they found themselves misaligned with the Democratic Party's pivot to civil rights.

I wholeheartedly agree that a parliamentary system would serve the US better.

In terms of tariffs you're normally either a "protectionist" or for "free trade". That's sort of the two sides of that argument. There is some middle ground, but those are the extremes. It is not really related to regulations, that's more if you believe that the market is able to regulate itself, in terms of environmental impact, fair wages, safety and those sorts of things. The latter is the things which are impacted by firing regulatory enforces, or removing regulation altogether.

The Trump administration seems to run a protectionist policy, with a deregulated home market. This will hurt exports as it makes products more expensive, but also less likely to be able to comply with the regulations of other markets, e.g. in the EU, which is heavily regulated. US companies have a reduced incentive to comply with EU rules, if they know they have a protected market at home they can milk instead.

The tariffs are literally just Trump and 2-3 cronies.

Ideology is their sales pitch, it's for you and me to consume. It has nothing whatsoever to do with their goals and intentions. This has been true of Thatcher and her deeply protectionist policies all the way up to today with Trump and his tariffs. We're not choosing between regulations and no regulations, we're choosing between regulations that benefit the working class and regulations that benefit the owning class. (Although I suppose it could be argued that in the US you choose between regulations that benefit the owning class and regulations that benefit the owning class more)

Same. This era has exposed them as the shameless hypocrites they are.

It was always about power accumulation.

Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke" when they harass people for being it.

> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"

No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.

The people who go on about “woke” are the most performative victims of all. Invoking the word “woke” for things they don’t like is a form of that performative victimization.

Didn't you just say exactly the same thing as the parent comment?

I can't tell if this is trolling.

If you genuinely don't think that each side has principles, which in fact overlap considerably, you aren't very curious about the world.

ETA: In case you are genuinely interested in learning about how liberal and conservative people differ psychologically, Jonathan Haidt is a very good person to read.

One groups principles are hierarchy, control, and cruelty.

Arbitrary corrupt incompetency is what they're looking for.

Caring about other, having respect, being sensitive, these are all 'woke' things from the "great awakening" cult.

I want more affordable college and the people in charge want to send people like me to concentration camps through kangaroo courts. This is the difference.

There is not and has never been any trace of free speech or free market "ideology" from Trump. Perhaps as a talking point but never in any policy or action. Trump is the anti-libertarian, severely authoritarian and moving things toward a centrally planned economy!

It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.

If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").

One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.

The Singaporean government's hand in it's own economy is larger than a lot of self-professed communist states - Temasek Holdings, Mediacorp, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines etc etc.

I never understood why libertarians/free market proponents think that Singapore is the paragon of laissez-faire economics. Try studying the country's housing market policies, for example, and you'll quickly realise that the government is extremely interventionist.

The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.

Singapore is the example of a (relatively) benevolent dictator over decades.

I wouldn't call it a dictatorship -- no label neatly applies to Singapore, but calling it a dictatorship (even if benevolent) is quite incorrect. Describing it as a soft authoritarian country is much more appropriate.

Maybe free in some areas eg. trade and less so in others.

While they are interventionist in some way, so is everybody else. The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.

We can learn a lot from the policies, both free market and otherwise. And we shouldn't learn from others.

No free market person thinks of Singapore as some prefect example. As that doesn't exist. So you have to take example from different places. And Singapore has more good examples then most.

> The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.

Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.

Singapore owns the HDB, which owns the leasing rights to 80%+ of all residential property and almost all land in the country. Issuing 99 year leases to citizens and PRs.

Imagine if the US government owned all land rights, built virtually all apartments and instigated racial quotas to match the demographics of the country; then subsidized the price drastically to make it affordable for the population. That's what Singapore does.

This isn't unique either.

The other libertarian wet-dream Hong Kong has a similar land-leasing policy. The major difference there is that 999 year leases were allowed at one point (rare and no longer issued).

In fact the only freehold property in Hong Kong is St John’s Cathedral.

Arguably, a similar problem exists for "big government" ideologues, except more severe.

https://fee.org/articles/10-crazy-examples-of-unrelated-wast...

Every voice on that (except the last one as it is too vague) is popular with the relevant electorate. I dislike how a bunch of random unrelated shit is stuffed together into a single bill but that is because the US is a vetocracy.

Isn't manufacturing more cars in the US also popular with the electorate?

1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms

2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.

As a quick excercise:

- for almost every industry new factories would be needed to significantly increase domestic production

- you are disencintivized to mix foreign and domestic materials if you plan to export (as you are going to pay potentially double tariffs)

- most things (especially cars) have long supply chains

- building a factory takes both non-trivial investment and at least a few months

And you get that for many products it would take sorta

    lenght_of_supply_chain * (few_months + gathering_fund_permits_time)

>1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms

My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.

There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.

I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.

Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.

>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.

I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.

I dont understand what this article means. Tesla's aren't imported so why would there be tariffs on them. The source link leads nowhere.

The tariffs cover parts as well as whole vehicles. The thing announced here is that they'll have a rebate program if the car is 85% manufactured in the US, and the rebate will be in effect for 2 years. So you still pay the tariff on parts, but you get some or all the money back if you meet that threshold. The idea being that it gives the company two years to move their parts manufacturing or sources. But the threshold is so high that only Tesla gets to enjoy the rebate, not any other company.

But even Tesla only maxes out at 75 - how are they eligible? Also wouldn’t surprise me if this carve out is special purpose to give Tesla and only Tesla this rebate.

It seems to be about a tariff rebate on imported parts.

Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported? So while it is a benefit, it is a slightly bizarre one?

Would be nice to see a technical definition for how the % imported is worked out.

> Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported?

85% of parts != 85% of cost

The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.

It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.

The article is really bad. Even the original source is just an off-hand comment from Lutnick, not the final regulation.

The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.

Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.

Fact sheet: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...

"Final" regulation: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...

"US automakers will receive credit up to 15% of the value of vehicles to offset cost of imported parts" https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-sec-lutnick-cars-85-percent-...

How is the unit for domestic component content defined? Is a screw a component in the same way a windshield is? Is it by weight? By cost?

It appears that the American Automobile Labeling Act measures domestic content on a value basis (that is, the amount the manufacturer pays the supplier for it):

https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...

Does that include tariffs?

Yes.

I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.

I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.

I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.

There seems to be a (largely American) misconception that people in positions of power are there because they earned such a position through being capable and competent.

Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.

It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.

Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.

I don't mean to imply that I believe they are excellent people who will take care of us all, nor that there is any illuminati cabal like that other ludicrous comment.

I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.

There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

You've missed the tail end of that story - Trump made an angry call to Bezos, presumably full of threats, after which Bezos announced that they weren't going to do that and totally never planned to.

It's still an example of a lever.

He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.

Yes, accidental, hapless stumbling onto major windfall on multiple occasions clearly is an indication of nothing more than pure, unadulterated, McDuck level of luck and not, I repeat, not indication of anything but simple return of a favor.

Mentioned it a few times in the past, but this is just a big freak out and America having a hard time squaring the fact that by almost all meaningful metrics, their "enemy" has taken the lead. Nobody really knows how to fix it, everyone at the top knows they can't really do much about it, but they have to show "power", because that's all they have left. Nobody wants to "lose" in public's eyes, but that's just how some of the world is starting to think.

Honestly, I feel kinda conflicted. From one point, I always looked up to the American values, and way of life. But it's becoming increasingly misaligned with my own values and the things I find important in life.

Why aren't you assuming the opposite -- that these mythical levers don't actually exist?

>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened

They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.

But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.

This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.

What about the voters that vote out members of Congress because they go against Trump?

He's chaotic and unpredictable by normal standards, but that seems irrelevant to me.

I don't mean the damage isn't consequential. What I mean is he has very obvious and simple motivations and reactions. For the purposes of somehow dealing with him, it's not all that important that "he might do anything". It seems obvious that anyone who wants to deal with him should take that as given and move right past worrying about what he might do and assume that he will, for sure, do anything. But he will do so for completely basic reasons and in response to completely basic stimuli.

A bullfighter completely antagonizes the bull into a frothing unthinking frenzy, on purpose, and owns the bull.

The bull is actually totally predictable and manipulable, and not because the bull can be reasoned with.

Musk and some few on the right are the only ones not being complete idiots about handling him. They are getting everything they want from operating him.

The left probably can't play that same trick since they probably can't figure out ways to tell him he's great and get leftie things out of him. Or forget left & right just business where they're all assholes, everyone can't play the same suck-up game. Musk is apparently doing suck-up without looking like a weak begger suck-up. Or he's allowing himself to look like just enough of a beta to keep Trump from feeling threatened, yet, like how his maga hat isn't red. Flouting the uniform, yet, not. It's probably a fine line there. And there is only room for a few magic pretend-beta slots. Trump will simply not give good behavior to very many people no matter what they say, so if all 100 people in his circle were all the perfect suck-up, still only a couple will get what they want and the rest get pissed on.

So anyone that didn't happen to win that lottery (or just weren't as good as Musk at that game) will have to go the other way which is poking him with a stick.

But they aren't. In the left vs right arena the left just continues to try to use rational arguments and appeals to reason on people who don't give a shit about that. Just who are the dummies when it comes down to that?

Though I wasn't originally intending to talk left or right but just about chaos impacting business and these supposed hard nosed rutheless powerful captains of the world just letting it happen. They only care about one thing, and he's burning that one thing by the billions, and they are...what? Nothing?

So when I say "I can only assume they are somehow ok with it" I mean there must be things I don't know. Like ultimately this doesn't really hurt Bezos and the like all that much. Like they make money on whatever happens somehow. Or they think longer term and they are ready to absolutely gorge themselves on some kind of bounce back in a couple years because they are somehow positioned exactly right. Like how at a smaller scale how Equifax ultimately made a shit ton of new money as a result of having their web site hacked. Maybe all the Bezos's of the country are just arms dealers who make out no matter what.

I don't know. Perhaps everyone's right and they are all tools no better equipped than myself. But I just think that's a kind of stupid take. Some probably are, and some surely are not. I am quite sure I can not solve Apple's Trump problem better than Tim. I simply wonder, what the heck are they doing? It looks from here on the ground like they aren't doing anything. But I can only assume that just means I can't see anything that matter from here, and don't know how to read what I can see.

[flagged]

> I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.

The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.

Huh? If anything, it now should be clearer than ever that it has been for a long time. The only difference is that the oligarch that happens to be benefiting from it is in the public spotlight, associated with and part of the current administration, and at the same time main guy for several publicly owned companies.

If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.

Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?

> If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.

Good grief, this is just an axiomatic belief, then. No evidence will sway you one way or another.

What part of oligarch is hard to translate into sufficient amount of evidence that does not require me to prove that 1000 million dollars might result in an ability to wield influence that a a simple individual like meself would consider mildly outsized? At this point it is like gravity. You don't have to believe it. It is just is.

Of course they have more influence than you and I.

But that doesn't mean they have enough power to influence the president and to correct course.

<< But that doesn't mean

Fine. Let us have it your way.

What does it mean?

You're so wedded to your overly simplistic and conspiratorial worldview that everything is a secret plan by "the elites", that now you've had to invent a new conspiracy about how they all had a secret plan to lose themselves billions of dollars.

Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.

I think you shouldn't try to use the word stupid given this example of your acuity.

Dude, Trump and Elon are literally the Elite. Take your blinders off.

I wonder if Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) will be exempt as well since they tout "Made in USA"

They are speedrunning the "Banana Republic" achievement.

It’s pretty coincidental. I can’t help but wonder if the number was picked for this outcome

What I personally find more interesting is that they consciously did not choose a more conciliatory number ( like 80 ), which would capture more cars and have the benefit of being able to deflect attacks. Almost like it was intended to cause uproar.

Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."

that's what gets them excited.. "owning the libs"

It's time for Europe to de link from the US.

If that's the way policy decisions are going to be made every time conservatives come to power in the US, then it's best that the rest of the world not go down with the US when the time comes.

Just all gotta hope that an increasingly desperate America in decline doesn't start grasping at war-shaped straws

Don't look Up! Great movie.

Most positive take:

Someone asked what is the car model with the most American parts right now? We will make everyone meet that benchmark or better.

This is reasonably close to a continuation of what the Biden administration did.

Though they did it with tax credits not tariffs. To get the tax break you had to buy a car made in America. (Which pissed off car makers outside the US)

If I understand the below from NPR, then few electric cars qualified back then as wel, and one of the few was Tesla Model Y

"As of May 3, 2024, eligible vehicles include the best-selling Tesla Model Y, the budget-friendly Chevrolet Bolt (which is no longer in production, but can still be found on some dealer lots), the Volkswagen ID.4 "

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1219158071/ev-electric-vehicl...

Can a manufacturer game this by separating domestic components into sub-assemblies?

Still never gonna buy one.

Apparently you get a credit of 15% of the car price to use against imported parts so presumably something like a Mustang with 20% imported parts would pay tariffs on a quarter of the value of the parts.

Someone said to me, the other day: “If you want to buy a car made in the US, get a BMW. If you want to buy a car made in Mexico, get a Ford.”

Curious about Rivian…

The corruption of dictatorship.

This, in all its many forms, is part of why the economies of dictatorships perform badly.

It’s funny cybertruck doesn’t make the cut, unfortunately nobody buys those so it’s irrelevant.

I see them quite frequently where I live, usually covered in a vinyl wrap advertising some local business or other.

In St Louis, I see them everywhere, too. Not as advertising but just driving around town.

There's a mall that closed and, for a while, there were hundreds parked in that lot waiting to be sold (and they were).

There appears to be someone in my local city that is using their cybertruck as a billboard. They drive around during rush hours and every week or so they switch the wrap to a different company. I wonder if it's being widely done elsewhere.

I haven't seen anything like that where I live. I see the same businesses over and over, and often see them parked at or near the business in question.

I saw a plain white one that could represent a drywall business.

My wife says the wrapped ones of any color look better than stock. She thinks the stock ones look like toasters, and that Tesla should have painted two red/orange stripes along the tonneau cover to complete the stock look.

I mean, they do. Wraps also ruin the stainless steel finish, so you are committed to wrapping for the rest of the car's life. Wraps aren't meant to last more than 5 years or so.

I saw a DOGE wrapped one the other day. Thought it was DOGE at first then realized it was actually just DOGE (crypto)

Used cars are ALSO exempt.

And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.

My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).

Used cars respond to market forces too.

If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.

This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.

That suggests an ecosystem may appear around making new goods "used" enough to meet some legal definition.

I think the meaning was not "You can import used cars without tariffs", but "If you buy used cars already in the country, you don't pay the new tariff, so just don't buy new cars."

If you're importing it it doesn't matter it's condition other than it's worth less so the tariff would be less. What they mean is if you buy goods that are already here there's no tariff, but they will also go up in price too as the new item goes up.

The parent comment was a confusing statement. They were saying that buying a used car or goods from a second-hand store does not go through the tariff process because the produce is already here.

There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.

Isn't that actually what they've been doing in Cuba since the revolution? I'm sure those old cars should have been retired by now and replaced with cheap Chinese imports, but for a few decades, they were refurbishing American-made cars continuously.

So get the car delivered in Europe. Go on a driving holiday and then ship to the USA.

Are you saying if I import a used car, I don't have to pay tariffs? Factory delivery programs would become a lot more popular.

Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.

Yes. Volvo has had a program for decades where they fly you to Sweden where drive a vehicle around long enough for it to be "used", buy it then they ship it over to the US to avoid US new car import tariffs.

Very surprised to learn that this is real https://www.volvocars.com/us/l/osd-tourist/

Pretty cool. Lots more info on reddit threads.

Audi, BMW and Mercedes did this as well until a few years ago.

https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...

looks like you have to pay VAT?

VAT is only levied if it doesn't get exported within a certain amount of time (6 months from the scheduled delivery date).

I knew someone who tooled around Europe for a month before dropping it off to be shipped to her without having VAT incurred (though it was a couple decades ago).

Yes - my question exactly.

I was strongly considering importing a 25-year-old kei truck from Japan before the tariffs were announced.

Seems to me that it's probably worth the incremental cost to buy one that's already here and registered in your state; there's a lot of unknowns in customs and vehicle licensing, and I'd rather not deal with it. But I spent my weird car slot on a 1981 Vanagon instead of a kei truck/van.

Based on what I’ve seen from states that are attempting to implement new rules, Kei trucks and cars aren’t grandfathered in, sadly.

Even buying one locally that is already registered doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to continue registering it.

Japan’s trade barriers on foreign autos have been legendary.

https://www.americanautomakers.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/...

This is crony capitalism.

It blatantly is, and the responses to you pointing that out are insane.

Deflection, whataboutism, sealioning with a side of demanding sources for what is essentially the use of a greater than sign.

It is but it always has been. I would also appreciate if the big 3 American car companies had 85% American content.

> would also appreciate if the big 3 American car companies had 85% American content

Versus 80%? Those five percentage points are worth a double-digit tariff.

and then there is the other side of the 14.9% coin, which will be fought over by Canada(read ontario), Mexico, China, and the rest when it comes parts and cars made in Canada and Mexico, that is going to be tricky, as both countrys have historicaly bought a lot of US cars and other stuff, but will now be in no possition to also play along with the anti china stance in the US and tarrifs, and all the other issues at the borders.......geoplotical has more meaning now.

5 percentage points should be easy enough for them to change then by moving a few supply chains.

Your answer to the question “Is the 5% between 80 and 85% worth a double-digit tariff?” here is “Yes. A double digit tariff on a car that is 80% made in America makes sense.”

Right?

So make it 90% and don’t give Tesla the special treatment.

[flagged]

> Then the exact same discussion will come up with a different number

No?

The point is there is no reason for the number 85 other than benefiting Tesla. The metacognitive question should be how one should estimate that variable in a way which balances disruption with incentivising the desired outcome.

Explain how the number 90 would be different than the number 85?

Provide source for any claims you make.

> Explain how the number 90 would be different than the number 85?

Qualitatively? Tesla wouldn’t qualify.

Practically? It isn’t. The same way there isn’t a difference between 85 and 80 other than keeping out Ford.

There is no methodology presented for how 85 was estimated. There probably wasn’t one, given the track record with the tariff rates.

You got it!

What should we call it when the other side does things in the opposite direction? https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...

Punitive legislation? Lawfare? Crony capitalism but for the other companies?

Do you have evidence Ford and GM bribed their way to getting that law passed

Tesla Model S is also not exempted ?

Won't safe his Chinese sales though

Tesla builds Model 3s and Ys in their Shanghai factory using almost entirely domestically sourced components, and even exports a fair number from there. But perhaps the trade war will reduce demand.

BYD is eating their lunch.

Well, better cars at a lower price tag and their CEO doesn’t seem to like doing “Roman” salutes.

If they were allowed to the US market we know what would happen here.

STATUS CHANGE: Incoming Trump change on auto tariffs in last few hours.[1] Not fully analyzed in the press yet.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-scales-back-ta...

Flagging this for the highly misleading headline. It makes it sound as if Tesla is getting some kind of carve out which is the furthest thing from the truth.

The headline is misleading. It should be edited to say "Only two Tesla models" rather than "Only Tesla."

Cool soo....

that's an oligarchy.

Can we boot these dickfucks from office yet? Jesus christ

The CEO of Ford is very critical of Trump.

But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.

Of course, who knows where Trump will be by then.

How long do you think that 5% will take them?

I have no idea, but I'll bet there are people in Dearborn, Michigan working on that right now.

The plan all along?

This was predictable and frequently predicted when musk got involved. Of course there would be new rules that would be written specifically so hurt his competitors and not him. That's why tesla stock rose sharply when trump won.

What a coincidence.

The protective moat, the death of innovation

Unfortunately companies have a bigger voice than people. Until that isn't the case there will always be doubts about the 'neutrality' of a particular law/policy/etc. The bigger thing here is that this particular administration rarely, if ever, does things in a 'neutral' manor. It is always 100% transactional with Trump. There is absolutely no doubt that the 85% is designed to give Tesla, and more specifically Musk, a huge win. It is foolish or outright disingenuous to even pretend that this isn't the case.

Now they need a special insurance subsidy to offset the extra costs for losses.

"What would the world's richest man stand to gain by cozying up to the Trump administration?"

I was thinking about buying an EV in the next several years, but I'll never buy a Tesla, until I see Elon Musk in prison. And I don't think I'm alone.

Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.

Tesla [...] losing $15.3 billion in brand value: https://brandfinance.com/press-releases/toyota-is-the-worlds...

I love how capitalists got so confident lately, they even lay bare their own corruption. Makes sense tho, they know no one will oppose them.

How many memecoins did Musk purchase for this exemption?

Or was it an in-kind deal for his amateur-hack-a-billy work at DOGE?

Musk as presidential prostitute is not something I had on my bingo card when he first arrived on the scene.

This is the kind of bullshit your reputation will never recover from - no matter how many puff pieces you buy or retweet.

RIP Tesla.

RIP Elon.

Well. Well. Well.

Ah yes, the "free market" at work!

Also a friendly reminder that all these tariffs are being made possible by a "state of emergency" declared by Trump because of fentanyl coming from Canada and China. Otherwise, only Congress would have the power to impose tarriffs.

So shall we just be honest and say we're heading towards a centrally planned economy, China style?

That we should be so lucky. Chinese Central planning actually gets useful stuff done, little hope of that from this lot

I didn't see any of this whingeing when Biden was making EV incentives that blatantly excluded Tesla.

This is what happens when you go along with lawfare or weaponized government.

The canon gets turned around and pointed the other way soon enough.

> I didn't see any of this whingeing when Biden was making EV incentives that blatantly excluded Tesla.

Examples?

Here are the EV incentives that I'm aware of that happened during the Biden administration.

• $7500 tax credit for qualifying vehicles. It only applies to cars below a certain MSRP which disqualified the Tesla Models S and X, but that same limit excluded many other cars from many other companies too. The rest of Tesla's models have many configurations below the MSRP cutoff that did qualify.

There were also rules on battery materials sourcing, which disqualified about 80% of the EVs that were then available in the US. Those did hit some specific trims of the Model 3 for a few months but Tesla was able to switch to using the same batteries that the unaffected Model 3 trims used, restoring the credit.

• The National Electrical Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which provided grants for building EV charging infrastructure. Tesla qualified and received considerable money from NEVI grants.

• There were some grants specifically intended to boost EV manufacturing with union workers. Tesla does not have any unionized plants so was de facto excluded.

• There were grants for building a network of EV truck charges. Tesla submitted a project proposal but it was not accepted.

What else was there?

Odd how sentiment about Elon Musk changed rapidly... Some HN users pointed out in the comments here that not even Teslas reach 85%. Is the article wrong? Interesting that everyone is talking about favoriting, but no one talks the anti-favoriting of Tesla during the Biden administration. Tesla wasn't invited to any EV conference that was organized by the previous admin. They are the biggest EV factory in the US yet somehow they were never invited...smh

One of those was to promote EVs built with union labor. They only invited the companies with the largest union workforces.

The other EV meetings organized by the Biden administration were all specifically about EVs in the context of specific legislation the administration was proposing, and they only invited companies that were supporting that legislation.

It's also quite telling that this gets attention and rampant cries about the oligarchy and cronyism, but not a peep about:

> New York state lawmakers have launched an effort to shut down Tesla’s stores in the state

From: https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/ny-lawmakers-shut-down-teslas...

> WA Legislature considers new tax aimed at Elon Musk’s Tesla

From: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...

"For my friends? Anything! For my enemies? The law [and new taxes]!"

I thought State Rights were so, very, very important?

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

Care to elaborate?

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Nonsense. Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years? Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]? Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.

[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!

> Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.

The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-te...

[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5104133-rep-andy-ogles-pr...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-jokes-ru...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-ft4BvHTE

[5] https://citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2025/04/29/trump-...

It's bait. They want you sounding hysterical and spending your time talking about things not on their agenda.

That's what everyone told me about project 2025 too.

Plus I thought one of trump's things was "no more BS". Is that not a thing anymore?

Who is 'everyone'? Trump voters?

Don't know what to say, P2025 was definitely the plan. A third term is flooding the zone with distractions. And if by some twist of fate it's his intent, the earliest you can do anything about it is midterms. Before that we will have had pivotal moments on tariffs, Ukraine/NATO, DOGE, and due process.

No, Trump himself constantly claimed to know nothing of P2025. But apparently it’s now “was definitely the plan”.

How am I supposed to distinguish between that and his rhetoric around 2028? How do we know it’s “flooding the zone” and not serious?

> How am I supposed to distinguish between that and his rhetoric around 2028?

Well a good first step would be to not take his word on anything. Why on earth would you have any faith in his P2025 denials?

What did the military do on Jan 6? They stood back and did nothing.

That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.

I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.

People don't generally show up unarmed for a coup.

I'm not sure what it was, but it surely wasn't a coup.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, because the Jan 6 insurrectionists were armed.

It was a repeat of the Brooks Brothers Riot.

> They stood back and did nothing

There's no reason to have a full allergic reaction to a mosquito bite.

The mob was literally minutes away from congressional people. They further kept those same congresspeople surrounded and locked up for hours until Trump called them off.

Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.

This wasn't a "mosquito bite".

Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.

For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.

"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.

This was a big deal.

I don't think the point was to kill a bunch of Democrats. I think the point was to either kill or pressure Vice President Pence, so that he (or his successor) would accept the "alternate" (false) electors as legitimate. I think the shouts of "hang Mike Pence" were aimed that direction.

I very much doubt even had they managed to kill some congressman that it would have helped them in any way. In fact im more likely to believe that had they actually gotten to a congressman we would have seen far more meaningful response and push back against them, Republicans, and Trump.

You're exaggerating to try to make a point, but I'm not convinced.

You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.

That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.