droidson

I like facts. I like discussing legal issues and politics, especially where the two converge. Left of center, but still mostly right. I also still like facts.

[droidson @droidson]

Well, election season has been exhausting. So time for a break.

So, a few final thoughts before spending significantly less time here: the narrative will almost certainly be that somehow women or minority groups failed America , when the truth is that, overwhelmingly, men did.

[droidson @droidson]

@JoJoFromJerz

[droidson @droidson]

@maxrushden thank you for a good edition of Football Weekly.
But I find it peculiar there was so little focus on Gravenberch, considering he is a master of the half turn and had just churned out 2-3 motm performances in a row. LFC's most important player momentarily.

[droidson @droidson]

Much to agree with in this post, but saying this isn't a political issue or a 2024 election cycle issue is downright disingenuous. Trump literally (yes, literally) campaigned on a slapdash tariff policy with a 20% minimum tariff on everybody.
This is what was promised.

[Shay Boloor @StockSavvyShay]

MY OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP

The frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly. I’ve said it publicly. I’ve written about it in this very feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table -- picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic workforce would adapt.

Eventually, that had to stop. It was unsustainable -- financially, politically, and morally. We couldn’t keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero-interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation. That would’ve been leadership.

But that’s not what this is.

What you’ve rolled out isn’t detox -- it’s whiplash. This isn’t strategic decoupling. It’s scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There’s no roadmap. No operational playbook. No clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It’s not an attempt to responsibly unwind America’s role as the global shock absorber -- it’s a brute-force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place.

You can’t replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience. You can’t build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination -- especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn’t have the labor force, permitting structure, or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed. And now -- after years of deportation policies and underinvestment in vocational training -- you’ve made the labor gap even wider.

Capital isn’t going to rush to fill that void just because you raised tariffs. It’s going to wait. It’s going to sit on the sidelines and preserve optionality. Because right now, no CEO can confidently model a five-year capex plan. No board can greenlight supply chain onshoring when they don’t know whether a tariff rate will double next quarter based on your Twitter account or some arbitrary trade deficit formula.

That’s the issue. This wasn’t rolled out as part of a comprehensive American renewal strategy. It wasn’t coordinated with the Fed. It wasn’t communicated clearly to Treasury. It wasn’t backed by a labor reskilling program or any form of public-private manufacturing incentive beyond empty slogans. It was dropped like a bomb -- seemingly designed more to shock than to build.

And in the absence of credible structure, capital is retreating -- not realigning.

I was ready to endure the pain of a thoughtful, structured reset. Most long-term investors were. We’ve lived through tightening cycles. We understood that globalization, as it stood, had reached a breaking point. But this isn’t a correction of imbalances. This is a rupture without scaffolding.

What you’ve created isn’t reindustrialization. It’s an intentional sabotage of capital planning. No executive is going to build a factory with four-year political horizon risk, a floating tariff regime, and no labor certainty. No investor is going to fund expansion in a market where the basic cost of imports can change weekly based on what country has a current account surplus that week. The system you’ve launched isn’t designed for certainty. It’s designed for control.

And the irony is -- we’re not even punishing bad actors. We’re punishing everyone. Allies. Poor countries. Longstanding partners. Israel gets slapped with 17% tariffs while dismantling their own to support American imports. Vietnam gets hit with 46% because it’s become too productive. Lesotho, one of the poorest countries on Earth, faces a 50% tariff because it doesn’t buy enough U.S. goods -- as if that were a sign of unfairness rather than poverty. It’s incoherent. It’s cruel. And it undermines any claim to moral high ground.

You say this is about protecting American workers. But no worker is helped by policy so erratic that no employer wants to hire. No consumer is helped when import costs rise and domestic capacity doesn’t exist to replace them. No investor is helped when the cost of capital spikes in the face of weaponized uncertainty.

This is not a plan to make America stronger. It’s a gamble that markets and allies will blink first. It’s brinkmanship with no floor.

And the most maddening part? There was a path. A real one. A version of this policy that could’ve worked -- not in headlines or soundbites, but in practice. A path that applied pressure with purpose, that aligned economic force with long-term national interest, that sent a clear message to adversaries and partners alike without destabilizing global commerce or blindsiding capital allocators.

You could’ve gone after China -- hard -- and had the backing of nearly every serious investor and strategist on the Street. Not just because of trade deficits or currency suppression, but because China has been actively undermining our economy and our people. I would’ve supported a four-year plan to end all dependence on Chinese manufacturing unless they stopped stealing American IP (DeepSeek). No more games. Make it explicit: if they don’t comply, we’ll back Taiwanese independence and bring the entire global semiconductor economy with us. No ambiguity. No half-threats. As I see it, China is at war with us -- and our policy should reflect that.

With the EU, you could’ve played it clean. Match auto tariffs percent-for-percent. That’s fair. And then leave the rest alone -- especially goods and services. We run a huge surplus on services with the EU. It props up some of our biggest competitive advantages -- enterprise software, consulting, cloud, defense tech, streaming, media IP. Tariffing the EU outside of autos would be like shooting your own foot for balance. We’re not in a trade war with Europe. We're in a competition for global enterprise dominance -- and right now, the U.S. is winning.

That’s what real strength would’ve looked like. That’s what an America-first trade doctrine could’ve achieved. You’d be rebuilding the system from the inside out -- not just throwing bricks through the windows and calling it a redesign.

Investors would’ve backed it. CEOs would’ve planned around it. Global partners would’ve respected it -- even if they didn’t like it. And capital would’ve flowed toward American resilience instead of retreating from American unpredictability.

But instead of that, you went with chaos. And now, confidence is shattered. Not because the numbers are bad -- but because no one knows what the numbers mean anymore.

That’s the cost of burning down the rules without building new ones.

So no, this is not the detox we needed. It’s not strategic decoupling. It’s not a path to renewal. It’s a slow, loud dismantling of the very foundation that has allowed American capital, innovation, and enterprise to dominate for decades. And it didn’t have to be this way.

But now we’re here. And the market is reacting accordingly -- not to the fundamentals, but to the sense that the future may no longer be modelable. That’s not a trade. That’s an exit.

I don’t want this post to be hyper-political. This isn’t about red or blue. It’s not about the 2024 election cycle. It’s not about ideology. It’s about strategy. It’s about execution.

It’s about understanding that when you're the United States -- when you sit at the helm of the global economic engine -- every policy you roll out reverberates through capital markets, supply chains, boardrooms, and governments. Words become signals. Signals become pricing. Pricing becomes pain -- or progress.

And I hope -- for the sake of the markets, for the sake of businesses trying to plan, and for the future we’re all investing into -- that it’s not too late to recalibrate.

Because we don’t need more noise.

We need a plan.

[droidson @droidson]

Imagine having pushed Trump in the election and being surprised that the tariffs he promised during his campaign are being implemented. 20% on every country on the planet, plus extra for China, Mexico and Canada is what you voted for, @BillAckman.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

The country is 100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country. But, business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust.

President @realDonaldTrump has elevated the tariff issue to the most important geopolitical issue in the world, and he has gotten everyone’s attention. So far, so good.

And yes, other nations have taken advantage of the U.S. by protecting their home industries at the expense of millions of our jobs and economic growth in our country.

But, by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.

The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.

If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.

What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large,
long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war?

I don’t know of one who will do so.

When markets crash, new investment stops, consumers stop spending money, and businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers.

And it is not just the big companies that will suffer. Small and medium size businesses and entrepreneurs will experience much greater pain. Almost no business can pass through an overnight massive increase in costs to their customers. And that’s true even if they have no debt, and, unfortunately, there is a massive amount of leverage in the system.

Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe. The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for.

The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system.

Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down.

May cooler heads prevail.

[droidson @droidson]

There's no way Novak wins another slam, but he's done enough and is rightly the best tennis player in history.
#AusOpen #AustralianOpen2025 #Novak #tennis

[droidson @droidson]

Time to long BTC and other digital currencies.

Time to long gold.

Time to permanently end WP subscriptions.

But most importantly, however, time to start strategizing for 2028 and listen to @RachelBitecofer.

[droidson @droidson]

Well, election season has been exhausting. So time for a break.

So, a few final thoughts before spending significantly less time here: the narrative will almost certainly be that somehow women or minority groups failed America , when the truth is that, overwhelmingly, men did.

[droidson @droidson]

Thank providence that Sotomayor is only 69 years old.

RIP Ukraine.

For the first time in my life, I am hoping for European nuclear proliferation.

Debt to GDP ratio limits are about to be tested.

Inflation will return.

Elon will be paid handsomely. As will Thiel et al.

[droidson @droidson]

@jaxajueny Jill Stein is a grifter and it's appalling how she's managed to derail the green party for as long as she has.

[droidson @droidson]

@MathJawn @RachelBitecofer A bit soon on the doomkart there?

[droidson @droidson]

@Flynn_BS @RachelBitecofer Or that there are just very few sensible Republicans left.

[droidson @droidson]

@EliStrawmaning @LEBassett @RexChapman Plus if Trump wins there will be shouts of Russian interference, cue endless chaos.

If Harris wins, cue shouts of election interference and endless drama.

Simple but effective subterfuge.

[droidson @droidson]

Man, I'm not sure I'm ready for Russian Election Interference: the Sequel.

But Putin buying some 50 US eSims to call in bomb threats at swing state polling places pretty much guarantees four years of chaos, no matter the outcome of the election.

[droidson @droidson]

@unfazedgoat @TheGoodLiars He'd literally be praised by all of the MAGA cult for trying to rid the world of Hollywood pedophiles.

[droidson @droidson]

@Angry_Staffer I'm pretty sure Musk gets his feature ideas from IRC ca. 1997

[droidson @droidson]

@allenanalysis You have to love it when someone as rich as Musk, someone as allegedly smart as Musk gets legally caught between a rock and a hard place because he tried to openly flaunt the rules other people have to play by.
Also, whichever counsel he ran it by must have a fitful sleep tonight

[droidson @droidson]

@cb_doge Literally having points shaven off my IQ being fed this nonsense in my algo feed.

[droidson @droidson]

@cb_doge Stfu
It shows Harris because it is a county there. Not because Harris is the democratic nominee.

[droidson @droidson]

@jimstewartson (emigrate), but yes. Especially given he was, himself, an illegal immigrant when he founded his first company in the US.

[droidson @droidson]

@RussInCheshire @wesy76 Or, at least, be a natural born US citizen who's lived in the US for at least 14 years.

Either way, Musk wouldn't be eligible, as you correctly point out.