Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.
I don't mean to imply that I believe they are excellent people who will take care of us all, nor that there is any illuminati cabal like that other ludicrous comment.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
You've missed the tail end of that story - Trump made an angry call to Bezos, presumably full of threats, after which Bezos announced that they weren't going to do that and totally never planned to.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Totally. But Bezos is leaving a lot of money on the table, and none of this makes political sense. Everyone goes down if things get more expensive. Meanwhile I'm imagining a Chrome plugin that shows you the pre-tariff prices on Amazon [rubs hands]
Yes, accidental, hapless stumbling onto major windfall on multiple occasions clearly is an indication of nothing more than pure, unadulterated, McDuck level of luck and not, I repeat, not indication of anything but simple return of a favor.
