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G7 not going so well...

Siro said:
Retraining is a silly idea anyway. Not easy to train a 50 year old coal worker to compete with teenagers in the software sector.
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1. You don’t need to retain them in software design.

2. Reread the last sentence of post #19. Coal has been in decline for 30+ years. At some point we need to admit that natural selection is taking place. Some people make poor decisions and reap sad consequences. Government shouldn’t heavily subsidize coal at the expense of the global economy and environment so some old fart made a very poor economic decision 20 years ago.
 
The Thriller said:
1. You don’t need to retain them in software design.

2. Reread the last sentence of post #19. Coal has been in decline for 30+ years. At some point we need to admit that natural selection is taking place. Some people make poor decisions and reap sad consequences. Government shouldn’t heavily subsidize coal at the expense of the global economy and environment so some old fart made a very poor economic decision 20 years ago.
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1. This applies to any sector where they can make a good living. Not easy to retrain an older factory worker.

2. I don't disagree. However, this trend will continue to claim more and more sectors. It is a natural product of advancing technology, where available jobs that pay well are fewer and require more education and skills. You can't save the coal workers, or the steel workers, or most other manufacturing jobs in developed countries. Service jobs will soon follow as AI advances. We need new thinkers willing to try out new ideas, not the same **** we've been hearing from both sides since time immorial.

3. UBI, bruh.
 
Siro said:
Seems like Josh Bivens and his Economic Policy Institute (they're liberal) are pretty happy about Trump's trade policies. Most anti-free-trade liberals have been mostly silent about the issue.

It is a bit complicated of course. For example, the TPP was not wholly endorsed by left or right thinkers. There are very few trade restrictions between the signatories as is, and the main purpose of the agreement was to give greater access to US markets in return for exporting the US patent system to those countries. So basically protectionism for IP-based sectors, like pharma and silicon valley. Many on the left prefer protectionist policies aimed at blue collar workers, just as Trump is doing, instead of protecting the ultra-rich thru the oft-maligned patent system.
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Eh, I'm not sure it's fair to say that Bevin is 'pretty happy' with Trumps trade policy. The most recent article I could find from him regarding Trumps tarriffs dates to earlier this year and falls short of a ringing endorsement. He was calling out the doom and gloom prognosticators over the idea that the proposed steel and aluminum tarriffs would lead to a recession, but somewhat lamely said they 'may' end up doing good for the American worker. Then there is this:

'To be clear, there’s plenty to hate about the policy course charted by the Trump administration. His anti-trade stance is of a piece with an agenda rooted in xenophobia and bigotry that has favored the rich over low- and moderate-wage workers.'

Now he also wrote that fears that this path would lead to trade wars were overblown, in hindsight those fears seem to have been well founded.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/trump-tariffs-trade-recession.html
 


This is staggering to see. Has an administration ever treated our allies so poorly? What the **** are they doing?

Trudeau didn't do any such thing as stab anyone in the back, all he said during his post G7 press conference was that Canada would not be pushed around and would retaliate for tarriffs. There was no attack on Trump. Christ this is stupid.
 
Wes Mantooth said:
@JustTheTip

I’m curious what you think about this as Trump specifically referred to farming tariffs. I’m not sure if it only has to do with dairy as he specifically mentioned that...
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Don’t know a ton about the dairy industry tbh...but I know it’s tough to be in. Due to a lot of different fees, prices (or lack thereof) there’s not many “small” guys in it anymore.

In regards to tariffs...in general what Trump has done has hurt agriculture. What @Thriller said is partially correct, and partially wrong (which is pretty good for him!). He won’t see this though since he has me blocked. A synopsis, our trade deals weren’t exactly great for us. Prior negotiations did not go well, and we gave up too much. We are a premier agriculture country not just in quantity, but in quality. Our trade deals did not reflect that. With that said, backing out of those deals without another deal in place or a quick plan for a deal was idiotic. Throw in the tariffs, and we are going to export a lot less and flood our own markets. Really hoping something gets done. And it’s not just food...equipment prices have increased 3-5% because of steel. That’s a lot.

In regards to welfare Ag...well, yeah. Farmers get a lot of perks. But if y’all want to eat, and y’all want cheap food, that’s kinda how it goes. Personally, we don’t need the programs but not that many farms can say that. We do things a little differently. Also realize that farmers now have to compete with real estate to buy land. That increases the cost dramatically, in some cases quadrupling the price of land. It doesn’t pencil out. So farmers do need some help if everybody wants a consistent supply of food.

As for tariffs not helping/hurting the every day American...I mean, the price increase/decrease always gets reflected to the customer. That’s basic common sense.
 
One thing I’ve wondered is how the price for a gallon of milk is still the same or even cheaper than it was 25 years ago.
 
Wes Mantooth said:
One thing I’ve wondered is how the price for a gallon of milk is still the same or even cheaper than it was 25 years ago.
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We’re a billion times more efficient. And unions, and subsidies. America isn’t going to let farming fail...that typically doesn’t help a country if they don’t have food.

But @thriller just thinks we have “cheap, subsidized crap”. His words, not mine. Dumbass.
 
Food in general has gotten cheaper. I read somewhere that the average American spends 8% of his or her income on food. In the 80s, it was something like 15%.
 


What the hell is this?

He's describing... Canada? I don't recall this kind of rhetoric even when dealing with monsters like Hussein, Bin Laden, or Assad. What the hell?
 
You would expect Canadians to be pissed off, and they are...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/world/canada/g-7-justin-trudeau-trump.html

MONTREAL — Canadians have had enough.

It takes a lot to rile people in this decidedly courteous nation. But after President Trump’s parting shots against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the day he left the Group of 7 summit meeting in Quebec, the country reacted with uncharacteristic outrage and defiance at a best friend’s nastiness.

“It was extremely undiplomatic and antagonistic,” Frank McKenna, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States, wrote in an email. “It was disrespectful and ill informed.”

“All Canadians will support the prime minister in standing up to this bully,” he added. “Friends do not treat friends with such contempt.”

Even Mr. Trudeau’s political foes rose to his defense.

“We will stand shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister and the people of Canada,” Doug Ford, the Trump-like renegade who was recently elected premier of Ontario, wrote on Twitter.
 
Jazzta said:
In what shape or form is Assad a monster?
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Kind of like the cookie monster.

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Gonna self-plagiarize a little from my facebook. I'm getting continually frustrated because this country's news coverage is shockingly ignorant of why alliances matter and why the Western alliance looks the way it does. Apparently I decided I needed to share with you all.


Does anyone truly believe that if Russia invaded the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania tomorrow that Trump would lift a finger in protest?

Remember: those are all NATO members.

This is why making it clear that you're a country that keeps its promises to its allies matters. Even if we were to recover from this nightmare and have a proper leader in office as early as next year, our allies are on notice that one of the two major political parties in this country does not think the country's commitments to them are meaningful. And that's going to stay on our "Diplomatic Credit Score" for a very long time.

Trump's policy position seems to fundamentally come down to the idea that America is so big and so rich that we can dictate terms and everyone on the planet has to live with them. All that does is inspire countries to grow militarily to the point that they don't need us anymore. Trump is a built-for-design resentment engine with no knowledge of why our alliances look the way they do and no desire to learn.

Take, for example, Trump's constant argument that NATO countries should be paying for their own defense and that the US has been getting ripped off for decades. The NATO system is an odd duck in many ways. One of the "features" of the system is that it removes the need for many nations that have a 1000+ year history of periodic intense warfare with one another to dramatically build up their military at all. It is difficult for French-German relations to devolve into internecine conflict when neither is spending much time preparing for any war on its own terms.

This has been a consistent part of the Western Alliance defense strategy with various degrees of explicitness - if we are guaranteeing your security then you have no reason to actively build up your own military and even create the temptation that you should be pursuing an expansionist agenda. If they don't have the built-up capacity to fight; they don't fight. It's that simple. The most explicit version of that policy is obviously Japan. The most long-term important partner in that agenda has been Germany - who is already willing to use its economic importance in Europe in an effort to set EU economic policy. If Germany had a large and massive army, it wouldn't be long before someone there would get the idea that Germany should cut out the middle man and just run the EU. The US guarantee of security intentionally acts as a replacement for the domestic requirement that every country defend themselves. That's the entire point of the system.

The defense spending benchmarking demands reframe that feature as a bug. Requiring every NATO country to put in 2-3% of GDP to the maintenance of their own security forces is a long-term detriment to the reasons for the alliance to exist rather than a method of securing the alliance. In the sense that client-patron state relationships require some degree of long-term dependency, demanding that these countries become less dependent is ultimately a demand that they no longer need to be allied with us at all.

Telling more countries that they should build up military strength so that they can protect themselves is a recipe for less stability - not more. I think it's quite clear that Trump doesn't understand what the US has been "buying" all these years. And he's got an army of "newscasters" propagandizing on his behalf who have never given an iota of thought to the question "do we want Germany to build up its own army again?"
 
If Trump has an army of broadcasters propagandizing for him (and he does), it is equally fair to point out that he has an equal amount, if not greater, amount of them that have something negative to say for every single action he does. Some of it well deserved, some of it not.

And that’s one of our largest problems as a country. Nobody can sit down and actually discuss this without insults or feelings getting “hurt”.

Just look at Trump. Look at people like @Thriller. It’s all rhetoric always against one side, and never any room for concession. People don’t want to discuss. They want to be right.

Even though idealogically I lean different ways, I wish more people were like @Siro and @Bulletproof. I almost always learn something when I talk to them, and in general, they’re respectful about it. Shocking that that method works.
 
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