My inbox is burning up from all the board game creators whose games I have kickstarted panicking about the new tariffs that will kill their profitability and likely their company. Steve Jackson Games posted a long letter about how they don’t know how they will continue with their business. Car companies are laying people off. It’s an economic disaster. Unemployment will spike. The economy is crashing.
We’re about to enter the techno-dystopia we’ve been reading about for years (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, so many others).
It’s fine! Democracy was just a crazy dream but dreams end, right?
It’s a new world. A world where high tech smugglers will get your game out of China for you — for a reasonable price. Underground night clubs where deals to get your “Goats of Lamentation — Kickstarter Edition” across the border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong and then into a fishing boat headed for the Port of Pismo Beach, where trucks painted matte black with no markings will haul it to a distribution center in Kansas.
You could probably make a board game out of that, but you’d have to make it out of sticks and bits of grass because it ain’t coming from China.
Seriously, though. These past few years have been amazing for the indie gaming studios; so much creativity combined with cheap, high quality manufacturing and shipping. Hard to believe it’s all gone, so suddenly. Maybe the tariffs will be rolled back quickly, but Dr. Doom seems wedded to them.
A few years back, I was having a discussion with one of the people from Rock Manor Games that was having trouble getting their games out of China, as to why they just couldn’t make them domestically. He echoed what Steve Jackson wrote in his blog post; the capability just doesn’t exist in the US for the sort of small runs that indie creators need. It just doesn’t exist at all. Even if someone just decided to set it up in the US, the costs per unit would be ruinous, not to mention the years to get it all set up, and the certainty that the next president will just walk all this back anyway.
I think everyone is just going to hunker down and hope it all just goes away before too many businesses are destroyed. Congress could stop it, but Congress is already bought and paid for — same for the Supreme Court. Everyone has bent the knee to Dr. Doom.
One world under Doom.
I actually heard that a few GOP Senators are finally starting to be concerned enough to stand up to the co-president, at least on the tariff thing. Not sure it’s enough to matter, though.
Congress may yet strike down Trump’s emergency order, but then he would veto it, and they don’t have the votes to override the veto. However, those GOP who voted for it would now be Trump’s enemies, and they would be in real danger of their lives.
So, not going to happen.
Are you confident the next president isn’t going to be the current one? He certainly seems to think so.
No, he’s not.
Democrats always get elected to clean up the economy after a Republican, so the next will be a Dem unless we truly foul up. Which we may do. But it won’t be Trump. It doesn’t matter. He has broken so much stuff and will continue to break so much stuff that the next president will fail to make headway and then will be ousted for someone like Trump.
It is ironic that Biden had just about managed to turn things around. We were in for a soft landing on inflation, and the underlying fundamentals that could have led to long term growth were strong. Peaple were actually worrried that Trump would coast on the strong economy Biden had managed to build up and take credit for it.
Well at least we don’t have to worry about that happening any more . . . .
Past presidents used to be big on continuity, trying to keep things from changing too much between administrations, to keep the illusion that swapping presidents didn’t unsettle things too bad.
Nobody will ever trust us again.
Biden was doing a great job, but even liberal press was all doing the “Well, Actually…” thing with him making sure that the good things were never mentioned, the bad things emphasized, and anything Trump did was normalized to seem sane and measured.
I’m pretty pissed off at all of my previously normal news sources now too. AP is the only mainstream one I really trust any more. A lot of news sources aren’t exactly inaccurate, but the way that they discuss things and the topics they decide to emphasize do not give you a very accurate picture of overall reality. Even when it comes to cold facts it’s now become necessary to cross check anything I really care about in independent sources or dig up the original source. It’s annoying as hell.
On this topic in particular, I did some digging since the trade war is now pretty much US vs China. China only imports about 8% of US goods. However, The US actually only imports about 14% of Chinese goods. So on the surface it looks like these are two countries that could stop trading altogether and it wouldn’t completely cripple either of them.
To really figure out who has a better position in a long term all out trade war, I think you would need to dig into things in a more granular way to figure out which industries in each country absolutely depend on trade with the other. For example, we export about half our soybeans to China (and it was more before China put 60% tarrifs on them a month ago), and the EU is talking about banning our soybeans because they don’t like how we grow them (too many GMOs and pesticides). We also still depend on China for raw materials for some stuff like lithium ion batteries.
We want China to be dependent on us. Having us go our separate ways is a terrible idea. If China is the leader (or a leader) in manufacturing, well, we spent decades helping them get there. Dollars sitting in bank vaults does nobody good; it’s just bits of (probably virtual these days) worthless paper. Money only has value when it is spent. Us giving them money and them giving us stuff is how this whole thing works, this capitalist thing. Then they give away that money to get their own stuff and eventually it comes back around when someone buys something from us. This has been working pretty well for a very long time.
In all of the Great Nations of THE UNITED STATES, Canada and Mexico, there are not the tools nor the resources to build a TABLE TOP BOARD GAME at a competitive price.
But, of course, you couldn’t possibly have the capacity to consider what THAT means. Go spend more time with that fart-huffer Raph Koster.
It means American manufacturing is tuned toward large job lots, not the small run size, bespoke stuff they specialize in in China.
What’s your problem with Raph? He’s just a dude trying to get by and sharing his dream. If you don’t like his games, don’t play them.