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Cake day: December 13th, 2024

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  • The stock market is up because nothing has fundamentally changed. Tarrifs are only going to hurt the consumer.

    The stock market is based on value extraction and as long as everyone keeps on working and consuming at reasonable level it will continue to hum along just fine.

    Some markets and industries will be harmed by this the tarrifs but these are small fractions of the overall economy. There is also a ton of uncertainty since Trump has a tendency to pull back any measure that affects the market averages.

    The pain will be felt by workers and consumers but people have to work and we cannot stop consuming so affected workers will ultimately shift to new places and consumption will shift to new products and the skim will continue.

    Global markets aren’t going to get shaken up because the global market is incredibly resilient. Prices will quiver for a bit but in the long run they will simply route around us and new normals will emerge.

    The only way things change is if the people cause it to change. Either accidentally or on purpose. But the change has to be sudden and swift because there are tons of levers built into the system to force us to participate.

    Something like national strike might not be enough unless it can be sustained indefinitely and it’s not clear how that could occur. I suspect will take several events each gaining the momentum of the last and there is little chance of a first event for occurring.

    The stock market is indicating it doesn’t think we have the fortitude and despite what we may want to be true, they know a lot about us and our patterns. Our predictability is to their profit, literally.


  • The civil war itself destroyed the south’s market for cotton. The number of slaves that fled was ever increasing and the war made it even easier.

    If the north and south were separated they would have continued to come north but would then be asylum seekers.

    The north of the south would have been the main producers of economic growth as mineral exports from that region exploded after the civil war. Based on this alone it’s not certain the confederacy would have actually collapsed.

    It would take someone with deep historical knowledge of that era to make any realistic predictions of what would have happened.

    For instance, the likelihood of the confederate states not further splittering isnt known. And then there are issues such as if the west coast or other regions would do attempt the same break from the union.

    There are all sorts of trade imbalances that would be in play. But it’s hardly an idle thought experiment. There are simply too many pieces.