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6·1 month agoIt is kind of funny how much of the Trump administration’s agenda makes sense if you’re a “climate realist” preparing America to rule the new three degree world.
Annex Canada and Greenland? Sure, as the world gets warmer and Arctic resources open up we’re going to want those.
Tariffs to help American manufacturing? Famines and natural disasters are going to wreck world economies and scramble supply chains, so we need to be able to make it on our own.
Brutal immigration enforcement and performative cruelty towards migrants? The climate crisis is going to drive climate refugees north from Latin America at levels never seen before. We want migrants to be afraid to come to the United States. And we want Americans to hate migrants so they’ll be on board with turning them away.
(Same with cutting Social Security and Medicare and public benefits - we won’t be able to afford those luxuries in the coming crisis, so let’s get America used to the idea of not having them.)
More oil and gas and fossil fuel production? Why not? We’re preparing for the climate crisis, and other countries are not - the faster the climate changes, the more of an advantage we’ll have.
Even the fucking lumber emergency is understandable - if you think most of America’s forests are going to burn down in the next few decades anyway, the rational thing to do is salvage as much usable wood as you can before the forest fires get really bad and you lose that resource entirely.
I don’t think Trump would come up with this on his own, but “the world as we know it is ending and strong men must now make hard choices to save civilization” is exactly the narrative techbros like Musk would cream their jeans over. I wonder if Peter Thiel got into ecofacism in the last few years.
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24·1 month agoThe Trump family made at least $500 million pumping and dumping cryptocurrency. I guess they’re tired of playing in the crypto sandbox and going for the big money now.
Do you have a source for that #1 impact claim? I want to read and share it.
Trouble is, the US already has a ton of plant agriculture subsidies. But they go to major commodity crops (corn, soybeans) that provide feed for livestock or, worse, ethanol.
Transfer those subsidies to plants that people eat and I’m with you.
2·1 month agoTrump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.
A few weeks? Try a few months. Or years. I think Trump is fine with bad headlines for months on end.
The positive interpretation is: Trump’s confident that he’s right. He’s confident America will be better off under his tariff plan. OR he’s confident he can use tariffs to force trade deals that benefit America and exploit the rest of the world. And he knows voters have short memories. As long as the economy is strong in fall 2026 he can take credit for it and give Republicans overwhelming electoral victories at the federal and state level.
The negative interpretation is: Trump doesn’t care about public opinion because he doesn’t think elections are going to matter anymore.
Either way, what the media and the voters think about tariffs now doesn’t matter to Trump. Trump does what Trump wants and the rest of the world submits to him. It’s everything he’s always wanted.
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Community buy-in is more important than efficiency in projects like this.
Sure, these projects could be done more efficiently by one construction company with heavy machinery, but that takes dollars these dirt poor areas don’t have (and I think Trump’s bullshit arbitrary defunding of USAID is an object lesson for developing countries not to rely on foreign charity for anything important, among many, many other reasons why foreign charity is bad for development). So local people need to know how to do it with local resources in order to expand the projects to new areas.
Just as important, local communities need to support and maintain these projects in the long run, and sweat equity is a great way to build commitment.