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cwal37 | on: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.

I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.

I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.

Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.

ihaveajob | parent | next
In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.

This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.

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chillfox | parent | next
I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.

It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.

The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.

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unclad5968 | parent | next
> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not

I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.

National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.

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seizethecheese | parent | next
Classic hindsight bias. In fact, you could be paying a lot of attention to politics and still think tariffs were not going to go so high. Here's [1] a betting market that regularly was below 5% chance of tariffs above 40% on Chinese imports in first 100 days of Trump's second term.

https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...

ohyoutravel | root | parent
Polymarket isn’t a source for this, lol. Maybe google trends, since there’s no reason to manipulate it. There were also reasons to anticipate the amount of the tariffs, and the absolute stupidity of the tariffs (still reeling from the Heard and McDonald islands tariffs lmao).
seizethecheese | root | parent
This is a strange position to take. Sure, Polymarket has warts, but that doesn't mean it's not a very good source for consensus opinions about the future from the past. Do you think this market was manipulated?
ohyoutravel | root | parent
Search “Polymarket manipulated” or similar and examples are legion. You can even do that on hacker news. There’s a lot of incentive to do so.
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renewiltord | parent | next
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
krisoft | root | parent | next
There are two different kind of “prediction” mixed up here.

The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.

That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.

If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.

derektank | root | parent | next
It would have been very hard to find a counterparty that didn’t think Donald Trump was going to raise tariffs prior to his inauguration. He was very transparent about this (though the exact amount has fluctuated pretty wildly). Hard to make money when nobody else is taking the other side of the bet.
ohyoutravel | root | parent
Plenty of things are predictable in the sense that one can bucket them. Tariffs were very predictable because we know the pedo has that unilateral lever and talks about wielding it. But who would have predicted that out of all the stupid tariff things that might happen, it would be things like tariffing allies, tariffing uninhabited islands, TACO tariffs, or a giant board with “reciprocal tariffs”? It requires not only predicting specific stupidity, but taking an aggressive position.

Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?

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skybrian | parent | next
I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
skrtskrt | root | parent | next
This isn't about timing the market by being clairvoyant about the timing of a madman's tariffs.

This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.

Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.

straydusk | root | parent | next
It was extremely easy to see them coming, because he talked about the repeatedly.

The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.

derektank | root | parent | next
They were very much priced in, you had retailers purchasing a lot of imports in Q1 to prepare for them. What wasn’t priced in was the scale, which is what resulted in the initial sell off in April until the administration walked back the steepest rates
mmh0000 | root | parent | next
He literally said he was gonna:

"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...

(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)

EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...

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swang | root | parent
let me guess... you don't follow politics either...
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