Eric Nilsson

A nonsense attempt to "do a Sokal."

As movies are required for our national security, we must establish a Strategic Movie Reserve: store VCR movies in vast quantities in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. If foreign countries stop exporting movies to the US, we can release copies of Independence Day to meet our domestic movie needs.

Coming soon from Trump: "we will be firing all the Deep State actors in the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Going forward, we will get MAGA DATA about the economy not fake Biden data!"

Doesn't Trump claim that tariffs don't raise prices? If true, shouldn't his Administration want Amazon to display price changes due to tariffs (as they would be zeros)?

Trump Warned U.S. Automakers Not to Raise Prices in Response to Tariffs The threat came in a call earlier this month, leaving CEOs worried they would face punishment if prices go up.

‪@deanbaker13.bsky.social‬ Tariffs stimulate domestic industry by making the industry MORE profitable (by increasing prices), drawing in investment, & expanding industry. But Trump wants STOP auto price increase, short circuiting what leads to increased dom investment. www.wsj.com/business/aut...

"We believe fraud was involved in your Social Security account. As a result, we'll not only stop payment of your SS check, we'll claw back the 5 yrs of SS payments we've made to you. You don't have this money in your checking account? Well, don't worry...we'll debit your 401K account."

If one alleged goal of aluminum tariffs is to create a larger US-based aluminum industry, the US will shift from importing aluminum to importing bauxite (needed to produce aluminum). I'm not sure being "dependent" on foreign bauxite is any different than being dependent on foreign aluminum.

We're three weeks from hearing about WMD stashed in an underground bunker in Québec City.

Trumpists might want to do this. But, that would be difficult. For instance, if the BLS artificially reduced CPI (perhaps accidentally because their price data was hacked), other actors outside the fed gov who collect their own price data could easily show something funky was going on with the CPI.

Perhaps they came across special issues bonds sold to Social Security and imagine such debts between parts of the US government don't need to be paid.

China might be willing to buy oil from CAN, but China's oil imports fell last year. With EV industry, China is reducing oil consumption. China might buy oil from CAN to establish greater econ links btwn countries. But oil exports to China might not be enough for CAN to significantly reduce US links.

What do you suppose CAN/MEX would export to China in the long-run? In the short-run, both would run huge trade deficits with China. But, I think your larger point is spot-on: MEX and CAN will likely explore greater econ connections with China and China will be happy to talk (and more than talk).

What you say is plausible. The issue, though, is what CAN and MEX will sell to China. Oil, autos/parts, agri products, timber, metals are not what China would want from CAN and MEX. Over time, the two economies' outputs might shift with greater trade to China, but that might take a long time.

If prices grow following tariffs, I expect the folks in the BLS who work on the CPI, PPI, and import/export prices will face extreme pressure from the Trump people to generate price indices that match the Trump position that tariffs don't hurt US people.

You don't need to take a website down to make changes to it. The goal must be to demonstrate they can and will take government websites down for whatever reason they'd like.

More complicated than that. The BLS took seriously research, but a bias existed in WHAT research was done re the CPI bias: economists paid a lot more attention to sources of upward bias and a lot less on sources of downward bias. As a result, "the existing research" was biased toward upward bias.

The same pattern exists for education: "education is HORRIBLE in the USA" but "my local school district is EXCELLENT."