Using Aircraft Subsidies as Pretense to Hit Autos, Cheese, Whisky and More…
Coming on the heels of a “surprise” temporary reduction in trade tensions with China, the list of affected goods in the tariff threat also includes 89 items, such as, olives, ham, coffee, wine, some seafood and metals.
Although the prospect of a new major front in the global trade war is one to be wary of, Trump is beginning to show his hand: in using threats and then trying to milk the negotiating phase, for a potential stock market boost which is then attributed to reductions in tension. Perfect example at hand is the one that boosted the markets yesterday after the meetings with President Xi Jinping around the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan.
Never mind that, as we reported on May 23rd, it was obvious that he (and Xi) would use the date-certain G20 to claim a temporary “victory” and try and boost stature (and the Markets) with a removal (that could also be temporary) of the additional $350 billion, previously scheduled to be levied.
May 23th, 2019: In a possible set up for both to appear to “rescue” their respective countries from this toddler-made crisis, a potential meeting at the G20 Japan summit, set to begin on June 28th, has been mentioned by the Trump administration.
Next Phase? European Front to Trade War
In May, 2018, Donald “Trade wars are good” Trump’s 25% tariffs on European steel and 10% on aluminum took effect. The European response was to impose steel import limits.
Behind it all, purportedly, are the aircraft subsidies given to Boeing and Airbus, respectively. Each of the two massive aircraft manufacturers received subsidies in the USD billions, according to the WTO.
In Trump’s about-face at the G20, he stated that the China negotiations are “right back on track”, although this, along with the original escalation that was an obvious ploy, can change at any time again, in a Queens heartbeat. Details of any progress on the agreement for Beijing to initiate economic reforms demanded by the US administration are currently unknown.
While Trump’s obsession with the stock market may serve him now, with many US indices at or near all time highs, if and when a dip occurs, especially coming in the ramp up into the 2020 elections, his tune will have to change in a hurry.
“Stocks Cap Best First Half Since 1997” @WSJ Our Country is doing great!
If the market does take a dive, look for him to find a scapegoat, or god forbid, start a war, not just a trade war, in order to distract from the suddenly unfavorable reflection on him. Crowing about stock market levels has traditionally not been a Presidential habit, for good reason, as, factually, bear markets always follow bull markets, sooner or later. Right now, it’s just a question of when. Trade wars will be an obvious explanation for any significant downturn, and that will undoubtedly be like the chickens coming home to roost, at long last.
Isn’t it odd that everyone on the internet either seems to hate or love Elon Musk and Tesla? One theory behind why this may be the case, was put forth in a recent article by John Mayo-Smith published on Medium.com called Elon vs. The Alligators. In a nutshell, the article is a list, with a nice graphic in part II, of vested interests that would stand to lose from Tesla’s success and, conversely, benefit from its demise.
This Is Not A New Development and Elon is Not Alone
Fans of the 2006 documentary, “Who Killed The Electric Car” would be well aware of the “conspiracy” against the proliferation of electric cars. The rise of Tesla, by definition, signals the failure of those entrenched interests that previously banded together to try and stop the emergence of this essential technology in the transition away from deadly fossil fuels.
Musk and Tesla represent an initial sign that these kinds of cabals to suppress technological development may be losing their strangle-hold on our world. Meanwhile, overwhelmingly obvious facts, once seen as “conspiracy theories”, are beginning to be recognized for what they are: simple facts of history.
Take, for example, the video below “Why The US Has No High Speed Rail”, released on May 7th, 2019, by none other than that “underground, subversive organization” CNBC. This short documentary clip has already garnered more than 4.5 million views.
The video shows the highly evolved, generally safe, and amazingly comfortable high speed rail systems across the globe: China, Japan, France, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia and so on. And while more countries develop low emission, luxurious, high speed transport, the US still has no high speed rail.
Meanwhile, overwhelmingly obvious facts, once seen as “conspiracy theories”, are beginning to be recognized for what they are: simple facts of history.
The clip goes on to trace the history of the transportation infrastructure and show how it was dominated and controlled in the US by Big Oil, government road building subsidies and the Auto Industry. It follows the clear path of these forces, and how they systematically prevented any rise of non-automotive transportation.
As the Media Slowly Comes Around, the Dollars Still Twist the Story
Perhaps, even ten years ago, this video would have likely been systematically attacked, in the same way as previous stories, for daring to sing the virtues of highly efficient, low pollution transportation, and for the very same reasons.
Today, after a Sea change, it appears that it is not so easy to squelch access to information that lays out plain truths about the past. Information is no longer so easy to suppress. While we, as a species, face possible extinction from climate change / global warming, brought about at least partially by the precise “conspiracy” of corruption that is the reason the US still has no rail infrastructure, the need to face these kinds of facts is undeniable.
Could the large viewership, unchallenged, indicate that it is no longer possible to bully the citizenry into silence, simply by disparaging the source of information, be it journalistic or otherwise?
It doesn’t take an eagle eye to notice, that when it comes to auto fatalities, Tesla and Musk are held to a very different standard than any other car company. Doing any search of a general grouping of news reports pertaining to fatal auto collisions, instantly, a stark pattern emerges. Ford is not mentioned. Chevy? Nope. Neither is Toyota, or Nissan nor Chrysler or Subaru. Mercedes Benz? Never. This list could go on and on, but any casual observer can see the pattern.
Although there are almost 40,000 auto accident fatalities per year in the US, and a very tiny fraction of those involve any electric car, nevertheless, the name Tesla comes up again and again, as the headline of stories about car crashes, with or without fatalities.
Titles like: “5 killed on way to Funeral” or “His 6th DUI Proved Fatal” are common. But it appears that any crash, of any kind, that involves a Tesla is “news”. This is but one of endless examples that could be cited, and corroborated, showing a pattern of negative stories aimed at one car company above all others. Coincidence?
The Story of Suppression of Design Innovation, Particularly when that Innovation Threatens the Status Quo is, Unfortunately, a Long One
A little known episode in this long history is that of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car. Featured prominently at the 1933-34 World’s Fair in Chicago, it had an amazing fuel efficiency, with approximately 30 mpg, and at 20ft in length, could transport 8-11 passengers at up to 70 mph.
However, after a local Chicago politician (Chicago South Park Commissioner) ran his own vehicle into the first prototype, killing the driver of the Dymaxion, the whole episode was used, in bogus press reports, to bury not only public interest in the car itself, but any chance of the advances in gas milage and overall efficiency that it represented. Gas mileage in the 30 mpg range would then be delayed for decades.
Photo Credit / Medium.com
Headlines in New York and Chicago read: “Freak car rolls over – killing famous driver – injuring international passengers“. In a subsequent investigation the Dymaxion was cleared of any fault, and the politician and his car were found to have been illegally removed from the scene before any reporters arrived. To this day, the average fuel economy in the US is less than 30 MPG. Even after over 80 years, articles can still be found that smear the history of the car with lies and baseless inferences, the same ones propagated in 1933.
A Trillion Gallons of Gasoline Wasted by Intentionally Inefficient Cars
If suppression of inventions that could have reduced carbon emissions, the same polluting substances that, eventually, could destroy the earth, is not pure evil, it’s hard to say what is. And yet, those same forces and corrupt powers remain with us today. “Tump Loves Coal“.
It would be interesting to speculate why 4.5 million would want to know the answer to the question: “Why the US Has No High Speed Rail”. And what about the “Alligators” that are out to get Tesla and Elon Musk? Are they going to succeed? Or will 400 million decide that the alligator’s time, like the dinosaurs they resemble, is finally over.
With all the amazing products and software updates unveiled at Apple’s WWDC 2019, you’d think the viral meme would be something related. You’d be wrong. The trending topic for the first several days was… the monitor stand.
More specifically, the price of the monitor stand. Before you get really confused, it’s more the fact that the price was quoted separately, not a usual thing in general for monitor pricing. But this is no usual monitor.
As the name implies: The Pro Display XDR is meant for professional use. Hence the fairly hefty 5k price tag. So far, no big deal, right? Had Apple just announced a professional monitor, comparable in specs to pro monitors costing upwards of forty thousand dollars for 6k$, we’d probably have seen articles lauding them for creating thirty-four thousand in “savings”.
Further, if they had announced that the $6,000 monitor could be purchased “sans stand” for only 5k$, again, it’s all good. Instead, it was accidentally implied that the average-joe (who wants to buy a professional stand) would have to pay 5k$ for the screen and then another 1k$ for the “optional” stand.
Once this was announced scribes and haters all across the land began to decry the injustice to the world that this “arrogant” company would have the nerve to charge “as much as an iPhone XS”for nothing but a chunk of metal.
The race was on to compile the most outrageous comparisons: “you can buy an entire gaming PC for the price!”, wrote one, “it’s everything wrong with Apple today“, screamed another. After many such articles, each more ridiculous than the last, the “grown ups” began to chime in.
Digital Deflation is a Tricky Business
Finally, it was pointed out that professional video or film editing businesses, the folks for whom this stand was designed and priced, tend to have studio edit bays custom built for the purpose of high end editing, processing and color correcting, among other professional activities.
These bays, generally designed by a high tech professional architect, who costs himself, many times the “outrageous” $999, and monitor screens (you know, those forty thousand dollar ones mentioned by apple in the presentation), are generally wall mounted or set up on proprietary house-owned stands that go for far more than $999. The bays also have professional lighting design (to prevent visual inaccuracies when evaluating high end content), and, more often than not, really cool (read: expensive), furniture.
The plot thickens…
So, wait, what was really announced is that those same pros described above could opt-out of a monitor stand they do not need and save the much whined about $999? You don’t say. How nice those Apple folks are. So thoughtful. Trying to help rich folks avoid paying $999 for a stand that will end up in a storage room.
Why so misunderstood then, if this is all so obvious? Digital Deflation. Yes, that nasty sounding trend that has changed the world around us for more than 25 years.
History of cost reduction to zero dollars
To make sense of this hilarious tale, it seems, we have to first go back. Waaaay Baaack. All the way to around 1996. At that time there was no 8k video to edit, let alone multiple streams of said 8k. Nevertheless, a professional workstation, absolutely necessary at the time to do any non-linear editing or EFX, would set you back around $100,000+. And those monitors? They’d likely be CRT and still cost 50k or some ungodly number.
Many of the processes that were routinely required in editing, color correcting and EFX generation could not be achieved on any computer or software alone. Everything had hardware add-ons, tally up another 50k here and 50k there.
So, once again, why the huge misunderstanding?
Fast forward to 2019. Your iPhone can shoot excellent 4k video anywhere, anytime, since it’s already in your pocket. Cost: zero additional dollars after owning the phone.
Add to that software, if you are on a budget you can forego the daunting challenge of coughing up a couple of hundred dollars to buy Final Cut Pro (there’s that pesky “Pro” again in the name), and go with Blackmagic Design’s “DaVinci Resolve” software, which happens to include excellent non-linear editing, EFX generation and management, color correction and much more. Price tag? For the functioning entry level version, zero dollars. For added professional functionality, a few hundred dollars.
Bottom line, if you already have an iPhone and some kind of Mac, zero dollars.
Tricky Business, Indeed
Here’s where it really gets crazy. Apple, and other tech companies, have, in essence, engendered this deflation by reducing the costs of everything needed for digital media creation, at a higher and higher level to, practically, zero$.
Great, right? Well, not entirely. It seems that when the cost of production nears zero, the monetization of the fruits of creation head south even faster. Translation? It’s damn hard to get paid if you are a freelancer producing and editing digital media products. Only the highest level creators (Hollywood Heavyweights, top of the charts, you get the idea) can garner much of anything, and, of course, they can afford many times that $999 for fruit toppings at breakfast.
Everyone else (a.k.a. “the rest of us”) live in side-hustle hell. Hence the moans, groans, and whining over the “dream” of having $999 to spare for a monitor stand.
So, to re-cap, the same people who were “gifted” by massive advances in technical capabilities spearheaded by apple, to the point where millions of dollars of production overhead for hardware was reduced to almost zero, were also victims of an unemployment epidemic, unleashed by the “barriers to entry” for their chosen profession being reduced to… wait for it… zero.
And, yea, by the way, all this applies double to writers working for digital media outlets. So let the angst flow freely next time an arrogant monolithic company has the audacity to release a pro product at a pro price. I feel ya, Dog, I really do.
We have all experienced how, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it can be very challenging to break away from convenience. When it comes to products and services, many large companies utilize fast, cheap, and easily disposable single-use containers made from plastic.
Sodas bottles are plastic, baristas serve coffee in plastic cups with plastic caps and straws, fast food restaurants prepare orders in single use wrappers with plastic containers for condiments, and the list can go on and on. These products are used and then discarded.
Single use plastic items, as the name indicates, are used only once, yet plastic breaks down extremely slow, with some forms taking hundreds of years to degrade as shown in the tweet below from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF):
Zero Waste as explained by Waste Management, is a philosophy that aims for resources to be reused, recycled or composted, in order to allow for very little to “zero” trash to be sent to landfills or spill into the ocean.
Clearly this issue is important, and getting more so, therefore should be considered a high priority – the reality is that huge amounts of plastic garbage does end up in the ocean and dumped in landfills. This dire state of affairs continues to jeopardize ocean and wildlife as well as our own health.
The organization Eco-Cycle Solutions urges the need for a complete change to our current system. With dwindling natural resources, a compromised ecosystem, and major changes in climate already evident today and with likely more on the way, there is no way the Earth can sustain for much longer and survive for future generations.
The obvious need for large-scale changes at the corporate level, regarding plastic usage, is clear, but we also need to ask ourselves: what can be done on an individual scale?
Here are a few products that can be swapped-out and used instead of single and disposable use options:
Bamboo Toothbrush – both brush and bristles can be composted when time to replace
Lunchbox – making meals at home instead of eating out eliminates containers and can also be an opportunity to eat healthier
Water and Coffee Bottles (aluminum, glass or BPA free bottle) – can be refilled endlessly
Metal or Glass Straws – sturdier than the plastic counterpart and can be used over and over
Shopping Bags (canvas or other fabric) – can be used to carry groceries or any purchases
Cloth Napkins – for drying hands or wiping up around the house
“Using more sustainable products offers many benefits: saving money, eating healthier, all while creating a smaller ecological footprint in the world. While all are positive steps, most importantly, these small individual acts can ultimately help in the fight for the survival of future generations.”
While it may be impossible to free us of all waste, with effort and change, not necessarily perfection (decades of waste cannot be eliminated by a short term solution), small steps can lead to a better tomorrow.
Similar to the business acumen and negotiating prowess he exhibited while losing more than any other U.S. citizen during his “glory days” as a real-estate mogul, Trump is going for broke in the China trade war. Trump lost over a billion dollars between 1985 and 1994, even while writing a book on how to be a genius negotiator.
The latest phase in the Trump trade war started with a typical tweet-storm last Sunday. On the following Tuesday (May 7th) China responded, in Dirty Harry fashion, saying “Don’t even think about it” and “We will not back down”.
China slaps back with $60 Billion in Tariffs on U.S. products to begin on June 1
The list of products is set to contain 5-25% tariffs on approximately five thousand items that will likely include textiles, chemicals, agricultural products and metals. In a hint that this is only the beginning China added that they “will never surrender”, apparently, just for good measure.
In characteristic fashion, Trump tweeted various random comments interlaced with threats and simplistic advice on how U.S. consumers can avoid being affected by the tariffs, claiming that his war is “very good for USA!”.
There is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs, which take effect on China today. This has been proven recently when only 4 points were paid by the U.S., 21 points by China because China subsidizes product to such a large degree. Also, the Tariffs can be…..
..There will be nobody left in China to do business with. Very bad for China, very good for USA! But China has taken so advantage of the U.S. for so many years, that they are way ahead (Our Presidents did not do the job). Therefore, China should not retaliate-will only get worse!
As reported in Esquire there’s a distinct possibility that Trump is out to lunch on trade theory (see billion dollars lost in his personal business deals above for a hint).
We will be taking in Tens of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs from China. Buyers of product can make it themselves in the USA (ideal), or buy it from non-Tariffed countries.
– Trump in recent tweet
While this may sound peachy, his own advisor was forced to clarify:
“Yes, I don’t disagree with that,” said Larry Kudlow, the head of the president’s National Economic Council, when Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” asked him, “It’s U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers who pay, correct?” Kudlow added, “Both sides will pay”
– Lawrence Kudlow, head of the president’s National Economic Council, from a Fox News interview
Possible brinksmanship on display as Trump and Xi Jinping plan potential meet at Japan Summit
In a possible set up for both to appear to “rescue” their respective countries from this toddler-made crisis, a potential meeting at the G20 Japan summit, set to begin on June 28th, has been mentioned by the Trump administration.
A deal could be announced during the summit, or even before. However, it is unlikely that this will be much more than jawboning, at least initially, and meant to save face and calm markets while the war, and the Tariffs continue. In the meantime, watch for a possible European entrance into the fray to be next.
President Trump declared the emergency on Friday to reroute billions of dollars to fund the creation of his long promised border wall. This, after Congress passed a bill that allocated $1.375 billion for its construction. With this emergency, Trump plans to allocate $8 billion to the wall, as well as $3.6 billion in military construction funds, and taking an additional $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense.
Presidents who claim National Emergencies rely on various moves and powers provided by Congress. Congress has long been the core source of emergency authority for the executive branch. Congress can pass laws to give the president wiggle room during military, economic, health, and labor issues.
In 1976, The National Emergencies Act was passed. It basically ended all previous national emergencies, and formally bestowed emergency powers to the president.
The White House has contended that the maneuver is a commonplace one and needed to skirt gridlock . According to the Brennan Center for Justice, presidents have declared national emergencies 60 times, including Trump.
Sixteen states have filed a lawsuit in a Northern California federal court against President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, in it, contending that the executive power to fund a border wall unconstitutional.
These 16 states argue that the Emergency Act is unconstitutional because it’s separating money and power from the states. In a recent widely covered speech, Trump acknowledged this legal hurdle with his sing-song break down:
This scenario is unique due to a National Emergency being linked to a rallying cry, and campaign promise.
Is it unconstitutional?
All roads lead to the Supreme Court—where the party line suits Trump.
As I predicted, 16 states, led mostly by Open Border Democrats and the Radical Left, have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the 9th Circuit! California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!
