If my hands weren't full with @HGENenergy, now would be a good time to start an income share school (think coding bootcamp) for electricians
In the AI world, energy is the ultimate currency, translating quite literally into labor
Meals and restaurants might no longer be a place of social gathering
Dates would be scheduled for after meals
Homes would need way more bathrooms
City water use would spike 3x/day
What else?
My baby’s in the phase where he takes a big dump at the conclusion of every meal
How would civilizational infrastructure be different if this continued through adult life for all humans? 🤭
2030 prediction: Emergence of private grids, operating in parallel to heavily regulated power utilities
Microgrids will transition from niche to significant provider of US energy
A huge part of what keeps the flywheel of American exceptionalism spinning is that we attract the best & brightest from all over the world.
Revoking the immigration status of all Harvard international students is a massive self-own.
The folks who’ll first experience the scourge of the tariffs will be the American industrial working class. Their backlash will escalate into a mainstream uproar over the next 3 weeks.
Thousands, and then millions, of American small businesses, including many iconic brands, will go bankrupt this year if the tariff policies on China don’t change.
🧵
The tariffs (as they're implemented) are all Trump, a crude hammer to incentivize on-shoring & int'l trade capitulation.
I've seen what someone looks like when they need to publicly defend something they disagree w/ due to their erratic boss. That was Bessent in this interview.
After watching Bessent's interview w/ Tucker on tariffs, it's clear there isn't 4D chess being played, & certainly not one led by Bessent (who business folks might otherwise trust)
Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business.
So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch.
But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch.
With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to keep in America all these years has suddenly become unprofitable.
You post online about how bad this is but get shouted down by an angry mob, convinced that capitalists like you should die. You can’t tell nowadays if they’re on left or right.
Moreover, you don’t have the time, money, skills, or tools in house to build that $1M of parts yourself. You are being asked to do the equivalent of growing a maple tree when all you needed was a little maple syrup. So now you are faced with several tough choices.
(1) First, you may need to go into debt or fire people to quickly come up with the $300k in cash to pay for these surprise tariffs at customs. Even if the tariff might go away, it might not, so you have to get the cash somehow or risk having your shipment impounded.
(2) Next, you might need to reduce quality to stop losing $100k on each batch. You could order the lower quality $750k parts, grimace and pay 30% tariff at customs, and hope you can build and sell for the same price of $1.2M per batch despite the lower quality.
(3) Alternatively, you could keep the quality parts at $1M and instead raise prices to $1.5M per batch to get back your original margins of $200k per batch, which you need to pay employees after all. But that’s a big hike that your customer will probably not welcome, given that he’s likely dealing with his own tariff shock.
So: these tariffs don’t really give an incentive to build in the US. Because it’s far more expensive to build a screw factory than to pay even high tariffs on a foreign screw.
Instead what they likely mean is debt, layoffs, lower quality, and higher prices for any US company that buys parts abroad.
Just to understand how common that is:
I think a candidate like this could enrapture & unify a future America:
A young, beautiful woman who emphasizes family & domesticity, exudes unity/love & rejects polarization, brilliant but with a kind/warm aura, not angry, who reminds us that America is a community.