I've been wondering for ages where the obsession with protein in the diet came from. This article in the New York Times doesn't fully explain, but notes this:
Protein has been the hot macronutrient for a while now. Longtime readers may recall that I gently mocked my husband for his protein obsession
in 2023. He had been listening to health podcasts and social media
posts, and various protein powders made their way into our pantry. In
the two years since I wrote that piece, protein has become even more widespread.
This month The Wall Street Journal noted that “in the year to Feb. 22,
the fastest-growing grocery items were those with the most protein per
serving — 25 grams or more, according to NielsenIQ data.” Members of the
extended Kardashian clan, who never met a trend they couldn’t
capitalize on, are in the mix. Khloe Kardashian just announced a new
line of protein popcorn called Khloud.
Protein-forward
diets are easy to market because they appeal to both men and women.
Dieting in general is female coded, but men can focus on protein without
feeling emasculated because body builders do it and it comes in the
form of literal red meat (hello beef tallow, my old friend) and gym-rat powders.
And:
I would like to tell you that I moved away from my protein obsession
because I saw that it was silly and that, as a person who is healthy and
fit, it was an unnecessary tweak. But the truth is, I stopped because
most of those protein-packed products tasted like chemicals and sawdust
and they caused the kind of gastrointestinal woe I do not need to go
into. “Proteinified food is just slightly better junk. Whether you
notice the ‘better’ or the ‘junk’ first is a Rorschach test: You see
whichever you care about more in the moment,” concluded Chris Gayomali in Grub Street, after he did a deep dive on how protein took over American grocery stores.
Unfortunately, the linked article is behind a paywall. Guess I will have to look elsewhere.
Yes I'm back from the short trip to Jakarta/Yogyakarta.
Let's start with the photo above of the Hindu (and Buddhist) temple compound at Prambanan, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The amount of reconstruction that had to be done is pretty amazing, putting together the blocks again after eruptions and earthquakes over the centuries. (It was built in the 9th century, but abandoned for about 900 years.)
On arriving there, this was the first "influencer in the wild" that I spotted on this trip. A simple photo of smiling and being happy to be at a grand historical site was not enough for her, obviously:
The temples are very impressive, obviously:
As you can see, the inside of each temple has a Hindu god or divine figure (if I remember correctly, the bull is Nandi, Shiva's mount and guardian.) The interior space in each temple is small and fairly dark, but I like that in an ancient temple!
We were assured by our guide (well worth paying for one) that all statues were originals. Some rocks in the temples themselves had been replaced, but not any of the carved panels (which tell Hindu stories).
After seeing the group of Hindu temples, you can take a golf buggy ride (or walk in the heat) to a separate large group of temples at the back of the compound to see the one that is believed to have been Buddhist (and yes, I think the tops look more obviously stupa like than in the Hindu temples above):
As you can see, there remains a lot of reconstruction of the smaller buildings yet to be done - although it is not entirely clear how many they think they will ever get to. (We also did not have a guide at this part of the complex, but the guardian statues did look new. Also, the Buddhist statues inside the temple had been lost.)
As with Borobudur, the grounds of this complex are very large. And it was from here that I first realised how close we were to active volcano Mt Merapi:
(I never found out who it was that were staying in the campsite set up there - they were teenagers in red uniforms, so possibly a school group, or something like scouts?)
Before moving onto Borobudur, the other famous temple complex everyone visits, how was Yogyakarta generally?
It is obviously beloved by Indonesians themselves - of course Western tourists are around, but it felt like at least 90% of tourism on the street was domestic. We stayed at a very lovely heritage hotel - The Phoenix - which was rather like a mini Raffles and which attracts a clientele of nearly all Westerners for whom, I guess, colonial style still appeals. Well, who can blame us, really :)
One minor point that surprised me - that courtyard was the main dining area, especially at breakfast, and for some reason, flies were rarely to be seen. (Even on the street, the street food vendors with their wide variety of meat and innards on sticks waiting for sale uncovered, and unrefrigerated, didn't usually attract flies. My tentative theory is that it's too hot for them!)
I doubt there are too many hotels from which you can watch an active volcano from your balcony:
(And I swear, that night I did see a brief flash of a of a red dot from lava flow on the left hand side near the peak, before it disappeared under steam. But no, the lava flow was not strong during this visit.)
The main shopping/tourist street in central Yogyakarta is Malioboro Street, which would probably have to be the world centre for batik clothes, which range in price and quality from cheap to boutique. Yes, Indonesians really, really love their batik designs. The male sarong is also popular here, and it did make me that think that it's kind of odd that the West refuses to contemplate adopting any form of male "skirt" as acceptable day to day fashion, despite there being nothing unmanly looking about an Indonesian or (say) Pacific islander wearing it. (Kilts don't count - they are a bit weird in that they are remarkably unsuited to the climate of the country they come from, and their shortness also makes them impractical.)
Malioboro street is also extremely lively at night - the shops are open til 10pm, despite the call to prayer being heard at 4.20 am, and people (nearly all Indonesian) mill about, without a drunk person to be seen (given that finding alcohol outside of a hotel bar is not easy.)
So the next key temple complex to visit is Borobudur, about an hour's drive out of the city. This place is pretty well managed: you have to go in a guided group of about a dozen or so, and the numbers on the temple itself are limited to (I think) 150 people for each 90 minutes booked time sessions, so it doesn't get too crowded. (The first morning sessions, when the day is somewhat cooler, seem to fill up days in advance on the online booking system.)
I've seen some Western visitors on Youtube grumble a bit about the entry price - it was about $45 per person for a foreign visitor to be able to enter and climb to the top of the structure. But it is a world class site with very well kept grounds; the guide was friendly and able to answer questions; and you can wander around on the grounds as long as you like after the 90 minutes with the guide is up. I have no complaints at all. Even the vendors at the souvenir stalls you have to go through to exit were not too persistent.
Anyway, here's a bunch of photos, very similar (no doubt) to those taken by all visitors:
What? Another influencer in the wild. (I can assure you the one having her photo taken was not genuinely meditating):
One of the most interesting things about the place are all the carvings, mostly telling about Buddha and related teachings. I wasn't detailed and quite sophisticated boats to feature too:
These boat reliefs have their own Wikipedia entry, given the apparent controversy of which particular region (or civilisation?) they belonged to.
Here's the classic photo showing both sides (each over 100 m long):
And a bit closer up to see some of the many, many Buddha statutes still in place:
Many are headless or armless, the guide telling us that this was their weak spot that would naturally break when the statues tumbled due to the substantial subsidence it underwent before restoration.
As with Prambaran, a combination of political unrest and natural disaster led to this huge temple being abandoned for centuries; it took decades to restore and although some new stones were needed, the relief carvings and statue are all original. There is no interior (or so they would have you believe!); it is built on a hill that partially eroded away internally during centuries of rain, leading to the subsidence problem that has apparently been permanently fixed by a new internal drainage system you can't see.
He dedicated himself to writing The History of Java, an encyclopaedic, seminal study of Java, contributing hugely to Western knowledge of the East and still used by scholars today. In 1815, undaunted by the 400-mile journey across difficult tropical terrain, he finally arrived at the jungle covered site on the fertile Kedu Plain to find a vast structure built of andesite covered with panels of exquisitely carved relief carvings – the Buddhist temple of Borobudur.
Sir Stamford Raffles was, as Collis writes, ‘captivated by it as a work of art,’ even if he was, as Collis claims, uncertain whether it was Hindu or Buddhist. ‘We are at a loss,’ wrote Raffles, ‘whether most to admire the extent and grandeur of the whole construction, or the beauty, richness and correctness of the sculpture’. Filled with awe, he organised drawing, measuring and recording details about the numinous structure with its rising four square terraces, three circular terraces,1,460 radiant relief carvings, 504 life size images of the Buddha and 72 perforated stupas culminating in a single, large, empty stupa at the top. Dating from the 9th century and the period of the Sailendra (‘Lords of the Mountain’) dynasty in Java, the exquisite narrative carvings form a divine exposition of Mahayana Buddhist doctrine, as later scholarship would reveal, with figures in meditative and graceful movement, sculpted with sublime expressions.
(Yet I note that Wikipedia says Raffles didn't personally visit the site - just that he sent the Dutchman engineer who spent a couple of months digging it out from the undergrowth and - presumably - volcanic ash. I'm not sure who is right - I haven't got to the relevant part of my own book yet!)
Anyway, it's all spectacular stuff, and as Wiki explains, all built starting around 1,300 years ago:
Hindu clerics appealed to the people of Java for generations, a fact that architect and author Jacques Dumarçay finds first mentioned in 450 AD.[25] Influence of the Sailendra and Sanjaya dynasties followed. Dumarçay says that de Casparis concluded that Sanjaya and Sailendra shared power in central Java for a century and a half, and that de Casparis traced alternating succession from 732 until 882.[26] During this time many Hindu and Buddhist monuments were built on the plains and mountains around the Kedu Plain. Buddhist monuments, including Borobudur, were erected around the same period as the Hindu Prambanan temple compound. In 732 AD, King Sanjaya commissioned a Shivalinga sanctuary to be built on the Wukir hill, only 10 km (6.2 mi) east of Borobudur.[27]
There are no known records of construction or the intended purpose of Borobudur.[28] The duration of construction has been estimated by comparison of carved reliefs on the temple's hidden foot and the inscriptions commonly used in royal charters during the 8th and 9th centuries.[28] Comparison of an Indian architectural process across temples, and acknowledgment of who was in power, enabled Dumarçay to approximately date the construction of Borobudur in five stages.[29] Loosely, the Sailendra began c. 780, and continued stages two and three c. 792 through to an unremarkable fourth stage during their decline c. 824.[30] The Sanjaya completed Borobudur's fifth stage c. 833.[30][a]
So, what else about this quick trip:
* Indonesia (or Java, at least) seems to have a sophisticated, affordable and comfortable train system, with the "Executive" class having big well padded seats with plenty of leg room. The 6 to 7 hour trip from Jakarta to Yogyakarta is about $70 one way. There is also a "luxury" class, with seats set up like airline business class, but for around $120 (I think) seems hardly worth it for a relatively quick trip.
Here's the seats, with the incidentally charming child a bonus:
And here are two station photos: the first is Yogyakarta, the second shows a chill cat in Jakarta's rather busy Gambir station:
* Jakarta: Well, I was only there for about 40 hours, but it's clearly one of those cities with massive disparities in wealth and lifestyle in different areas. (On the drive to the airport, the Grab driver avoided some traffic by going through some very narrow streets in some pretty poor looking areas. But the worst was the glimpse of some shanty slum areas on the train going to Yogyakarta.)
As lots of online commentary says, the city is not exactly very walkable, so working out how to use Grab is essential to getting around comfortably. (It's pretty easy, and not expensive.)
I reckon Hanoi might be slightly more overrun with scooters, but they are also ubiquitous in Jakarta, making for some apparent near misses on every car ride. In fact, it occurred to me, it's surprising you don't see more cars with panel damage than what you do - does such dense, weaving, traffic mean speeds are slow enough that car damage is pretty restrained?
The "good" thing for Western visitors is that you don't have to spend a lot of money to stay in luxury. Yes, another heritage hotel for the last night, The Hermitage, and it was the swankest suite I have ever stayed in:
This is the view from the rooftop bar. Live music til 10.30pm.
* Security was very high in Jakarta: Grab cars checked with mirrors for bombs underneath, and dogs, was a common feature when entering the hotels. Up market shopping malls too. Obviously, the government is taking a long time to relax about the risk of terrorist attack.
* Service in the country was, however, overall friendly and welcoming; both in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. It's a bit of a pity there is not much to see in Jakarta itself. (I believe there are some decent daytrips into the adjoining countryside, though, after overhearing a conversation in the airplane.)
* As for the countryside generally:
I have never been to Bali (always sounds like too many Australians behaving badly), so the mountain backdrops, extensive rice paddies and banana and coconut trees everywhere certainly felt exotic to me in a way that perhaps isn't new to those who get outside of Kuta. It was the end of the rainy season, so it looked probably as lush and verdant as it ever does.
The plains between Jakarta and Yogyakarta are so extensively covered in rice paddies, and Jakarta is so low lying with some rather foetid looking canals and a serious subsidence problem, that the overall impression is that most of the country that isn't mountains is barely above the water table. I can understand how badly earthquakes can affect the country.
And to finish on a trivial note, this is the biggest avocado I have ever handled. :
Well this might be a first for this illustrious blog.
Qantas wifi might allow me to post during a flight over the vast and soooo empty Australian interior, which is covered in parallel lines for hundreds of kilometres:
Large parts - and I mean enormously large parts - are also currently covered in muddy water from the recent floods:
Where am I going? I'm off to Yogjakarta, via Jakarta, for a brief visit to some ancient temples.
I do feel extraordinarily lucky that, only a few months ago, I was listening to a writer talking on Radio National (Late Night Live) about how remarkable Borobudur is and it piqued my interest; that I have a wife who was agreeable when I suggested a trip to see it; and that I have a kind sister who worked for Qantas for decades and has provided us with cheap staff travel opportunities for the last 18 months or so, such that this trip came together very quickly.
Seems to me that the American stock market is actually not taking as seriously as it should the effect of Chinese tariffs. I guess there is a fair chance that it is because of Trump's constant reversals, or pauses, but it seems to me he is not likely to make a major reversal on several key Chinese exports that are important to American manufacturing and business:
The other amazing story going on is Trump pretending it's no problem sending a guy to an El Salvador prison by mistake - in fact, he hopes to be able to do it to American born citizens!
The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.
Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the fate of the father of three is now up to El Salvador.
Buekele then said that he does not have the power to return Ábrego García t the US - and that he won't.
Also on the agenda was topics including transgender people in sports, DEI and women, Iran and tariffs and Ukraine and Russia.
Temu Goebbels, as I have seen Stephen Miller called on social media, insists that the deported guy deserved it and it wasn't a mistake, contradicting court filings by the administration.
We're about a centimetre away from being able to declare the US a fascist state.
I finally got to the end of the abridged version of Journey to the West. I liked this passage in the last chapter about Buddhism:
It is difficult to comprehend fully how yin and yang pervade Heaven and Earth because the forces themselves are invisible. That images may manifest the minute is a fact that does not perplex even the foolish, whereas forms hidden in what is invisible are what confuses even the learned.
How much more difficult it is, therefore, to understand the way of Buddhism, which exalts the void, uses the dark, and exploits the silent in order to succor the myriad grades of living things and exercise control over the entire world. Its spiritual authority is the highest, and its divine potency has no equal. Its magnitude impregnates the entire cosmos; there is no space so tiny that it does not permeate it. Birthless and deathless, it does not age after a thousand kalpas; half-hidden and half-manifest, it brings a hundred blessings even now. A wondrous way most mysterious, those who follow it cannot know its limit. A law flowing silent and deep, those who draw on it cannot fathom its source. How, therefore, could those benighted ordinary mortals not be perplexed if they tried to plumb its depths?
What I like is the acknowledgement that it's not easy to understand....
In a widely shared article titled “Religius tapi Gemar Korupsi, Ada Apa?” (Religious but keen to corrupt), Kompas journalist M. Zaid Wahyudi raised a timely question: Why does corruption remain widespread in a nation so openly religious? His article highlights a common assumption, that religion guarantees morality, that belief and ritual naturally lead to ethical behavior. A paradox indeed: Indonesia ranks high in religiosity but low in clean governance. Places of worship are crowded; prayer groups flourish. Yet corruption remains a daily reality. So, if religion is not to blame, what is missing?
....
WW Howells, in The Heathens: Primitive Man and His Religions, explains that early religion was never primarily moral. It was a response to fear. Faced with death, disease and natural disasters, early humans created rituals to reduce anxiety and restore order. Religion gave comfort, not necessarily ethics.
This primitive function has not disappeared. Today’s religious practices, prayers, fasting, sacred artifacts, still serve psychological and social needs: belonging, identity and comfort.
However, these rituals do not always shape conduct. One can fear God yet cheat the system. One can wear piety as a badge yet abuse office. Religion works well as a symbol. But without inner conviction, it does not restrain wrongdoing. The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg showed why. His six-stage model of moral development explains that people grow from a basic fear of punishment to principled reasoning. But most never reach the higher stages. Many obey rules to avoid shame or to be accepted by others, not out of justice or compassion.
Public religiosity often reinforces these early stages. One fasts only to be seen, prays to belong, avoids alcohol to gain respect. The moral compass is external. Right and wrong depend on who’s watching. And so corruption thrives, not because people lack belief, but because belief stays stuck at the surface level.
....
Ruth Benedict and Koentjaraningrat both showed that Indonesian society leans more toward a shame culture than a guilt culture. What matters is not whether something is right, but whether it is seen. The wrongdoing itself is tolerated as long as it stays hidden. When exposure comes, the shame is in being caught, not in having done wrong. So the question is not “Why are religious people corrupt?” but “Why has religious life become more about performance than formation?”
I was watching a clip from CNN this morning featuring two American women who run small businesses and their concerns about the tariffs.
One in particular had a story which would be happening in thousands of small businesses across the country. She designs and manufacturers some kind of baby products, and has them manufactured in China. It's a small business, I think with 5 employees. She has a loan secured by her house to support the business.
She said she has a shipment of products waiting to leave China, but she knows she cannot afford the massive tariff abuptly imposed on them. It means the few months of stock she has left might be the end of the business. She can't figure out a work around (she mentioned shipping them first to Australia and repackaging them before sending on to the US) because of the continuous changes in policy "every 36 hours". She also said there is no way an American factory can be expected to be geared up to make her particular products in less than (I think) 6 to 12 months. That's assuming she can find any factory that can take it on.
This all sounded very realistic and with no exaggeration for political spin.
I thought it a very effective and telling story on the turmoil which Trump and his very rich advisers, who don't have a worry in the world about how it will affect them, are causing.
Funny the things that can pop into your head while ironing a shirt. Or am I just remembering something I have already read online?
For some reason, I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz, and the song "If I only had a heart/brain/the nerve", which sums up the deficiencies of each of Dorothy's companions. Then Trump came to mind, and I realised how remarkable it is that he is like a Trinity of each of these deficiencies in the one man.
No brain - the evidence is overwhelming.
No heart - has no real interest in justice and wants to punish foreigners for all of America's woes.
No nerve - President Heal Spurs who flip flops on policy continuously.
The only way in which the analogy falls apart is in the resolution in the movie, where the characters are taught they always had what they desired within them. I try to be generous, but I can't see that happening with Trump...
[The other obvious Trump in Oz comparison was in the meme that went around a few months ago that showed Putin as the true Wizard behind the curtain controlling the fake Wizard head in the form of Trump. I liked that too.]
I would guess that like most people, I have the slimmest understanding of bond markets, but as far as I can tell, the changes in the US market may well have been the motivation for Trump to "pause" his tariff plans (on everyone except China). See this article, for example:
I don't really understand why it seems no one can tell who is selling - there was speculation by some that it was retaliatory selling by China, and denials from other finance types that the pattern indicated that this was the likely explanation.
And how disingenuous is Bessent: that this was Trump's plan all along. And he denies the bond market had anything to do with it. Not to be trusted in the slightest.
Finally: many, many people suspect a lot of insider trading happened on the Republican side. Who would be surprised? No one, given that this administration seems to be the first to think that if you do it (pretty much) in the open, it can't be corruption.
But in the body of the interview, the author seems to make the case that the decline was in stamina only, and nothing to do with mental ability when sufficiently rested:
As the 2024 campaign kicked into gear, the president couldn't hide from
public scrutiny, Whipple says. He notes that in the days leading up to
his disastrous debate with President Trump, Biden "was in a terrible state."
"He was absolutely exhausted. He was unable really to follow what was
happening in the campaign. He was tuned out," Whipple says. "Early on,
he walked out of a [debate preparation] session in the Aspen Lodge, the
president's cabin, went over to the pool, sank into a lounge chair, and
just fell sound asleep."
OK, but then further down:
On why Biden's staffers believed he could still govern
I think that this is much more interesting and not nearly as simple as
the notion of a cover-up. In other words, I am convinced that Joe
Biden's inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of
governing, and they believed that he could do it for another four years.
And we can't dismiss the fact that Biden on the very last day, July
21st, that Sunday when his aides came to hammer out his abdication
statement, Joe Biden was on the phone parsing the details of a complex
multi-nation prisoner swap. He was on top of every detail.
People who visited Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the Middle
East said he was on top of every nuance of Middle Eastern policy. ...
Joe Biden, behind closed doors, was governing, capably, whether you
liked his policies or not. So there's no question that he was a shadow
of the campaigner that he once was, and that was true from 2020 all the
way to the end. But, you can't dismiss the fact — it's an inconvenient
fact for people who say it was a cover-up — that Biden was capable.
* I still think, after viewing the extended sneak peek on Youtube, that the new Superman film does look good. It's weird, but so many people in comments on Youtube agree that it literally "looks great" - meaning the colours and CGI and cinematography overall. And there's a dog, of course. It's funny how some trailers can really still hit the spot and make a film look like it will definitely be a hit - I felt the same about the one for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
* There is also a new Wes Anderson film coming out. And again, it is in his highly, highly idiocentric and stylised, um, style, which makes the recent films play more like dryly and ironically amusing comic books than anything reflecting the real world. In fact, I reckon people now feel that his refusal to back down from this signature style has become something of a meta-joke in itself. As for me: I do think his "miss" rate has been getting higher (I didn't think much of Asteroid City, although I was watching on an jet and had interruptions), but I still am happy to try out each new one to see just how amused I am. I don't know why, but there is something pleasing about his persistent self indulgence, perhaps because you have a sense of how much he likely enjoys creating it?
* On politics: I am encouraged about the Labor policy to subsidise more home battery power. As I said a while ago - why aren't they (and solar panels, and solar hot water) a requirement on all new house builds under State construction codes? Maybe not worth it in Tasmania, but definitely for most of the country.
Sure, there are some around who tread carefully, sound socially responsible and don't go nuts.
But - Elon Musk, obviously.
And now, I'm wondering about this Scott Bessent, (worth about half a billion, apparently) who I knew nothing about until this tariff meltdown.
I mean, Wikipedia indicates that he used to have decent Democrat supporting credentials (originally worked for Soros, supported by donations Gore, Hilary Clinton and Obama.) Now he works for Trump.
Despite rumours (JC at New Catallaxy referenced them, but I think I have seen it said online too) that he's privately freaking out about how Trump has dealt with his tariff scheme, there is no indication of that at all in his public appearances - he went on Tucker Carlson to defend the whole scheme, talking about the need for a complete recreation of American trade, etc. And look at the reference to him in this article from WAPO, about how the MAGA Right has gone all Maoist:
Recently, a viral meme
in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump
addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the
mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you
could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview
— one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as
a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it
exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.
What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”
This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.
This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.
Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts
My daughter has said that she is very close to deleting Tik Tok off her phone because she fully recognises the way it saps attention span and wastes time. I must ask her if she has done it yet...
The whole thing is worth reading, but I will extract some of it:
I think most people thought it was going to be some kind of across-the-board tariff — same on everybody. Or maybe two or three different types of tariffs.
Instead, he announced this whole complicated, different tariff for every country, at levels much higher than the smart money — or the money that thought it was smart — was betting. Something like a 23 percent average tariff now, which is huge. It’s higher than U.S. tariffs were after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was passed. And trade is a much bigger part of the economy now than it was in 1930. So this is the biggest trade shock in history.
And:
There’s a funny thing here, which is that ordinarily I would say that while tariffs are bad, they don’t cause recessions. It makes the economy less efficient. You turn to higher-cost domestic sources for stuff, instead of lower-cost foreign sources, and foreigners turn away from the stuff you can produce cheaply. But that’s a reduction in the economy’s efficiency, not a shortfall in demand.
What’s unique about this situation is that the protectionism is unpredictable and unstable. And it’s that uncertainty that is the recessionary force.
If you were a manufacturing company in the United States and your next investment is going to be, let’s say, a components plant or something — well, should you put that components plant in Mexico, where it’s cheaper? Not if there’s a 25 percent tariff. But should you put it in the United States, where it’s more expensive? What if the tariff comes off?
So either way, you run substantial risk of just having stranded investments. And that’s happening across the board. So this is the instability of policy. The fact that nobody knows what’s coming next makes a recession certainly a whole lot more likely.
And:
If you were asking what a national
security oriented industrial policy that tries to keep production of
strategically important stuff in the United States looks like, it looks
like the CHIPS Act. It looks like what the Biden people were trying to
do. Probably bigger than that — in an ideal world, we’d be doing
substantially more. But that’s how you do it.
Putting
high tariffs on imports of clothing from Bangladesh is exactly what you
shouldn’t be doing. That’s the kind of thing that is disruptive, raises
the cost of living for American consumers, does nothing to make us more
secure.
There is a national security
rationale for domestic production, but also for friendshoring and for
nearshoring, because the stuff that’s close by is a lot easier to
secure. If that’s what we were wanting to do, then we would not be
levying tariffs on Vietnam and Bangladesh, and we would certainly not be
putting tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
And this bit by Klein makes a lot of sense to me (it's in bold because that is how Klein's voice appears in the transcript):
When I try to dive into MAGA world’s thinking here, something that I tend to hear is a somewhat contradictory or troubled relationship to American power.
On the one hand, they want America to be stronger, more feared, more dominant. And on the other hand, there’s a broad view that we have overextended ourselves.
Financially, we’ve made the dollar the reserve currency. We’ve allowed all these other countries to buy our assets and buy our money even as our industrial base flowed out.
And then on the military side, we have these bases all over the world, we have all these troops in Europe, we’re part of NATO, we’re spending more as a percentage of gross national product than some of these other countries. But this is part of why we can no longer take care of our people.
And so there’s this feeling: Well, for America to be stronger, it can’t be operating this global umbrella of financial and military protection.
But then you ask: Well, do you want the dollar to not be the reserve currency? And they say: No, no, no, no. We definitely want to keep it the reserve currency.
If you ask: Do you want America’s military to be weak? Do you want people to not be tied to us in the way they are now? They say: No, we actually want more leverage over them.
There’s something here that I think is very strange and very unresolved in this movement that wants both more dominance and somehow, at the same time, to pull back from the actual architecture of that dominance and leverage.
Krugman's reply was something that I was recently saying to an overseas friend who is generally very anti-American:
We have been a kind of imperial power.
Some people say more than kind of — we’ve been an imperial power, in
many ways, since the end of World War II.
But it’s not like any previous empire. The Pax Americana starts with the Marshall Plan.
Instead
of plundering our defeated enemies, we rebuilt them. And then we built a
system of alliances: We have NATO. We have international economic
institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which do actually
kind of reflect U.S. interests, but at least on paper, we’re at most
first among equals. So we are a polite, low-key, relatively generous
imperial power.
That is a very hard role for many people to understand.
I'm sure that Krugman would, if asked, agree that there has also been a lot of awful direct foreign interference in the post war period; but America's role in re-building defeated countries after their destruction is no doubt the explanation for its continuing popularity (until now!) with much of the free world.
When I first heard the "Mar a Lago accord" I thought it might be another conspiracy theory, perhaps this time of the Left. But now I know it is a pet theory of someone in Trump's ear, and it looks like we have to put up with the chaos that happens when you have a dumb narcissist as leader who other people want to manipulate.
Here are two articles on the idea that are worth reading:
As any commentary points out - the idea that countries will trust the US under Trump so much that they will co-operate in devaluing their own currency seems wildly implausible when everything he has done and said indicates that he is completely untrustworthy.
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