Thank you. Is there a transcript? I'm specifically interested in whether he's making an actual argument around trade, or if he's speaking metaphorically.
> serious in a techno-accelerationist manner, specifically around anticircumvention laws
So not serious as a policy proposal but serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power.
> you have a level of pessimism that would prevent anyone from trying anything innovative
Dead wrong. I’m a risk taker. I wanted to see Doctorow’s argument because I respect him and would love if the numbers allowed for constraining Washington.
Dismissing a stupid proposal for being wrong isn’t rejecting solutions in general. In this case, it’s pointing out that Europe escalating a trade war for copyright reform doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re rallying folks to that cause.
I think it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating.
The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once. Constraining Washington is in their interest as Washington is a malign actor now.
> it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating
Shredding a trade agreement outright is absolutely an escalation relative to tariffs. It’s both more comprehensive and includes raising tariffs.
> The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once
Sure. By escalating.
> Constraining Washington is in their interest
Agree. But there are smart and stupid ways to do it. It’s in America’s interest to constrain China. Nuking its own oil production to raise oil prices, as an extreme example, would be a stupid way to do it. Ends not justifying the means is more than just a moral argument.
The tariffs already constitute shredding the trade agreement. This again is dishonest framing. There's no trade agreement as soon as one side breaks it. The side to break it wasn't the EU.
The parent of your comment is only one of the many here who go by the following scheme:
"WE can dishonor any part of any agreement but YOU have to fulfill all of your obligations according to our interpretation and under our direction... OR ELSE"
I don't know if these are real people or bots but I pity them for their lack of basic reasoning abilities.
Once one side starts removing obligations from themselves they will never stop, especially if the other side keeps being in compliance, it's just an incredible opportunity to corner the compliant side and drain it completely... and then it'll experience the "OR ELSE" part anyway but at the most damaging time and in its worst form.
There's only one choice when an agreement is broken - act as if it never existed while positioning yourself for a fair renegotiation.
He can't actually believe it. He's pretending like he doesn't know how numbers work, and burying it in words. There's a difference between a 1% tariff, a 2% tariff, and a 25% tariff. Just like there's a difference in forcing you to accept anticircumvention laws and forcing you to give up Greenland.
> Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."
> That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.
> The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!
Comparing having any tariff to having your house burned down is pretending that it's not possible just to have your barn burned down. Or to have a window painted over. Or to have to trim the branches on your trees. Which ask is going to push you to the point where you give up your coffee industry? Nah, let's pretend not to know that all of this can be quantified, and that Hungary has any real leverage over the US on its own.
If the US is asking too much from Hungary, Hungary can go to China or India - but China or India can ask for anything marginally less than what the US asked for, or can even agree with the US to ask for exactly what the US asked for. And Europe has cut itself off from Russian resources for ideological reasons, so it can't even take advantage of the fact that Russia's market for its resources is somewhat limited.
He's suffering from applause addiction. China can do what they want because they are not a dependency of the US. Europe is. If anything, with all of his invective about Orban (because Orban is ideologically unpleasant), Hungary is in a better position than Europe as a whole because the Orban government doesn't have the self-destructive Russophobia that the rest of Europe does. Hungary can choose at any time whether to be in Europe or to rely on Russia, and China. That's more leverage than Europe has.
I think they meant he feels like saying “fuck you,” even if it burns down the world around him. That’s a real human impulse. But it’s important to distinguish folks who want to watch the world burn from those floating serious solutions.
He seems pretty emphatic that everything is burning and that we are watching it burn, right now, because it is on fire, presently. Is it your interpretation that Doctorow is a fan of this administration’s actions and wants them to continue? Or that he is advocating for a sort of… double fire? Like lighting fire on fire?
Is there a physical world analogy for what you’re describing in terms of burning/not burning?
Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland. Who knows what dumb reason he'll come up with next?
Under this regime, the US is eventually going to develop into something similar to Japan under Sakoku - a nonfactor in international trade, due to a self-imposed embargo.
Of course it'll hurt former US trade partners (and the US itself even more!). But it's coming either way, whether we suck up to Americans or not. With that in mind, we might as well just do what we want since the US is for some reason voluntarily giving up power over us.
> Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland
And that would be a good reason for tearing up a FTA.
It would cost Europeans more, financially, than the tariffs. Probably tip the EU into a recession without significant deficit spending and ECB intervention. But I think it’s the sort of thing that’s geostrategically worth threatening if your population and political structure lets you credibly do so.
(Note: shredding trade deals to the point that IP stops mattering != ratifying the new thing.)
Also having individual EU member states publicly announcing and committing to ratifying the Eu-Canada CETA within a 1 year time frame like they did for the EU-India FTA would be a significant message that also doesn't require shooting oneself in the foot.
States within the EU may also have to make peace with the need to expanding ties with regional powers like Israel, KSA, UAE, Egypt, etc in a strategic instead of tactical framework.
IK the latter is in the pipeline, the former less so due to electoral risks.
> serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power.
What “power” does this blogger/sci-fi writer have? Who is “his base”? What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate when he said a thing you didn’t agree with?
Folks whose pet issue is IP reform, presumably. If that’s your drum, beat it. But it’s good context for anyone tuning in that it’s going to be your beat.
> What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate
What are you talking about? Where was this responsibility suggested?
All I did was point out hyperbole for what it is. Doctorow is speaking metaphorically. He isn’t literally suggesting tearing up trade agreements over IP because he isn’t an idiot.
“I want ETFs and low fees” -> https://www.bogleheads.org, there are various articles describing which funds to pick. (I’m thinking by “indexing service” you mean index fund?) Bogle was the founder of Vanguard and argued that low fees were better than active management; the “bogleheads” are the community that follow that advice.
An index fund is a fund that owns a basket of stocks which are weighted by their weight in index. Like, if you have an S&P500 index fund, then for every $1,000 you put in the index, you own, say, $13.30 of WMT, because WMT has a weight of 1.33%.
But with some exceptions, you will mostly own stocks in integer amounts. You own one share or zero. That doesn’t give you $13.30 of WMT, that gives you $96.98 of WMT or $0.00 of WMT. Index funds work because the funds are large enough—a fund with $10 million in assets can buy 1,371 shares of WMT at $96.98 for $132,959.58 which is close enough. And then the index fund has to periodically rebalance—the share price of WMT changes, the weighting of WMT in the S&P500 changes, and the fund then has to buy or sell shares of WMT.
You could come up with a way to do something like having your own index fund, but it would involve partial ownership of shares, and pooling your assets with people who disagree with you about the way to allocate assets, which makes things more complicated and probably more expensive.
My personal take on this is that these more complicated schemes can often end with retail traders getting the short end of the stick. That’s why low-fee ETFs have been so successful.
I think if you want a weighting other than what the index fund gives you, then there are ways to do that—maybe these involve some fees, but c’est la vie. You can buy “tilted” ETFs, you can buy exposure to specific stocks or funds, you can hedge exposure to specific stocks or funds. But you are probably going to have a hard time making your own basket with a lot of stocks in it. Retail trading just does not get access to the same strategies that wall street has.
Or you just buy the largest stock in each one of the 7 largest sectors and it pretty much correlates to the sp500. ETF have some nasty hidden fees related to the etf price being more expensive than the basket when you buy and less than the basket when you sell.
Sector
Company 1
Company 2
Information Technology
Microsoft (MSFT)
Apple (AAPL)
Financials
JPMorgan Chase (JPM)
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B)
Health Care
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
UnitedHealth Group (UNH)
Consumer Discretionary
Amazon (AMZN)
Tesla (TSLA)
Communication Services
Alphabet (GOOGL)
Meta (META)
Industrials
Boeing (BA)
Caterpillar (CAT)
Energy
ExxonMobil (XOM)
Chevron (CVX)
I'm sure I'm missing something but does direct indexing really solve anything for you in this instance?
If you're in any of the main ETFs or index funds you're getting really cheap access to what's basically the same list of stocks you'd get with direct indexing. If you're trying to get equal-weighting of an index there's ETFs for that too, but that would mean you're betting more on companies without the ability to benefit from significant hegemony and the madding crowd of index fund influx, which seems to be where most of the growth comes from these days.
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