Where is/can Donald Trump take US (sic)?

[SirRumpole]

Can you see what I see?

The power of the keyboard is strong indeed Luke.

 

[moXJO]

MoKjo, Wayne are you saying that regardless of competency, regardless of ethics, regardless of nepotism and regardless of obvious conflicts of interest Donald Trump is untouchable as President ?

Taking it to the obvious conclusion Donald Trump could walk down 5th Avenue and shoot someone and nothing would happen. Fair comment ?

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politics/donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/index.html

The news is overfed with Trump stories. He has done bad stuff that no one else would get away with.

And yet here we are.

All these stories with half truths and negativity on trump just dilute the more important ones. I don't know what news stories to believe anymore, without a half hour of research. So its easier to start ignoring them.

 

[qldfrog]

some Truth there moXJO.
Since Hillary is unable to accept her defeat (as it was her defeat not Trump's victory) we have so much anti Trump bias I do not give a **** to the news and I believe most of the americans do the same (except the Hillary fan cohorts of course with their self righteous indignation)
As Trump is going to pass the first laws since ages on gun control, it is hardly noted, or not enough orrr..but compare with the past..anyway..he is not a saint but i have more respect for him than any of the other puppets

 

[SirRumpole]

is going to pass

That remains to be seen. Good on him if he does.

 

[wayneL]

MoKjo, Wayne are you saying that....

So whay you are say is that you are channelling Cathy Newman?

Amateur bas, amateur.

 

[luutzu]

That remains to be seen. Good on him if he does.

He, like most people who aren't politician, have moments of sanity. But he will be quickly enough brought into line by those who know better.

It is better to come to terms with doing what the lobbyist tells you, get to live and retire with a few billions extra. Don't go insulting the real owner or growing a brain... might end up like Nixon and be seen as a villian; or JFK and a hero who's no longer with his family.

There was a leak some weeks ago about Trump telling his generals: you guys keep asking me to send more troops here, bomb more places there. Why the heck are we doing this.

General: Sir, we have to do it there so we don't have to do it here.

Trump: You always say that. You can say that about any place you want bombed.

Not sure if that exchange was before or after "he" ordered that Mother of all Bombs on Afghanistan.

There's a reason why empires and dynasties last no more than 220 to 300 years. The empire get over-extended, the military grows too powerful, the plebs too impoverished, the elite too rich and corrupt to know the possibility of an uprising... then a spark either ignite the plebs to overthrow their governemtn... or an external shock reduces it to a colony and protectorate.

 

[Tisme]

Interesting to see if the relatively small amount of steel China sells into the USA, will be be replaced by the same stuff, but in the form of e.g. cheap white goods with increased profit margins :- putting tariffs on import steel will presumably raise the cost of production in the U$ofA .

 

[luutzu]

Interesting to see if the relatively small amount of steel China sells into the USA, will be be replaced by the same stuff, but in the form of e.g. cheap white goods with increased profit margins :- putting tariffs on import steel will presumably raise the cost of production in the U$ofA .

Increased cost of production, yes. But that's OK because beside war machines, how many manufactured goods does the US export nowadays anyway.

So most of the costs will be paid for by Americans themselves. On that planned infrastructure spent.

Apparently we in Australia already have a similar trade protection scheme for the local steel industry. I was told by a sales rep that they have to pay some 5% or 10% extra if they import steel from China. So they have to buy from OneSteel the raw material... "making life very difficult" as he put it.

 

[wayneL]

Chinese steel is absolute shyte anyway.

The difference when you work proper stuff is huge.

 

[moXJO]

Chinese steel is absolute shyte anyway.

The difference when you work proper stuff is huge.

Depends where you get it from.
Plus you need guys there checking the orders are packed with what its suppose to contain.

 

[luutzu]

Chinese steel is absolute shyte anyway.

The difference when you work proper stuff is huge.

Personally I wouldn't want to build my foundation with Chinese imported steel.

But if it's for a client... well, I supposed there's a few pieces of paper saying it's to Australian standard soooo your Honour... who am I to question other people's authority

But yea, for an average house the cost of reinforcement is about $4K to $5K... which is practically nothing really. Might as well go for quality you can trust... and supporting a couple of local duopoly for their hard lobbying work.

 

[wayneL]

Sticking on the bottom of a horses foot for six weeks shows you a lot about the quality of the steel.

 

[Tisme]

Personally I wouldn't want to build my foundation with Chinese imported steel.

But if it's for a client... well, I supposed there's a few pieces of paper saying it's to Australian standard soooo your Honour... who am I to question other people's authority

But yea, for an average house the cost of reinforcement is about $4K to $5K... which is practically nothing really. Might as well go for quality you can trust... and supporting a couple of local duopoly for their hard lobbying work.

Just about everything out of China is dodgy...we all know it, they know it, every Oz business that has gone down because of price point knows it.

 

[Macquack]

Sticking on the bottom of a horses foot for six weeks shows you a lot about the quality of the steel.

Is there any special requirement for the steel to make horse shoes?
Why don't you use stainless steel?

 

[luutzu]

Just about everything out of China is dodgy...we all know it, they know it, every Oz business that has gone down because of price point knows it.

Them fake LewisVuitton and Niko Aires look pretty good though.

But yea, China is a big country with many lords. As long as the importer do their homework and check the specs themselves, they might get half of what they paid for.

 

[wayneL]

Is there any special requirement for the steel to make horse shoes?
Why don't you use stainless steel?

You probably could use SS, if you found the right forgeable alloy, but their really is no benefit in doing so. There us a cost-workability-benefit equation.

Just decent mild steel is all that is required, but a lot of the chinese stuff is not much more than iron with a few impurities. Aus steel you can harden via quenching from red heat, the Chinese stuff won't harden very much at all, it also slags up much more in the fire.

You can also use aluminium for therapuetic work (or premade racing plates).

Copper used to be used in the coal mines because of the non sparking properties... And fun for specimen shoes you can polish up and make pretty.

Titanium was tried for a while, and there are some polyurethane shoes available.

 

[basilio]

Just what we all needed... a Pre-Depression style Trade war.

Trump administration's trade war claims first Australian victim

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"Protectionism is a dead end. It's not a ladder to get you out of the low-growth trap. It's a shovel to dig it much deeper," said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Jessica Hromas

• by
• Jacob Greber
• John Kehoe

Donald Trump's fast-escalating protectionist trade war has claimed its first Australian scalp with Perth silicon metal exporter Simcoa slammed by a bruising 51 per cent US government tariff that threatens to muddy Canberra's push to be excluded from steep steel and aluminium levies.

As governments around the world led by the European Union, China and Canada ramp up retaliatory threats – including potential tariffs on Harley-Davidsons, bourbon and blue jeans – the Turnbull government admitted it still has no clarity on whether the steel tariffs would hit Australian exporters.

In a warning of how a full-blown global trade war would confound Mr Trump's tweet over the weekend that "trade wars are good, and easy to win", modelling obtained by The Australian Financial Review by Deloitte Access Economics shows it would cost 20,000 jobs, wipe $5 billion off national income within a year, and derail a much-needed upswing in business investment.

WTO issues warning

In an unusual intervention into a World Trade Organisation member's trade policy, director general Roberto Azevedo said the "potential for escalation is real". "A trade war is in no one's interests. The WTO will be watching the situation very closely."


Markets and investors continue to brace for potential blow back from China and others after Mr Trump announced a plan for 25 per cent tariffs on steel imports and 10 per cent on aluminium.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 771.93 points last week, or 3 per cent.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, just over a week after personally pressing Mr Trump at the White House to honour a pledge last year to exempt Australian exporters such as BlueScope Steel, on Sunday lashed out at slide towards greater trade barriers.

"Protectionism is a dead end. It's not a ladder to get you out of the low-growth trap. It's a shovel to dig it much deeper," Mr Turnbull said.

http://www.afr.com/news/economy/tru...laims-first-australian-victim-20180304-h0wylv

 

[SirRumpole]

Trump administration's trade war claims first Australian victim

We should cancel our free Trade deal with the US as it seems that Trump has no respect for it.

They get a lot more out of it than we do.

 

[SirRumpole]

The perils of trusting Trump.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-05/trump-said-australia-would-be-exempt-from-tariffs/9512612

 

[Tisme]

The perils of trusting Trump.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-05/trump-said-australia-would-be-exempt-from-tariffs/9512612

Perils or naivety? How many times does the LNP have to try sidling up to the USofA only to be done over? They must think we are Hicksville.

Meanwhile our true trading partners watch on as we make fools of ourselves thinking gratuitous WW2 camaraderie was about saving Australia rather than the commercial and commonwealth interests of the US at the time.

Paul Keating warned us to "cut the tag" two years ago and as late as last November put out there what is coming true right now:

Changes our world forever’: Paul Keating warns of breakdown in US-China relations
FORMER Prime Minister Paul Keating has revealed what he sees as the biggest threat to Australia’s future.


Frank Chung@franks_chung

news.com.auNOVEMBER 15, 20171:59PM

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating speaking at the CEDA annual dinner in Sydney on Tuesday 14 November 2017. Picture: David Moir/AAPSource:AAP

FORMER Prime Minister Paul Keating has warned that the biggest threat to Australia is a breakdown in co-operation between the US and China in the coming decades.

Speaking at the annual Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) dinner on Tuesday, Mr Keating predicted a coming “bifurcation between the west and the east” and the decline of supranational bodies such as the European Union.

“The Chinese believe in globalisation but they don’t believe in globalism,” Mr Keating told a packed crowd at Sydney’s Hyatt Regency. “They don’t believe in a block strategic structure run out of the Atlantic.

“We’re now going to a bifurcated world where global governance is going to be perhaps much more about the nation state and its representation in places like the United Nations, but not going to be [about] bindings of states in alliances of the kind the US has had in the past.”

Mr Keating said the result would be a “much more identifiable world of independent nation states of big power rivalries of a kind we last saw at the end of the 19th century”.

“That’s why the relationship between the US and China is so important here, and frankly the relationship between Russia and Europe.”

A breakdown in co-operation between the US and China “changes our world forever”, he said, warning Australia must “do all we can to resist such an impasse” and adding that the strong relationship between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was “encouraging”.


“America will remain our security alliance partner, the world’s predominant military power and a great democracy to which we are philosophically akin, but we are increasingly part of a regional economy based on China,” he said.

“There are increasing signs that the inevitable strategic competition between these two nations risks spilling into trade, investment and technological competition as well as issues of global economic governance.

“We should have no interest whatsoever in publicly or privately encouraging either America or China down the paths of crude economic nationalism. A mercantilist path where investment in each others’ economy is resisted, or where trade is thought of as wins and losses, where agreed global rules can be suspended, is of no use to us.”

Highlighting the major economic reforms of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Mr Keating said the next big opportunity for Australia lay in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, but warned the country risked sliding into gradual decline without visionary thinking.

He slammed the nation’s two peak business lobby groups, describing the Business Council of Australia’s calls for a company tax cuts as “dull” and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as a “national menace” for its attacks on penalty rates.

“Reform in Australia can’t be these simple notions,” he said. “The dullness of it. ‘You cut the company tax rate and the Holy Grail arrives.’ Or the whingeing from the ACCIs of this world about penalty rates when the reality of static wages growth stares us in the face.”

Mr Keating pointed to new technologies like Airbnb and Uber as the “tip of a big iceberg”. “We can see the first big phase of this shift with consumers responding directly to the smorgasbord of things on offer at their fingertips, and as we can see information lowers prices,” he said.

“The wider phase where even larger gains will be had is in the heavily government influenced areas of health, education, aged care and human services. Can you imagine what is available to us in terms of productivity and improvement with the digitisation of these huge areas of the economy?

“These are the reform horizons we should be concentrating on now, not the dross handed down by the Business Council or the Financial Review.”

But Mr Keating warned changes of the kind required were “not going to drop from any department”.

“You won’t find these falling from a Treasury printer, because of their essence they require imagination,” he said. “Imagination was a principal tool in underwriting the ‘80s and ‘90s changes. If you can’t imagine it you’re sure as hell never going to see it.”