The US has strategically used tariffs with great success over the last decades to get favorable pricing from Canada on everything from energy, softwood, potash, you name it. One item at a time, slowly, methodically they were able to bring down pricing. We have been giving the US extremely good prices, and now, because of Trump he has just flipped the board over and it’s time to restart.
America will be far worse off than before this started, and this has leveled off the playing field again with Canada.
As a Canadian I am thrilled.
Could you or someone explain this a bit further? You’re saying tariffs were used to bring down prices, but now tariffs are bringing prices back up again? What’s different this time?
Thanks for any help.
(I’m also thrilled for Canada, especially if it means shit in Donald lap.)
I think strategically used tariffs (i.e. used in trade negotiations for specific sectors or items, not unilateral tariffs) can convince a country to export items at a price that benefits one country more than the other, usually in tandem with an agreement to reciprocate. Basically, countries agree to trade at certain rates or exclusively sell. Tariffs are the “bad cop” of trade negotiations.
The tariff isn’t what lowers the price, it’s the threat of the tariff that lowers the price or keeps it stable.
Imagine Canada exports maple widgets at $10 a piece to reflect the true cost of manufacture. The US says that is too high, our people can’t afford that price once it’s on the shelves, so how about you export them for $8? To sweeten the deal, we’ll export freedom widgets to you at reduced cost.
Canada responds saying $8 for maple widgets is too low, $10 is firm and we’ll deal with the current cost of freedom widgets. The US threatens a targeted tariff on maple widgets at 25% which doesn’t affect the price of maple widgets in Canada or their sale price to importers in the US, but importers in the US have to pay $2.50 in tax on top of the purchase cost for maple widgets which drives up the cost for US consumers.
This results in the price of the item increasing in the US $4.50 over the price determined to be “affordable” which will result in reduced imports and reduced purchases of maple widgets by consumers. Canada now has to find somewhere else to sell their maple widgets since the US isn’t buying at the same rate which drives down the value of maple widgets in Canada.
And if the US was feeling particularly vengeful at being denied their cheap steady supply of maple widgets, they could convince other countries to not buy Canadian widgets at all or impose a blanket ban on all Canadian goods (see: how the US obliterated the economy of Cuba because of “communism” which was really just Cuba not wanting to be the US’s sugar plantation anymore).
Canada will evaluate this and determine that selling maple widgets is essential to their economy and less profit for their maple widget industry is an agreeable trade compared to the US not buying at all.
Ah, man, thank you for this. I became just a little bit wiser today. Love you.
how the US obliterated the economy of Cuba because of “communism” which was really just Cuba not wanting to be the US’s sugar plantation anymore
Oof. I did not know this. That’s scummy af.
Think that’s scummy, take a look at what happened with Haiti when they fought for and gained their independence.
There’s a reason one half of the same island is way worse off than the other when it comes to living conditions for their people.
I barely want to know. Nothing I can change, and I’m sure it’ll be triggering af 🫨
Short version: after gaining their independence in a slave rebellion France (in particular since they were a colony of them) was pissed and our for revenge. They got the other European powers and the USA to enforce an embargo on Haiti. They’re still poor af because they had many years of basically being isolated from international trade of many things.
Yah, Canada is the bully…
I always find this imagery amusing. David is touted as this weak shepherd boy who is nearly defenseless in the face of this giant opponent. In reality, you’ve got someone who has trained to sling rocks with deadly accuracy. He’s basically the bronze age equivalent of a sniper, bro can send a 2 inch projectile at mach jesus straight for your dome.
Prior to Goliath David was using that sling to defend his flock from wolves. I imagine it’s much harder to bullseye a running wolf than human with acromegaly like Goliath.
Slings (no NOT slingshots) are actually awesome. It is very fun to learn to throw tennis balls. The average physically active adult can with learn to throw without hurting their bodies at speeds only a fairly professional baseball pitcher could rival with arm alone. The “lever action” you get from the slings length translates to a much slower (angular rotation) and less violent acceleration necessary at the base of the rotation (your body) for a vigorous throw, it doesn’t hurt to throw even fairly heavy things because it is like you have gone to a really low gear on a mountain bike.
I really like this guy’s paracord slings, might be expensive but you are also basically buying a template and a tool that will last for years and years of throwing.
https://www.practicalparacord.com/
https://youtube.com/@practicalparacord
Montage of normal people slinging and the crazy variety of body types and throwing styles, I have never seen a sport/throwing implement with such variety of body mechanics, it is clearly in our bones after all, to make a sling simply requires cordage of some kind, time and a pile of rocks!
Canada:
USA: How dare you. Trade war it is
Villainmaxxing
Goliath also ate children.
perfect analogy for the american government.
Also I heard him call me a slur on Xbox live
And for tech bro oligarchs
They do not.
This has very much the feeling of ‘they need us more than we need them’
I’m in the UK and some people voted for Brexit saying the same. Look how that turned out for us over the last five years.
I know this is sidetracking a bit, but i just wanted the chance to ask somebody who is actually from Great Britain, how is it there.? Without having to look for information online that could be propaganda as we don’t really know which information source is reliable or not. How are you guys holding up?
For starters: If someone has an ® behind their name it’s most likely a lie.
Bit chilly today, otherwise fine.
Imports and exports have largely been the same before and after Brexit, with a dip as people figured out the bureaucratic mountains of paperwork involved that wasn’t needed before.
Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7851/CBP-7851.pdf
Section 3 for the graphs.
I dare say we’ve lost a lot of influence across Europe over it. We didn’t get any of the supposed “benefits”, but trade didn’t just drop off a cliff either. For all the bluster over the hardness of the Brexit we’d like, it mostly seems to be business as usual.
That’s not the universal view within the government, the OBR has estimated that imports/exports of goods and services are 15% lower than had the UK stayed in the EU although some research goes as high as 30% and some as low as 6%
Yeah, we’re likely down a few percent of growth each year. Over time the compound interest on that may end up adding up to a lot.
Still at least we didn’t stick a shit load of tariffs on it out of sheer spite.
Bad, I’m lucky and live in a fairly afluent area of the south (but outside of London) but decades of conservative cuts have left our local government councils broke. My best friends moved to Europe because one of them worked in the arts and there’s not enough jobs to support them in just the UK. The new Labour government is an improvement but has shifted significantly to the right in their policies and feels like Conservative Light and is actively persecuting Trans and immigrant people through it’s policies to appeal to ex-conservatives. They’re starting to seek closer ties to Europe again but everything feels pretty hopeless.
I’ve been watching labour’s right turn from over here in antagonismland, and I’m baffled by it. Like first of all, they won because the Tories were a parade of buffoons at best and actively destroying the UK whenever they managed to do anything. Like, all you have to do is say “these decisions have been bad for the British people, it’s going to take some time to get results from us actually attempting to govern, but we promise we won’t do what they did”
Ask our Democrats how that’s working out.
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It’s often been pointed out that Right Wing Media Literacy is poor.
We see this often when they root for villains or characters intentionally unsympathetic, like Bojack’s Dad, Homelander… heck Trump’s 2020 Re-Election team compared him to Thanos, saying he was “inevitable” and making gifs of him as Thanos snapping the DNC away.
So this isn’t anything new in theory, but it’s amazing that this “They’re rooting for the bad guys because they don’t know how media works” problem extends to the FUCKING BIBLE!
The Heroes of the Bible are intentionally meek a lot of the time, the point is that even when you aren’t powerful yourself, your dedication to your Faith and standing up for what’s right should be enough to make up for your shortcomings, for the Lord will lift your burden.
It’s why “Proud Christian” doesn’t make any sense, it’s a very Pro-Humility faith!
I mean, David literally had a thousand wives and concubines and he still had to go and fuck one of his best soldiers’ wives.
He got her pregnant and then orchestrated the guys desth to cover up his sin, the baby was cursed to die, and the second the baby died, he was just like, “Okay, cool, I’m over it” and he’s still considered the beloved of God.
The gist of the story is that people that are pointed to high places and have heroic unbelievable achievements can make horrible mistakes and still be forgiven by God as long as they repent.
Nobody is perfect, not the undefeatable giant Goliath, nor the beautifully-hearted musical genius hero warrior king David of Israel.
Anybody whose understanding of David stops at, He killed Goliath with a slingshot" doesn’t deserve any sort of authority when it comes to interpretation of the Bible.
My interpretations of the Bible are as useful as my interpretations of any other fantasy series. Just because something has a deeper meaning doesn’t mean it is useful, correct, or should be followed. Every episode of South Park ends with what lessons they learned. It’s also more up to date and in tune with the realities of the world around it. The reason people don’t worship South Park is because they haven’t been systematically brainwashed to do so.
How I know this: god told me so
I was cut, by the edge.
The Bible’s track of history is unique in that it doesn’t just show when the people written about did good, it also shows when they did bad. David was good, until he got into that affair with Bathsheba, and indirectly got her husband killed in battle. He was called out on that part by a prophet speaking in behalf of God, and the only reason he lived was that he repented, but he still lost their first child because of it.
Solomon was the king with a thousand wives. He asked God for smarts when presented with an option to ask for anything and be granted it, and he was granted that and more for thinking spiritually and not materially, but then he started getting into the whole wives and concubines thing. Another example of “started out good, but then got sucked into doing bad”, as he was given advance prophecy that Israel would be broken into pieces over this. Which happened when his son took over and made things worse.
And one could look at both of them as following in the traditions of the judges in that way. They were people who needed power to protect their people, obtained it, used it for good, abused it, then suffered.
I was always taught it was meant to indicate that God and it’s followers would always have this push and pull relationship, but I think it’s just that power makes you suck
I’ve been saying it for a while, but a lot of the US so called Christian groups actually aren’t. I’m not really sure what they should be called. Pseudo Christian maybe?
Many of them could pretty accurately be called Mammonites.
I’d argue that the American Civil religion is dedicated to the dual gods of Columbia and Mammon. Those are the only two things they consider truly sacred
Sure, their fundamentalist, militant beliefs are not rooted in any intelligent reading of their scripture, but, in my opinion, just like humans can not evolve out of our ancestry (humans are apes, are monkeys, are primates, are mammals, are chordates) movements cannot escape the roots of their religion. And they constitute a vast, but for it’s size relatively homogeneous, culturally distinct sect of Christianity. So let’s not create a “true scotsman” here, just because they don’t abide by your (or my) interpretation of their faith doesn’t mean they aren’t Christians, similar differences in belief exist in many religious sects in many different religions. And at least they violently “claim” to be Christians and will defend that position with vigor. Something apparent in all the big american sects that, from the outside, seeem to have little to nothing to do with the teachings in the New Testament. Like Mormonism.
Just like Christianity, Judaism and Islam are still abrahamic religions, those new american sects will always remain christian in their roots.
For this sect, Christian trappings have fused with the American Civil Religion, the Red Scare and the “Lost Cause”-myth. In this worldview, the defeat in a holy war (American Civil War) facilitated the struggle between evil, socialist, secular, globalist, minority-loving, weak liberalism and the good, pious, capitalist, nationalist, exceptionalist, (mostly white) red-blooded conservatism.
This might actually constitute a new kind of religion, but it is heavily blanketed in pseudo-christian trappings and lots of old-testament fire and brimstone. And this mind-virus relies on the widespread christian beliefs in the US to spread into new hosts. A lack of (objective, comparative) religious education with, at the same time, a deeply religious habitat is the fertile ground that allows this to spread. What you or me would interpret as a “correct” (or “less wrong”) christian faith, if followed culturally or blindly and without haven given it enough thought, actually aides in the spread of this militant, nationalistic, chauvinist movement that has infected the US and is (imho) at the root of Reaganism, the Tea-Party and the entire Maga-Movement. It has been mutating and getting more malignant for a while now and I honestly have no idea how this could ever be excised from the US.
I think you’re absolutely right. I imagine in 20 or so years all this will be seen as heretical by the more organized Christian denominations. Really I see two ways for it to go: mormonism or positive Christianity. And that really depends on how well things go for them
Your take on it is interesting and probably quite close to the truth of it. Those sects are now part of the US identity for many and are there to stay despite their continuing mutations.
American with christian characteristics?
This means that Canada defends the israelites, and therefore has God on their side.
he point is that even when you aren’t powerful yourself, your dedication to your Faith and standing up for what’s right should be enough to make up for your shortcomings, for the Lord will lift your burden.
Really? And here I thought it was just another awful story from an awful book that nobody bothers to read.
Please, tell me how the book of Job is all about being faithful to god, even during the worst times. And completely ignore the premise of the book, and the horrific things visited upon the man for simply being “god’s most faithful servant”. Oh wait, no that wasn’t enough. God had to murder his family and destroy his life because he made a bet with the literal devil. What a cool guy.
Your book is garbage and you should feel bad.
He was referring to Goliath from Gargoyles.
No.
Books.
That’s funny.
Do these people even read their own books?
No. I thought that was pretty obvious.
not theirs, ours that they appropriated ~ jews
Oh, the irony…
I find the average atheist seems to be more familiar with the messages of the Bible than many of these people who claim to spend their Sundays studying it.
Out of curiosity I went to one once, I am not Christian and I never believed in the Bible.
I don’t know if this how all churches do it but the one church I went to read the Bible in a manipulative way. Regardless of the book or its content, you cannot construct a narrative by selecting one or two verses from one book and another one or two verses from another book of the Bible. Sometimes the books aren’t even from the same testament.
Any book should be read in whole, and any verse has a context that explains it.
The same technique applied to anything be it a research paper or a comic will produce a false narrative.
I don’t know about other churches, but the Methodist Church I used to go to with my grandma never had a pastor out of the 2 I witnessed that did stuff like that. Maybe it depends on the region, but I’ve never heard of those type of manipulative strategies where I live, so I’d say I’m pretty lucky on that front. Closest I’ve probably heard of something like that in my area are the Mormons, but that’s a whole nother can of worms that I don’t wanna touch.
Regardless, that doesn’t sound right or like a very Christian thing to do. Even if the verses tell of similar things, context for those verses are real important, just like with any other readings (religious or otherwise).
It’s also a thing based on denomination. Quakers are unlikely to pull that shit, meanwhile baptists are infamous for it.
The point is that whatever verses are picked out agrees with what the pulpit wants to believe. It makes their hate righteous.
Here’s a fun one: tell a conservative that rich people are doomed to go to hell. If they ask how you figure that, quote:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God
Without fail their programming will kick in and you will get some lengthy blog post with stupid reasoning about how what Jesus was actually talking about was some rock formation and some other dumb shit. Meanwhile you can just read the verses before and after for context and it’s pretty damn clear what was meant: greed is a form of evil.
This is the difference between reading the Bible and having it explained to you.
Another fun one: tell them God prefers atheists to vague believers. Prepare for another programmed blog post about how Jesus was actually referring to the taste of the water at some town that completely ignores the context of the book itself.
Teenage me went into reading the Bible expecting to learn more about my religion and become one of those well-versed scholars.
And then I kept reading, and the terrible truth eventually dawned on me. It really is just a bunch of silly stories from farmers thousands of years ago. It’s nearly impossible to actually read it and remain neutral about this; yet another one of life’s “emperors new clothes” situations.
It really is just a bunch of silly stories from farmers thousands of years ago
Can you imagine how twisted the guy who wrote Revelations was? Why did he just make all that shit up? Why did he try to pass off his own shit as Yahweh’s shit? Since he knew that Revelations was his own made up bullshit, he must have known that the entire bible was made up bullshit too. Why did he think it was okay to be a gigantic liar and for him to contribute to the mountain of bullshit started by others?
A friend who grew up an atheist recently read the Bible as part of her reading a bunch of religious texts. Her take on revelations is that she’s had fever dreams like that.
Money
If you’re actually curious about this, Elaine Pagels has a really great book about this. The book of Revelation was just a thinly-veiled series of jabs at specific people and the politics of the time.
Her interpretation is that it would have been blatantly obvious to John’s contemporaries, but it’s opaque to us now because we’re so far removed from that time period.
huh. Interesting.
so something similar to Dante’s Inferno, which is basically a long shitpost about contemporary politics that over time diffused into religious culture?
Yup. It’s a big fat rant propaganda against nero. And it worked - our perception of nero has been viewed through that lens for centuries
He went in for the 2000 year old schizopost.
The more I read the Bible (having read multiple versions) as a teen the more I realized that people who claim to walk as Christ did, in fact do not walk as Christ did. There are exceptions, such as the pastor who I met volunteering at a soup kitchen, but a vast majority only prove my point.
Christ walked among sinners, the down and destitute, tax collectors, sex workers and the “unclean”. The same people these self proclaimed men and women of Christ will rebuke and spit on.
I always think back to that scene from Castlevania between the Bishop and the Demon: “my life’s work is in his name!” “Your life’s work. Makes him puke.”
Yeah but some of the worst Christians are the ones who do walk with the wretches. They come in with their ideas of sin and salvation and don’t bother to notice when they’ve found pockets of paradise among the damned because they’re too busy trying to convert people away from the things they like
