Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves.
The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place).
since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation
Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!
One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:
I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.
The gutter mud soaked knife-fight practice of economics and the erudite study of economics is one of the more jarring discontinuities between how we talk about how something works and how it actually does.
The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.
They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics.
Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.
If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.
Coase did his most relevant work in the 1950s, and it wasn't as if he invented the idea of externalities. It was first given serious academic weight in the 1890s, and Pigou created the concept of externality correcting taxes in the 1920s. His work was important because it proposed a more market based solution than Pigouvian taxes.
I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.
At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects)
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc...
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it.
It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.
Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired.
Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.
The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.
The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not.
They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.
That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible. Estimates vary, but so far about 50% of their offensive capabilities seem to have been destroyed. Continue combat operations and destroy the rest. Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out. Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy. I don't care about the internal politics of Iran. If the country descends into chaos or civil war, so be it. Hopefully, this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic. It is for the Iranians to decide what government they want, so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests.
From the point of view of the people who would actually do it, the most important effect of impeaching Trump would be a messy political fight and likely losing reelection in November. The most important effect of not impeaching him is they get to stay in office. Everything else is unimportant by comparison.
The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was.
If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was.
There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet.
It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering.
and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.
In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.
Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers.
If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area.
Probably much less in quantity.
which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient
or other wierdness where filling a can with
an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.
Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition.
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
> It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed.
There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them.
Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers.
But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.
The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.
It really does seem like this war of choice was[1] an absolutely boneheaded idea. It's the kind of thing (and specifically, the lack of consequences or measures to prevent it from being repeated in Cuba or Greenland) that highlights how broken American politics are right now.
1. Not even in retrospect - intelligence agencies knew this was a significant risk and I'd bet your average person on the streets would have come to the realization that it was a bad idea if they thought about it for like a week.
Add to that the USAID shutdown and other impacts to humanitarian relief caused by the DOGE team. It’s all coming together for a really nightmarish time for developing countries
I'm not certain how recently you were in the grocery store but it's getting pretty serious in developed countries as well - not famine levels, for sure, but meat prices in Canada are going crazy right now and we're just feeling the first wave of the supply shocks - this will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I do not eat meat so I couldn’t say. I haven’t yet seen large increases in Germany for what I buy but I wouldn’t be surprised if the overall prices have been trending up. Not yet to the Covid era, where I could see the rice increase in price every time I would do groceries — and it still hasn’t come down :(
Despite being positioned in a way that should shield from the more immediate impacts, I keep wondering if that would actually happen at this point. Most parties seem to try hard to avoid the actual conflict and while not escalating further won't save this year's crops, it shouldn't mean that people will automatically die. It may mean, however, that people will not be able to eat what they want, which, in turn, would mean shortages.
Trump flip-flops numerous times per day. I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake - he is unable to make a deal. Everyone sees this now.
If you knew anyone that worked on the other ends of those deals, you'd know that it was always a load of trash. He basically relied on people caving to threats. That tactic only works if the other side believes the threat is credible and that they actually have something to lose.
The art of the deal always seemed to be, (1) create a situation unfavourable to your opponent. (2) exploit their temporary weakness to force a coercive one sided deal.
Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world. The thing is when it comes to countries its harder to get them to roll over because if a dictator looks too weak its off with their head. If you give a dictator the choice of ruling over an impovrished country or dying in a coup, they are going to choose the former. On top of that its hard to make international coercive deals stick. In the normal business world, you can sue if someone reneges. When it comes to countries, what are you going to do? Whine to the UN? Good luck with that. Countries can stick with deals when it suits them and forget about them when it no longer does. At worse that may not make countries want to make deals in the future, but if it was a coercive deal that doesnt matter much.
It was always the Art of the BS, part of which is always to try to hide the fact that it is BS. But people fall for it and his minions often at least initially benefit from the same BS.
Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.
Trumps art of the deal is trying to forcefully create win-lose deals instead of win-win or win-neutral deals, which, not very surprisingly, leads to other sides then going for the lose-lose deal.
Of course it was fake. It was ghostwritten (again, of course it was), and the ghostwriter is wracked with remorse. [1]
The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.
> I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake
To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)
Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?
I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)
You just discovered why your gdp is so high... American prices make no fucking sense to me, some of your double car garages are more expensive than a full high end house in central Europe
People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k. That's fresh out of college or shortly after. Obviously not everyone makes that much, but it's not unusual at all in tech.
> People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k.
This is an extremely HN specific and tech industry specific comment. Go for a day-long drive through middle America, like from Nebraska to Wyoming or something, and 95%+ of the people you will see are living on less than $60,000 total family income per year. A very small selection of very specific jobs start at $200k a year.
I’d hardly consider this a side effect. Decreasing traffic in one path within a network of exchange has the direct effect of increasing traffic/demand on alternate paths. Increased demand == increased prices.
The most surprising thing is that the whole world somehow has built dependency on Hormuz which has been known for decades that it is controlled by Iran, an adversarial actor to the west.
Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?
Adverserial? They just want to raise families, enjoy BBQ and live decent lives, its the meddling outsiders that produced this conflict. Dont fall victim to mass media propaganda, on HackerNews we expect you to be an independant thinker.
(Really neat website, I think it was shared on HN a few months ago?)
There is a lot of other proposed routes but it’s actually pretty hard to create them in that region, lots of actors with their own interests and not the best history of collaboration. And Iran would definitely be against it given it reduces their influence
The funny thing is that we don't need to speculate about many of the effects of this because it's already happened but nobody really paid attention to it. I am talking about the Trump 2020 OPEC deal.
First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].
In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].
So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.
When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.
And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.
That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.
This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.
Oh and oil CEOs are starting to warn about the coming energy shock [7][8] so buckle up.
Resuming production is also going to take years. Every bit of oil storage inside the Strait is at maximum capacity. All of the wells have had to stop producing because there is nowhere for the oil to go. When wells stop, it can take a long time to ramp up the production to previous levels -assuming it can ever again resume its prior peak output. Additionally, several key bits of infrastructure (trains, refineries) have been damaged and cannot be easily repaired.
Can't someone take all possessions of Trump, Hegseth etc... and redistribute this to middle and lower class folks? I fail to see why I have to pay for increasing prices due to the actions of those guys. This is literally a racketeering scheme for milking us via increase of prices. A few get very rich, just as Smedley Butler pointed out many decades ago - even he would be shocked at the level of milking going on here.
I genuinely think it's necessary to bankrupt the Trump family. If the family (and especially Trump himself) exits office with all the wealth he's stolen then it sets a clear example to Bezos, Musk, Gates or any other wealthy individual to buy the presidency so they can loot the coffers to multiply their wealth.
America as an organization needs to stand up and get retributive with robbing government coffers or it'll just breed even more kleptocracy.
The next time they'll elect Vance or some other dipshit. It's idiocracy in real life, and nothing surprising given the American education system... ~25% of functionaly illiterate voters
> As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron
Another part of the new price of oil and Trump's tariffs earlier is that they are a regressive tax. Poor people have to pay more in terms of percentage of their income now.
Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.
American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.
Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.
Not to get all fatalistic, but:
What’s the point in getting revenge on these people in particular? The voters have made it clear that there’s about eight years at most, typically less, before they’ll rally behind some new grifters and need to repeat the complete set of coursework from scratch.
As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”
One contributing reason politics became this bad is that politicians were rewarded for exactly this behavior. By gentlements agreement there was no accountability and no punishment - and no sex impeachment with bad faith performative pretense you care dont count.
That is why. Because if you dont "take revenge" things will get worst. Because not taking revenge made conservatives know the strategy works.
We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.
Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.
Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves.
The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place).
since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation
Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!
One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.
The gutter mud soaked knife-fight practice of economics and the erudite study of economics is one of the more jarring discontinuities between how we talk about how something works and how it actually does.
The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.
They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics.
Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.
If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.
Coase did his most relevant work in the 1950s, and it wasn't as if he invented the idea of externalities. It was first given serious academic weight in the 1890s, and Pigou created the concept of externality correcting taxes in the 1920s. His work was important because it proposed a more market based solution than Pigouvian taxes.
I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.
There's a wide gap between "ignored" and "received the attention they deserved".
Decision makers ignore externalities. Economists definitely not, it’s pretty much what their field of study is about
Econ 101 often ignores side effects, but I don’t think economist has a whole ignore side effects. That’s like one of their main topics of study.
Externalities were a very big part of my first-year microeconomics course circa 2008, FWIW.
This is a bit like the critique of physics that they ignore friction.
It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.
Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.
At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects)
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
same here. gas is $6 in seattle; every business uses gas, explains the extreme cost of living. i'm going broke working for AWS.
I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc...
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it.
It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.
Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired.
Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.
The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.
The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not.
They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.
That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible. Estimates vary, but so far about 50% of their offensive capabilities seem to have been destroyed. Continue combat operations and destroy the rest. Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out. Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy. I don't care about the internal politics of Iran. If the country descends into chaos or civil war, so be it. Hopefully, this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic. It is for the Iranians to decide what government they want, so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests.
Iran going like Syria would certainly interfere with US and global interests.
From the point of view of the people who would actually do it, the most important effect of impeaching Trump would be a messy political fight and likely losing reelection in November. The most important effect of not impeaching him is they get to stay in office. Everything else is unimportant by comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
They absolutely are
The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was.
If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was.
There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet.
It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering.
[1]: https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...
and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.
In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.
Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers.
If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.
which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient or other wierdness where filling a can with an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.
Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition.
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
> It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed.
There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.
The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
We should standardize some "dual-container" format that can be formed out of disassembled containers.
I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.
The rest of the world suffering the stupidity of average the American voter.
There’s probably going to be a famine or famines due to lack of, and expense, of fertilizer resulting in less food for the developing world.
It really does seem like this war of choice was[1] an absolutely boneheaded idea. It's the kind of thing (and specifically, the lack of consequences or measures to prevent it from being repeated in Cuba or Greenland) that highlights how broken American politics are right now.
1. Not even in retrospect - intelligence agencies knew this was a significant risk and I'd bet your average person on the streets would have come to the realization that it was a bad idea if they thought about it for like a week.
We're talking about 4D chess here /s
Add to that the USAID shutdown and other impacts to humanitarian relief caused by the DOGE team. It’s all coming together for a really nightmarish time for developing countries
I'm not certain how recently you were in the grocery store but it's getting pretty serious in developed countries as well - not famine levels, for sure, but meat prices in Canada are going crazy right now and we're just feeling the first wave of the supply shocks - this will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I do not eat meat so I couldn’t say. I haven’t yet seen large increases in Germany for what I buy but I wouldn’t be surprised if the overall prices have been trending up. Not yet to the Covid era, where I could see the rice increase in price every time I would do groceries — and it still hasn’t come down :(
Perfect time to explore alternatives to eating meat.
Despite being positioned in a way that should shield from the more immediate impacts, I keep wondering if that would actually happen at this point. Most parties seem to try hard to avoid the actual conflict and while not escalating further won't save this year's crops, it shouldn't mean that people will automatically die. It may mean, however, that people will not be able to eat what they want, which, in turn, would mean shortages.
edit; grammar and syntax for clarity
Yeah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlH32Lprto is a video from Peter Zeihan covering that exact topic.
Trump couldn't care less
Tired of winning, can't take it anymore.
Trump flip-flops numerous times per day. I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake - he is unable to make a deal. Everyone sees this now.
If you knew anyone that worked on the other ends of those deals, you'd know that it was always a load of trash. He basically relied on people caving to threats. That tactic only works if the other side believes the threat is credible and that they actually have something to lose.
You mean you once believed he was good at making deals or was that sarcasm?
The art of the deal always seemed to be, (1) create a situation unfavourable to your opponent. (2) exploit their temporary weakness to force a coercive one sided deal.
Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world. The thing is when it comes to countries its harder to get them to roll over because if a dictator looks too weak its off with their head. If you give a dictator the choice of ruling over an impovrished country or dying in a coup, they are going to choose the former. On top of that its hard to make international coercive deals stick. In the normal business world, you can sue if someone reneges. When it comes to countries, what are you going to do? Whine to the UN? Good luck with that. Countries can stick with deals when it suits them and forget about them when it no longer does. At worse that may not make countries want to make deals in the future, but if it was a coercive deal that doesnt matter much.
It was always the Art of the BS, part of which is always to try to hide the fact that it is BS. But people fall for it and his minions often at least initially benefit from the same BS.
Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.
Trumps art of the deal is trying to forcefully create win-lose deals instead of win-win or win-neutral deals, which, not very surprisingly, leads to other sides then going for the lose-lose deal.
It's not important to win, but it is paramount to at least feel like someone else is loosing more.
Of course it was fake. It was ghostwritten (again, of course it was), and the ghostwriter is wracked with remorse. [1]
The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.
1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-schwartz-trumps-ghostwrite...
> I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake
To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)
Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?
I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)
Anyone tried to buy paint recently?
$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.
You just discovered why your gdp is so high... American prices make no fucking sense to me, some of your double car garages are more expensive than a full high end house in central Europe
People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k. That's fresh out of college or shortly after. Obviously not everyone makes that much, but it's not unusual at all in tech.
> People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k.
This is an extremely HN specific and tech industry specific comment. Go for a day-long drive through middle America, like from Nebraska to Wyoming or something, and 95%+ of the people you will see are living on less than $60,000 total family income per year. A very small selection of very specific jobs start at $200k a year.
> but it's not unusual at all in tech.
But tech workers are a tiny sliver of the population so no, $200k starter jobs are extremely unusual in USA.
I spent $111 for two quarts
God bless the Trump administration. Sounds like that’s a bunch of my summer task list checked off as No Longer Viable.
Dunno, it depends on what brand that is. $60 per gallon sounds about where Sherwin Williams paint has been for a while.
I’d hardly consider this a side effect. Decreasing traffic in one path within a network of exchange has the direct effect of increasing traffic/demand on alternate paths. Increased demand == increased prices.
Calling increased shipping costs due to rising fuel prices a "side effect" of an oil crisis, seems odd to me. Isn't that the expected main effect?
War insurance rates for shipping has also gone up: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/strait-hormuz-sh...
people don't realize how cheap shipping via containers had become.
& this increased commerce all around the globe.
but destroyed due to bad propaganda.
The most surprising thing is that the whole world somehow has built dependency on Hormuz which has been known for decades that it is controlled by Iran, an adversarial actor to the west.
Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?
They actually have. I think both Saudi Arabia and UAE have built pipelines to bypass the strait.
Not to mention USA investing heavily in fraking to counter balance the middle east...
Adverserial? They just want to raise families, enjoy BBQ and live decent lives, its the meddling outsiders that produced this conflict. Dont fall victim to mass media propaganda, on HackerNews we expect you to be an independant thinker.
> Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?
When you have questions like that in mind, the answer is pretty much always „yes, that’s a well known topic of discussion in that field“
You can see alternatives that exist here: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/alternative-routes/
(Really neat website, I think it was shared on HN a few months ago?)
There is a lot of other proposed routes but it’s actually pretty hard to create them in that region, lots of actors with their own interests and not the best history of collaboration. And Iran would definitely be against it given it reduces their influence
The funny thing is that we don't need to speculate about many of the effects of this because it's already happened but nobody really paid attention to it. I am talking about the Trump 2020 OPEC deal.
First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].
In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].
So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.
When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.
And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.
That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.
This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.
Oh and oil CEOs are starting to warn about the coming energy shock [7][8] so buckle up.
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1135...
[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contango.asp
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
[5]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-touts-great-saud...
[6]: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114185/documents/...
[7]: https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/chevron-ceo-drops...
[8]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/exxon-warn...
> And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
IIRC there’s also major long-term supply destruction happening, because wells have to be capped around the Persian Gulf since the tanks are full.
Resuming production is also going to take years. Every bit of oil storage inside the Strait is at maximum capacity. All of the wells have had to stop producing because there is nowhere for the oil to go. When wells stop, it can take a long time to ramp up the production to previous levels -assuming it can ever again resume its prior peak output. Additionally, several key bits of infrastructure (trains, refineries) have been damaged and cannot be easily repaired.
A predictable FAFO event due to US global aggression, forced on the world by Israel and putting America last, as usual.
click on YTD on this graph
* https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...
(screenshot https://images2.imgbox.com/cd/73/yMf1mwKy_o.png )
every 1 single day = another 1 week of misery for the world
100 ships per day now single digits sometimes zero
90 days = 90 weeks
except it's going to be still like this in SIX MONTHS if not all the way through January 2029
wait until Cuba happens some Friday night too
Can't someone take all possessions of Trump, Hegseth etc... and redistribute this to middle and lower class folks? I fail to see why I have to pay for increasing prices due to the actions of those guys. This is literally a racketeering scheme for milking us via increase of prices. A few get very rich, just as Smedley Butler pointed out many decades ago - even he would be shocked at the level of milking going on here.
You are asking for your own Lenin.
Wasn’t Steve Bannon too?
I genuinely think it's necessary to bankrupt the Trump family. If the family (and especially Trump himself) exits office with all the wealth he's stolen then it sets a clear example to Bezos, Musk, Gates or any other wealthy individual to buy the presidency so they can loot the coffers to multiply their wealth.
America as an organization needs to stand up and get retributive with robbing government coffers or it'll just breed even more kleptocracy.
They go bankrupt, they get a 10B dollar tax deduction :)
The next time they'll elect Vance or some other dipshit. It's idiocracy in real life, and nothing surprising given the American education system... ~25% of functionaly illiterate voters
> As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron
Another part of the new price of oil and Trump's tariffs earlier is that they are a regressive tax. Poor people have to pay more in terms of percentage of their income now.
Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.
American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.
Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.
Not to get all fatalistic, but: What’s the point in getting revenge on these people in particular? The voters have made it clear that there’s about eight years at most, typically less, before they’ll rally behind some new grifters and need to repeat the complete set of coursework from scratch.
As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”
One contributing reason politics became this bad is that politicians were rewarded for exactly this behavior. By gentlements agreement there was no accountability and no punishment - and no sex impeachment with bad faith performative pretense you care dont count.
That is why. Because if you dont "take revenge" things will get worst. Because not taking revenge made conservatives know the strategy works.
We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.
Honestly, The Internet created this.
vote
I believe democracy is about a bit more than voting what is presented to you.
like what?