South Korea's President Says Us Investment Demands Would Spark Financial Crisis

That's not a good thing. Lots of farmers going bankrupt now.

I've always had high regard for Trump as a talented scumbag grifter of note.

He's been noticeably and increasingly off game since it seemed he was only campaigning for re-election to avoid a mountain of looming bad legal outcomes.

Much of his early second term "wins" I've marked as momentum success from having a ready to go game plan care of the Project 2025 crowd. His carry through on tariffs, dodging Epstein complications, handling free speech issues, etc. have been more chaotic than cunning.

Once trade is diversified, the US will be isolated naturally as it represents the least beneficial trade arrangement. Now, if MAGA is dethrowned somehow, sure, trade with the US will increase again, but the diversification you see happing now will be permanent. Things aren't going to go back to the way they were, the US has already given up it's spot as the economic leader of the west, and it's given up all its foreign soft-power, it's just a slow process to see it all play out.

2. He lies when his lips move. When you're dealing with a pathological liar, there's no reason to believe anything he says that paints him in a good light - until it's been independently confirmed.

https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15953967

Well, having the paper agreement certainly helped last time. (A month ago.)

There's also a Language barrier. So making sure there is a written agreement ensures that both sides understand what was agreed upon.

Sure. But I don't think I'd trust the leash made by the same guy who accidentally invented God. At least, I wouldn't trust that leash to hold when he put it around God's neck.

While eventually, given some absurd amount of time, we might learn to control these things, will we learn to control them before we've created them? Could we survive long enough to learn to do that, if we create them first? Legislation and regulation might slow down their creation sufficiently *IF* we only needed 12 months or 5 years or whatever, but if we instead need centuries then those safeguards won't cut it.

My only consolation, I think, is that I truly believe humans far too stupid to invent AGI. Even now, there are supposed geniuses who think LLMs are a some stepping stone to AGI, when I see no evidence that this is the case. You're all missing the secret sauce.

the chance that anything like that will pass those Senats also isn't exactly high

and all of this is public knowledge, so either Trump is incredible badly consulted to a point you wonder if it's malicious or more likely he doesn't care, and only care about a meaningless legally void promise he can present now probably some way smaller immediate subset of the promised actions. And then a few years down it's the "evil other countries" which he knowingly pressured to give him hollow promises they legally can't give, instead of it's seemingly bad/incompetent deal making (if you assume the goal is to actually make working deals and not to rail up people to have excuses for increasingly more extreme actions).

*As a redundant disclaimer for HN, that belief would put me in opposition to Trump's policies.

However when describing the outcome all things are not equal. We shouldn't fall into the trap of an appeal to utopia.

Selling into the US presents advantages on economies of scale. Overseas dollar denominated debt drives dollar demand. These factors affect decisions for producers selling into the US market.

The specific pricing data is subject to cherry picking and politicalization. Generally it is a bit strange to see the illiberal left taking exception with Trump's illiberal interventionism. You get the sense that if the interventions were rationalized by a different actor or for a different reason, the statistics would be spun in the other direction. This feels inconsistent and hypocritical.

The other key point is that the tariff doom prophesies haven't yet come to pass. Perhaps the doomsaying was merely more political bloviation? It would fit with the pattern of inconsistency.

Access to the US market has other values. If the manufacturer is carrying USD denominated debt, they or someone else must obtain those dollars through trade. Access to a large market may unlock economies of scale for producers. Losing access may drive up their overall costs to serve other markets.

These are just two of the most obvious things which I can immediately think of. There are likely other factors as well.

> The exporters aren't impacted directly at all

This isn't true, at least if you believe in standard economic theory (not believing standard economic theory is what got us in this mess!).

The issue is that the tariff increases the effective price to the consumer, so it shifts the demand curve downward by the cost of the tariff (the price consumers are willing to pay the producer for a given quantity of goods).

Markets always find their equilibrium, and the resulting equilibrium point is a lower transaction price and lower quantity than before. Quantifying the shift requires knowing both the supply and demand elasticities.

In other words, both the producer and consumer share the burden of the tariffs. The producer receives less from the consumer, and the consumer pays a higher total cost than before. Who pays more of the tariff is question that we again need the elasticities to answer.

This suits large importers over small ones, they have the cash reserves to cope.

The other issue for importers is uncertainty. The tarifs might be high this week (when my stock arrives) but it might be low next week when my competitors stock arrives, putting me at a disadvantage.

So "shelves being bare" is primarily a business risk / cash flow issue. Partly handled with more frequent, smaller, orders (driving up consumer prices some more.)

And yes, I agree, most American consumers don't understand that fundamentally the goal of tarifs (good and bad) is to drive up the price. To that end though the administration is being very successful.

The genocidal regime[1] that it is actively supporting is a little further south.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...

Driving civilian populations out at gunpoint into neighboring countries is called a genocide.

(If I remember my history, there used to be a German word for that sort of thing, I think it started with an L...)

For instance, he ignores that Israel goes out of its way to warn civilians before attacking, and provides aid to civilians. He ignores that Israel could simply kill ALL the civilians with a bunch of bombs if its intent was actually genocide, and yet it has not.

This is not a serious debate. Israel is not genociding. If you disagree, you need to respond to the actual arguments. But nobody on the other side is doing so, because they can't, because Israel is not genociding.

Please think about this.