Notes

It’s about much more than central bank reserves. It’s a about controlling the global financial system. It’s what trade is denominated in, what foreign loans for many countries are denomined in. Why is it good for the United States? The obvious reason is that it allows us to borrow cheaper than we would otherwise, probably half a percent to a percent. And when I say cheaper, it’s everything. Mortgage loans, car loans across the board because the dollar is very liquid. There are deep markets in it. People wanna hold it and it makes it cheaper. And by the way, when you move towards a tri-polar system, let’s say the Euro and the renimbi, taking up some of the dollar’s market share, that’s gonna bring that interest rate we pay up. But there are many other things.

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But there’s something much deeper than that that I people are less aware of. Because the dollar is so central to everything. Many, many financial transactions which happen in far-flung places end up circulating through the United States before they clear. So when you see a modern spy, CIA, and when you say the US always have this ridiculously good information about everything, a part of that is our financial data. Of course the Chinese hate it, the Russians hate it. The Iranians hate it but believe me, the Europeans hate it They would like their privacy. They don’t really want Donald Trump to see as much as he can. I guess one other thing I should have said, it maybe is a corollary of being able to borrow cheaper. When there’s a crisis, the pandemic, financial crisis, the US can go really big in a way other countries are reluctant because they’re afraid their interest rates will move up and make it painful. That does happen to the United States, but it’s more gentle. So after the financial crisis, there were many complaints the US should have stimulated more and I think probably they should, but it did much more than most other countries. And in the pandemic, it was doing double what other countries were doing. And that’s part of the privilege. Now, why does that matter to an ordinary person? It matters because believe me, next time there’s a crisis, you will feel it that the government can’t do as much. You will feel the pain, just as other countries have to do.

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giving it to them. “Write 500 words about the causes of the Civil War, because I said so.” It’s like forcing someone to do a bunch of jumping jacks in the hopes that they’ll develop an intrinsic desire to do more jumping jacks. But that’s not what will happen. They’ll simply learn that jumping jacks are a punishment, and they’ll try to avoid them in the future.

I wonder how much better writers some might be if they had chances to write more about something they want to. I don't remember many chances in school for open writing. Being able to write well is an important skill even for non-writing professions.

Yet business is not back to usual. Even if the tariffs stay paused and prohibitive ones on China come down, trade barriers and uncertainty will remain. Those risk being to America Inc what Brexit was to uk plc—a persistent drag on growth. In a new working paper Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues find that by 2024 Britain’s exit from the eu had cut productivity by 3%, business investment by 12-20% and gdp by 6-9%. American ceos should put away their pandemic diaries and chat to their British counterparts instead. They won’t like what they hear.

Having the economy be at the whim of someone who doesn't understand economics and has no interest in learning is a dangerous thing.

I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.

What you create, and how you do it, is entirely up to you. That’s the beauty of it.

I love side projects as a tool to help improve my skills, learn something new, and build a tool that might help me solve a problem I'm having. Even if no fully fleshed product ultimately comes out in the end, the creating and learning is fulfilling.

If America’s government degrades the dollar’s role, whether by design or by accident, other countries may try to defend themselves by throwing up barriers to capital and falling back on new and less sophisticated financial networks. Without a true successor, the result would probably be a world of competing currency blocs, inadequate alternatives to Treasuries, barriers to trade and reduced efficiency. The past few weeks have been a taste of such a future—and they have not been pleasant.

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

We're already seeing signs of it.

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages.

But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities

This is beyond scary. You now have a US President openly defying the Supreme Court and threatening to send US citizens to what essentially are concentration camps. We shouldn’t be sending anyone to El Salvador, full stop. The fact that the current administration is sending people there without any kind of due process, and is now considering sending citizens there as well should be raising every single alarm bell.

If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.

Couldn’t say it better myself.

Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.

Experience teaches so much.

One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users.

But that’s not product development, it’s programming. They aren’t the same thing. Not even close.

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don't we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie?

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves.

I think there are many companies who would like to be able to make their goods in America, but the economics just don't work out. Anyone who thinks that re-shoring manufacturing to America is simple, easy, or cheap are deluding themselves.

I regret to tell you that there is no grand plan. There’s not even a proper conspiracy. It’s happening because Trump is an idiot and has filled his administration with fellow idiots and yes men. They’re just dumb fucking people, careless people, people who reject the notion of expertise as a liberal conspiracy, who don’t understand how the world works, and who don’t care when they break things.

I really have nothing more to add. This administration is just disaster after disaster. In this case, they're just causing so much harm unnecessarily.

Real people are going to have their lives destroyed. The economy isn’t just a series of numbers, it’s real people. People will lose their businesses, their jobs, their savings. Children will go hungry in America (and many other countries) because of this. We’re killing jobs and growth and markets in service of one delusional idiot’s resentment of foreign trade. And I hate even more the parade of sycophants who still try to dress it up as some sort of grand strategy. There’s nothing behind the curtain. The emperor has no clothes. He’s just a dumb idiot and you will keep being wrong about him until you incorporate this fact.

Perhaps most importantly, the actual announcement and implementation of these tax increases has made the incompetence and thoughtlessness of this administration even more obvious. The nonsensical “reciprocal” tariff rates published on April 2 were, as best as anyone can tell, generated by a chatbot. Officials repeatedly lied about how the rates were calculated, claiming that each economy’s “tariff and non tariff barriers” policies were quantified individually, when all they did was use a simple-minded formula based on bilateral trade balances in goods with the U.S., which imply nothing about anything. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the administration’s apologists to claim that there is some grand strategy here, or a secret plan, or a complex design that outside observers are simply failing to understand.

And most importantly:

The tariff hikes will harm Americans, they will harm people in the rest of the world, and they will likely fail to accomplish whatever they are supposed to do.

Trump's tariffs make no sense as an economic policy, but they are familiar to anyone who's spent time around organized crime (like, say, Trump)

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This isn't capitalism – it's gangsterism. It's a system that will annihilate trillions of dollars in value to put billions of dollars in the pockets of Trump and a few of his cronies – at the expense of all the other rich people.

What a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.