Don't post anything sensitive here, and I mean "private" parts of the site as well, like your PMs or your e-mail address or anything like that. Keep in mind that deleted posts and PMs may not be actually deleted from the database.

And trust that theymos has a reasonably recent backup to recover the site, which he probably does.

LOL that's exactly what I was talking about, the "offers" are basically the equivalent of a shirtless Trump on a horse. Like the one where Canada said yeah we'll help with fentanyl, which there is barely any coming from Canada, and Mexico send yeah we'll do something-or-other-that-we-were-doing-anyway-but-will-make-it-sound-like-Trump's-wish.


Good point. Have you concluded the research of the tariff formula's divisor yet?

It's quite lovely how you rant about media misinformation and then parrot white house and right wing media talking points with no thought whatsoever, all on the same page here.

By no means ever try to ask yourself, which countries are coming and what they're signing and why would they sign anything, let alone anything beneficial to the US when they can clearly see Trump caving as soon as someone tells him that bond selloff is a bad thing... a much better option is to talk to China or Japan, the countries holding the US by the proverbial balls, who also happen to not have a tantrum-prone toddler in charge. OTOH, if they can negotiate some sort of deal by promising to hang paintings of Trump (shirtless on a horse for extra discount) in their streets, more power to them. Paid for by american taxpayers either way.

The US does not have the upper hand. China saw that all it needs for Trump to cave in is to wait a day or two for the stock market to drop. So they can ratchet retaliatory tariffs to 500%, Trump will obediently respond, and then will declare victory by revoking the stupid shit he did himself. Just one of many ways this can play out without any benefit for the US. At the expense of everyone paying a 10% federal sales tax, we love new taxes don't we.

Makes about as much sense as your (somehow magically disappeared) thread about the idiotic formula that was so brilliant and poof it's gone just like your thread, all bullshit formulas thrown away, all taxes set at 10%, except China, which can get whatever it wants now that Trump has shown himself to be full of chickenshit. Or to use your analogy, you've given fake money to all bullies except one, that'll definitely teach that one bully that you're definitely a super-tough keyboard warrior and totally not giving up.

I bet you will find excuses even when the same government officials turn out to have done insider trading while lying to the public.

What happened Navarro, Lutnick, et al bleating "this is not a negotiation" for the last week or so?

Rhetorical question of course. Morons crashed the market, got reprimanded by fellow billionaires, and quickly "fixed" what didn't need breaking to begin with. Fart of the deal.

Yeah he did finally chicken out and kinda sorta paused (or lowered to 10%, depending on how you read his illiterate tweet) tariffs for most countries, except China tariff was raised to 125%.

It's funny to see all those who were salivating how great the tariffs were now praising Trump that he bravely "fixed" the stock market that he broke himself... what a bunch of feckless idiots.

I apologize. I'm trying as hard as I can to stay on your topic of 2:1 "discount" by proving will multiple examples that the USTR formula has nothing to with it. I'm sorry you didn't like the numbers for China or Vietnam. How about Thailand? Beautiful country.

45608.9 / 63328.2 = 0.72 aka 72%... is this better? Still just a coincidence? It should be 2 instead?

Please show your math for this one. You might have made a grave mistake of doing this correctly for some inexplicable reason... except it's a trade surplus, so how does that work out in your imaginary reciprocal land?


Or if you do the math as intended by the abject morons (or chatGPT) who came up with the formula, you get 90.4% which is... what a coincidence... can it possibly be?




I don't. I want to know more about every other country and how it averages to "2".

You're the one having things the wrong way round, specifically the wrong divisor. The formula is idiotic for other reasons, i.e. it has nothing to do with "tariffs" or "reciprocal", it's like asking "how much are eggs at Aldi today" and USTR provides a formula: number_four_letter_words_in_your_posts / total_number_of_words_in_your_posts.

However in the name of science, could you please try to plug in numbers for Vietnam into the formula and show us how it equals your magical reciprocal number of "2".

Here is the source data: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5520.html

Uhm... you do realize that you made all that up? I'm saying the idiotic USTR deficit formula uses exports TO China from the US. All your other hallucinations are yours only.

I do love your selective quoting while ignoring the glaring issues of using the wrong divisor, or the "2" being elasticity (and not the delta t like you keep saying).

Flip the subtraction around, you get -0.673, feel better now with that minus sign?


Not exports FROM China, exports TO China from the US is what's in the formula.


"country" is China for the purposes of this discussion. So it's imports FROM China, and exports [TO China].

It makes no sense that it would mean imports FROM China and exports FROM China.


It doesn't say that. I think you know that because you would have happily quoted it if it did.


It's not. You're the only one trying to invent this alternate reality. You haven't provided any proof from Trump or his minions that they used anything other than the idiotic deficit formula to come up with the tariffs.

Yes, I did, and showed that you're wrong.


LOL now you're just saying words that you think make you sound smart... stock market expert who can't divide two numbers properly 

Yeah that's exactly what China... wait, no, they called Trump's bluff and added a 34% tariff, brilliant stable genius move right there.

Here is what's more likely than any of the MAGA wet fantasies: China, Europe, some other places will make their own trade deals and figure out a way to make the global economy work without relying on the erratic bully that is the US. Because it would be absurd to invest billions into some cockamamie scheme that may or may not hold for 4 years, if that. What's not gonna happen is time travel to 1800s when the global trade was cotton, tobacco, and some tea.

But hey, if you trust the incredibly dumb formula that you couldn't figure out, buy the dip, you'll be rich beyond belief.

And before that people were so wealthy that they could afford to own other people, is that the kind of logic you're going for here?

What a batshit view of the world. Read up (not you, obviously you don't read, but anyone who might stumble into this thread) on McKinley and Hoover tariffs and how that worked out.

Are you too embarrassed by your 2nd grade math error so that you're gonna do personal attacks in multiple threads now?

I'm literally responding to a cybertruck-driving manly man who thinks that real men should stand on their principles and face consequences, and I'm suggesting that perhaps Elon is not very "man" according to that criteria. I'm not quite following how this triggered your crossdressing fantasy but perhaps you should start a separate thread about that, seems like an important topic for you.

I did and it is 0.67 aka 67%

In case of US trade with China, 2024 numbers, in millions USD:

(exports - imports) / imports = (438947.4 - 143545.7) / 438947.4 = ~0.673

Just admit it already, you divided by the wrong number (exports instead of imports). Imports is the larger number, thus deficit. How many more walls of text are you gonna post about your math error?


Those "findings" are utter bullshit, but math is math and you should at least be capable of grasping that the "2" they're talking about is not the tariff or the discount, but the elasticity value they didn't even use in the formula (which is irrelevant anyway because it's cancelled out by the other random value they picked). Emphasis mine.

I guess that makes Elon weenie-not-a-man, what with his whining on Fox News how people are hurting his fee-fees by saying mean things about him and his swasticars.

I love how dedicated you are to your own delusion, even after the USTR already published their incredibly dumb "formula" that is bleach-drinking-scale of stupid and primitive and you still managed to completely mangle it, however if you correctly plug in 2024 trade numbers into you get ~67% for China. But no, it can't be that, it must be that other thing that you post walls of bullshit about LOL.

US trade deficit with China is ~67% percent of US imports from China, that's the essence of the incredibly dumb "formula". Trumplings (or ChatGPT) perhaps thought 67% tariff might be a bit steep so they divided it by 2 to get the number they liked better. Very stable geniuses indeed.

Still you managed to out-genius them by cocking it up with the wrong divisor and spiraled into utterly absurd arguments based on utterly absurdly erroneous interpretation of the incredibly dumb "formula". Congratulations, you can have that celebratory glass of bleach now.

Except none of that is true. They wanted a number and came up with an incredibly dumb "formula" to get to that number. Also they wanted a tariff on everyone so they made up an incredibly dumb 10% "exception" to the incredibly dumb "formula". It's not based on any of the things you're trying to make up here.

I think the incredibly dumb theory that they asked Grok to come up with the tariffs makes more sense that all the bullshit you posted in this thread.