Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement.
It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.
more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
Walls themselves are a symptom. People generally build walls when they are afraid their village will be attacked. They are a lot of work so a safe village won't have them. (safe sometimes means you have a watchers and run to a nearby city with walls on need)
> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.
Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.
Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.
This gets into spoiler territory, but the walls in Attack on Titan weren't made with human labor. The first hint that something funky is going on was at the end of the first season finale, but we don't get the full story about the walls until much later.
It also was built when Marley was still very much a massive empire. So it wasn't limited to the manpower inside the walls. This is clear from how many of it's actual construction materials were used.
Enclosing a settlement gets easier as it gets larger. The amount of work is proportional to the perimeter, while the number of people to do the work is proportional to the area. The area is proportional to the square of the perimeter, so the work per person is inversely proportional to the length of the wall.
That only applies if you have the people. The limit of village population is the ability to grow enough food to feed it withing walking distance of the gate. And so your village cannot get a large enough population to overcome this.
Cities can only pull off a large population if there are a lot of villages growing surplus food (which is not what the village wants - in the medieval world cities were not making luxury goods farmers wanted so farmers would want to work less), and cities needed good bulk transport for all that food. Rome was a massive city in the day with just over a million people - today that is considered a tiny city and there are many much bigger.
What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason.
North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)
Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.
People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc.
And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.
One example I can think of is armour. In movies armour don’t seem to do anything at all. You see fully cladded soldiers getting killed by single sword blows, but people in armour are actually really hard to kill. There is a lot of story potential by treating armour like super suits, where characters get stronger with armour upgrades and elite soldiers are like Space Marines.
I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really.
Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).
40k is weird. The scales are often entirely off. Considering the stated populations and areas involved. Or the amount of equipment fielded.
This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands.
And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.
The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.
of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.
women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.
you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.
not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
History is long - I'd call 14th century slightly before. The end of the medieval period does reach the 14th century, but most of the time period we are talking about didn't have it, and the culture effects of it would (as always) take longer to settle out.
> spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all)
Nope. You can invent it, but if there is no economics to drive its adoption it won't spread.
Medieval thread production and thread consumption was roughly balanced so there was no great economic incentive to engineer it.
A spinning wheel is significant labor from a craftsman which means you need to have excess cash to buy and maintain it--farmers surely didn't have that. In addition, if you suddenly generate 10x the amount of thread, that doesn't mean that it can be consumed--weaving doesn't magically get faster. There isn't a lot of trade beyond a single village, so there is nowhere for excess thread to go in order to become money. All this is even before you have engineering limitations--spinning wheels didn't create great thread for weaving from most fibres.
(Side note: In fact, the excess thread from spinning wheels basically didn't get consumed initially. It just created a surplus of rags. Which then led to printing because there was suddenly a cheap supply of something looking for a usage to consume it all ...)
Contrast this to later: The invention of the flying shuttle suddenly kicked up demand for thread which then needed the spinning jenny which then needed the cotton gin. That was all "demand pull"--there was pent up demand that would result in profit if you could fill it. And, even still, a LOT of "inventors" went bankrupt inventing all those things!
I think you are completely right about demand pull being a deciding factor in adoption of new inventions. Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
Although I would question if multiple hours of daily labor isn't itself a significant demand pull? I assume everyone wants to free up time spent on monotonous tasks, but maybe this is wrong.
The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.
The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
> steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode
That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.
Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.
I don't have specific links to this but it's more general reading of tech / military history over the years. I'd love to see a definitive study of the tech tree behind steam engines, but I do know that making bullets/shells precisely fit gun barrels took a long time, and this is analogous to making pistons in engines that don't lose pressure. The first mine-pumping steam engines were the size of small houses and stupidly inefficient, but, assuming lots of coal, they were still cheaper than having people / animals working water pumps all day. And they provided a good opportunity for engineers to properly iterate the technology with commercial pressure. They had a lot to learn though trial and error about how to optimise the things, e.g. adding condensing chambers that separated out initial water heating from power generation. This was all way beyond what the Romans could have achieved.
As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.
Historians have come up with a lot of theories. There is no way to answer for sure though. General thought is they didn't even try because they had slaves they could force to do the hard labor, so there was not point. England developed steam engines in a world where slaves didn't exist. The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology as a society like England did, and so they mostly didn't try to develop technology (except as it related to winning wars - anyone who wins wars was a big deal)
However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.
England developed steam engines in an era where slaves were increasingly expensive and less socially acceptable than before and , contrarily, in an era where exploitation of the poor was still very normal and acceptable.
Hephaestus/Vulcan was disabled, yes, but also was very powerful (governing volcanos and fire in Italy isn’t a weakling’s domain). They absolutely valued technology… to say otherwise is wild.
> The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology
The Romans were engineers par excellence.
They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.
Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.
There was this synergistic interaction between coal and iron ore deposits, trains and the steam engine. Having a portable steam engine meant that you could build trains, which meant that you could transport coal and iron ore to the steel mills, which meant you could build more steam engines, which meant that you could build more trains and expand the rail network. The fact that these things followed one another wasn't a coincidence.
And then later they realize the tar that comes out of making coal coke can be used to treat railroad ties to prevent rot, letting you lay larger networks of rail.
> Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
They simply didn't have the metallurgy.
A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.
There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.
Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation.
Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing.
We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.
At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
If you aren’t reaping of sowing, your labor isn’t in the fields anyway.
People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
Yes, but also the other side of the ratio includes everything like guilded craftsmen, monks, merchants, etc. Not exactly people who weren't doing work themselves.
Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
No I haven't, sadly I can't find the real one on Steam as it suffers the same problem every other Steam game does; hundreds of suspicious copy pastes of original mods.
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
This is kind of a silly argument as any sort of action on H1b visas has been perennially stalled, and ICE "enforcement" actions are specifically targeting the underprivileged or low skill labor.
Sure, just saying the optics of this is unlikely to garner much sympathy from the public. They should instead ask their bosses to cut down on H1B hiring then instead of ICE raids if ICE has nothing to do with tech.
My H1B teammates are awesome. I would rather keep them here in the States, thank you very much.
Perhaps our current administration could maybe reverse their policy course that has making us shed all of our international customers and making our domestic customers have to tighten their belts?
From an accounting standpoint, it probably makes sense to have their depreciation be 3 years. But yeah, my understanding is that either they have long service lives, or the customers sell them back to the distributor so they can buy the latest and greatest. (The distributor would sell them as refurbished)
It's no secret that our current US administration is envious of China. So in no small part they probably want to model the US Dollar after the Renminbi. Drop the value internationally to incentivize American exports, and manipulate the hell out of it. (Hence why they have dropped inflation as a political issue - some in the administration are essentially rooting for inflation to get much, much worse).
It should go without saying that this would be shortsighted - China made it work because they were able to take advantage of a strong international market denominated in USD. The US cannot destroy our own common market and currency and expect to take advantage of it.
Furthermore, we know what a de-dollarized world looks like - imperialism. If you need to secure oil/mineral/food for your economy but you need expensive foreign currencies to acquire it, it suddenly becomes much more economically appealing to take the resources.
> probably want to model the US Dollar after the Renminbi.
I don't see that. Given trump's history, he thinks that going back to tariffs will allow massive tax cuts. As he trades in real estate, tariffs are inconsequential for him
He supports tariffs for the exact same reason Bernie Sanders does. There is a reason so many bernie bros jumped to camp Trump in 2016 when (globalist) Hillary won the nomination.
There is no secret or conspiracy going on here. Trump is a populist president and is unsurprisingly doing populist things, elected because of his populist stances. At this point you have to have stabbed your eyes out and shoved spikes in your ears to not know that all he does it gush about bringing back 1950's factory worker dad.
yeah, he’s a real populist with the <15% that wants the federal boot on everyone else’s neck. i think there’s a name for that specific type of “populism”.
if you wanna cheer for fascism, you should do so openly. no one is fooled anymore, and no one will think any higher of you for being in denial about it
There's a difference between Trump says populist things and Trump does populist things. Much like "saying things I want to hear" and "saying things I need to hear."
For your factory worker example, at exactly a year into his presidency, we've yet to hear populist points on:
- a comprehensive overhaul to address medical costs for workers
- point-by-point implementation of tariff revenue in reshoring and subsidizing of industry
- how AI is going to support manufacturing gains to the degree we can become competitive with China
Fascism always wears populisms clothing, but they aren't therefore directly equivalent. Bernie and Trump both support tariffs but for different reasons (and to different degrees). Likewise you can gush about 1950's factory workers for different reasons. One is purely to do with economic power of the lower class, the other is to do with supposed Golden age of American history. They have overlapping bases but that's merely a part of their Venn diagrams.
Also Trump already passed the massive tax cuts based off the assumption of income from Tariff's, and those tax cuts disproportionately benefit the rich. I don't think we really need a conspiracy to explain the likely motivations.
For us individually. For us collectively it was a horrible thing. We lost the means and incentive to produce anything durable, including a healthy, educated, sustainable society.
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be.
The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US.
The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work.
I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1].
It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years.
Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".
The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")
The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:
* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.
* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
Yeah, I've heard this interpretation before that this is the US trying to wean itself off the resource curse bestowed by a strong dollar. I think it's a fun idea, but there is no reason or strategy to this, I'm afraid. Just stupid people doing what they do best, doing stupid things.
I agree, the whole thing is stupid. But, when you don't have a healthy, educated society, they wind up being easily conned into electing stupid greedy people. So it seems that the resource curse may lead inevitably to systemic failure. Good times make weak men.
Yes... so lets vote someone in that does all the things towards creating a less healthy, less educated and less sustainable society.
US was doing just fine btw. I know this because people like you blow the small issues way out of proportion, and the reason this haplens is that there is no real issues to worry about.
Whoa there. You're making quite some assumptions about me, it seems. I'm in no way advocating for the present administration, not in strategy nor in tactics nor in any other way.
I do think that the US was not "doing just fine", clearly, because our society was not healthy or educated or sustainable enough to avoid our present fate. It's easy to blame 'them' for all our woes, when we collectively made 'them'. Obviously we can't prevent every idiot and psychopath from existing, but we've certainly failed some 30% of our population if they fall for this crap. And this is the price we pay.
I know it's pretty common shorthand to describe American post-war interventions as "Imperialism". But Imperialism before Bretton-Woods was a very specific and intentional international policy - literally conquering and/or colonizing land to secure resources. Which is a bit different than America's "spheres of influence" thing today.
The two are very linked - the tacit agreement of the postwar order was for America to use its might to expand a common market on behalf of the shared benefit of NATO members. But the collapse of today's "American empire" does not mean the end of empires. If anything, the opposite: instead of one common international market, we will return to a 19th century scramble for land.
Well, that's just it. America has not so brazenly claimed territory for such selfish reasons in well over 100 years. Which is proof enough that America is pulling up the ladder on Pax Americana.
Obviously, but we're comparing apples and oranges here.
- Iraq was never a major oil concern for the US. Perhaps maybe stabilizing global oil prices - but the primary beneficiaries were actually our European and Asian allies.
- We never just "took" the oil for our domestic market (which is what we are basically doing in Venezuela)
- Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
Similarly we were in Afghanistan for-freaking-ever which had no clear resource benefit or even clear goal.
I would even go so far as to say that for most of the 20th century, America's foreign policy interventions are more easily attributed to our failed role as "World Police". We were brought into Iran because of the British, we were in Vietnam because of the French. Kuwait because of Saudi Arabia. Korea and Lebanon directly.
So while yes you could paint a broad brush and say all of this indirectly was to expand America's "empire", but as an international alliance where America carries the big stick, the US actually carried out a lot more on behalf of the overall alliance than one would realize.
That alliance that the US is now trying to dissolve.
> - Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
And in their spare time they pretend to sell bridges to people? Nobody sane would believe that invading a country promotes regional stability. The idea is absurdist, the point of invading a country is destabilising it and disrupting any power that the locals might have. Forcefully toppling governments and killing large numbers of people has never been a credible path to stability.
The Assad dictatorships in Syria and the Hussein regime in Iraq were proponents of Baathism. The former had occupied Lebanon and invaded Israel while the latter had invaded Iran in 1980 and annexed Kuwait in 1990.
> Nobody sane would believe that invading a country promotes regional stability.
Then you should read about some of the biggest influencers in US foreign policy since WW2. There’s one guy whose entire career was spent essentially trying to convince the president / military brass to bomb enemies into submission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
I’m sure you’ve also heard of Henry Kissinger.
Anyway, pretty strong history of US political figures dehumanizing foreign populations, justified by some western moral superiority. Direct through line to the Bush presidency (last of the neoconservatives).
Are you suggesting that LeMay or Kissinger believed that invasions promoted regional stability? On what basis? When Kissenger wanted stability he famously promoted détente with Russia and negotiating with the Chinese.
Kissinger did a lot of evil stuff, but a big part of his thinking was when he wanted an area wrecked he sent in an army, and when he wanted stability he negotiated.
Nah more that there’s plenty of history of influential American policymakers being convinced of a certain strategy’s effectiveness only to be proven wrong by history and in the process completely obliterating peoples and countries.
> Nobody is cheering for inflation to get worse, they are celebrating it being held down to 2.7% after higher inflation a few years ago.
Trump is actively fighting the federal reserve to drop the interest rate to 0%. Members of his team regularly do interviews where they say "it's going to get worse before it gets better". Inflation is being held down despite this administration's best efforts.
> The U.S. is a net exporter of oil and food and self-sufficent for majority of its mineral needs as well.
And has been for a while. But the current conservative rhetoric is specifically about bringing manufacturing jobs back.
> There is no need for U.S. to crash its currency to incentivize domestic production, it can just impose tariffs on imports to do so.
I don't think autarky is this administration's only stated goal. They specifically see an export-led economy as being more important or even "legitimate" and are pushing for other countries to import our goods. Devaluing currency is a strong way to incentivize exports and China's currency manipulations were the key to their rise as a manufacturing power.
The reason it was 0 for so many years was because the Fed was trying desperately to create inflation during this time. (Which was chronically low for other reasons).
Lowering interest rates to create inflation is literally one of the core tenants of the Federal Reserve:
The problem with tariffs is really just trumps complete instability. Why would anyone invest in domestic manufactoring when Trump wildly flip flops on all tariff policy using it as a diplomatic punishment and reward system? Especially when his tariffs in general are legally questionable at best and the other half of us politics are against them just in principal. Imagine investing millions in a domestic factory and then trump gets a personalized jet from some random nation so the tariffs you were depending on for your profit margin are gone. Or Trump loses the midterms and now tariffs as a policy are gone. Unless Trump both becomes a dictator and sets the tariffs in stone without changing them too much, or democrats come out in wide support of tariffs themselves, I don't see how you could use them to invest your money.
Also, anything companies build inside the US (factories, supply lines, etc.) just becomes an economic hostage for a Trump to use for further rounds of extortion.
So it's not just that the policies are (A) counterproductive and foolish and (B) changed on a whim and (C) have no long-term foundation and (D) are changed for corrupt reasons... but even after all that, (E) the corrupt person "making deals" is incapable of honoring them.
This is how you grow a sclerotic, internationally-uncompetitive domestic industry. See: shipbuilding.
Where tariffs work is as a nursery policy. Give firms a safe haven to grow in. Then let competition hone them. South Korea has pioneered this playbook; China copied it. We were sort of doing it, but the current administration blew up our nascent new energy industry.
It's also debatable how important tariffs even are for "infant industries". In most situations, if you ever remove the tariffs, the native industry is just as likely if not more likely to die out to any serious foreign competition.
For South Korea and China, tariffs were not a very key part of their industrial policy. Which is not to say that the government didn't have a massive hand in the success of their native industries. Case in point: shipbuilding for South Korea. The government was key in securing the capital investment in the massive drydocks the entire world depends on.
In the late teens, China was dominating all of these industries.
Under policies of the Biden administration, these industries were growing domestically in the US and we were increasing our share of the global market.
Over the last year those domestic industries have been destroyed. They are barely surviving and have stopped rapidly expanding. All gains made against China's dominance in these technologies has been lost, and then some.
Hope and wishing aside, if you think anything Trump is doing is gonna benefit the economy, you really show your ideological side.
For example, businesses are hesitant to invest in domestic manufacture because the tarrifs can be undone by next president. But the reputation that US is building right now cant be undone. Investment in manufacturing takes years, not to mention that its not like America has lots of people wanting to go work in mines and factories. Meawhile as countries with sane leaders adjust, US is gonna be less and less relevant.
So in 5 or so years when your house value and investments are way down and there is a Dem president and you think about complaining about economy is bad under liberals, remeber who cause it all. Most of the current economic problems that existed in late 2020s have origins with Reagan era economics.
I still liked Milton Friedmans proposal for a negative income tax for this reason.
You just piggyback on the existing income reporting mechanism of the IRS - just add a filing for people with no income. And the way the IRS withholds for tax season is just done in reverse.
Yes there would be fraud, but no more than the amount of fraud that already happens on taxes. If anything, it actually incentivizes us to finally fix our tax system.
You are already able to use 401k funds for this! Either as a loan to yourself, or as an "economic hardship withdrawal" (not hard to do if you actually need the money for a down payment).
In essence, all they are proposing is a way for wealthy people to avoid taxes by putting money into a 401(k) and then pull it out tax free to spend on properties.
I bet they would combine this with a raise on the contribution cap.
Even all of the purely imperialistic stated reasons for taking Greenland make no sense.
National security? We already have the right to station as many troops there as we want! And we have actually removed troops recently.
Mineral rights? America is already richly endowed - its just impossible to access what we have when permitting is almost impossible. If there were actually valuable lodes in Greenland, it would probably be easier to mine now!
The only thing I can think of are the warm fuzzies you may feel as a despot to take land and enrage your allies.
The NYT asked him about this a couple weeks ago. Here's an article with some excerpts from that [1]. Key parts:
> President Donald Trump revealed in a new interview with The New York Times that his quest for full “ownership” of Greenland is "psychologically important” to him.
> During a two-hour sit-down with multiple Times reporters on Jan. 7, Trump was questioned about why he won't just send more American troops to Greenland — which is legal under a Cold War–era agreement — if his goal is to fend off foreign threats. The president replied by saying that he won't feel comfortable unless he owns the island.
> "Why is ownership important here?" Times national security correspondent David E. Sanger asked.
> "Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success," Trump, 79, replied. "I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base."
> White House correspondent Katie Rogers — whom Trump recently called "ugly, both inside and out" for writing a story about his age — chimed in to ask, "Psychologically important to you or to the United States?"
> “Psychologically important for me," Trump answered. "Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything."
Plus, punishing exactlty those Nato partners who are sending military there to see how to strengthen the defense. That shows you don't want Greenland stronger, militarily. You want it weaker to have less issues when you invade it.
> The subpoenas suggest that the Justice Department is examining whether Walz’s and Frey’s public statements disparaging the surge of officers and federal actions have amounted to criminal interference in law enforcement work.
The Justice department is literally arguing that free speech is enough to impede an investigation.
This will surely be shot down in court, but this is just all noise to try to interfere in MN's midterm elections.
“In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot).”
America, in all trappings as well as in policy, is nearing becoming a soviet economy. This administration has already pushed more straight up socialist policies than nearly any before it.
At this rate, America is going follow suit and be just as worried about keeping people IN the country as it is keeping people OUT.
What socialist policies? Did we get free healthcare or free higher education or subsidized government housing and food and I somehow missed all of that? Did the government suddenly start focusing on economic inequality first and foremost and eliminated all institutional racism?
The US as it stands right exhibits quite a few hallmarks of fascism rather socialism: amalgamation of the capital and the state, marginalization of minorities, an extreme abuse of power, extreme nationalism. One of the tenets of socialism is that the worker class has no state, that it can only work if the workers of all nations unite, that's the exact opposite of nationalism.
the only common thing I can think of between the soviet flavor of socialism and Trump's administration is that both are authoritarian.
The government is taking equity stakes in corporations. It's anti-trade and anti-business. It's picking winners and losers in the economy.
In a lot of ways we are tangibly shifting to a soviet style centrally planned economy, just without all of the welfare (which, to be fair, the actual soviet economies were bad at providing).
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
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