Tariffs imposed on China are there primarily because they are the main exporter of highly concentrated flouride salts that can protect teeth from cavities and plaque formation.

It never made economic sense, for you, it's a conspiracy to protect big Organic and the detnists.

This is roughly why I expect tariffs to be economically bad for the US (or any advanced economy) -- and good, if used correctly, for a poor country -- but only "good enough" to get it to be middle of the pack.

Building/Scaling the product is tertiary and fully fungible.

This applies even to strict & authoritarian cultures, the only difference is that you need to place the constraints in a more top-down way.

People without sufficient constraints have "lack", filled by whomever can produced constraints (needs) for them.

This is the highest-value economic activity in any market:
- Create constraints for other people

Creating a product that solves the resulting needs is secondary.

I've spent like ~10 years training myself to do this and I am still bad at it, having needs is a skill (a very valuable one, people pay for it).

I know very few people that can formulate needs for themselves, and they usually use said skill to formulate needs for other people.

- 2025 We should divert 10% of the world's economy to getting the datacenters to train independent human-murder bots that evade detection

Real AI Safety timeline
- 2022 LOL guys ML is useful but if we train a model for no particular objective it makes cat memes, let's throw 1 trillion at this shit
- 2024 We should divert 10% of the world's economy to datacenters

- 2032 Rogue AI start buying up datacenters
- 2034 Rogue AI starts manufacturing self-replicating killer robots to kill humans and make room for more datacenters

Meanwhile conscientiousness and effort will make you better at 99% of human activities from being a good listener, to being a good construction worker to being a good engineer.

And most of these activities have meaning beyond achiving peak peformance.

There's the frustration of "not being the best" but also the frustration of "not being interesting" -- "not having your own style" -- "not being anything besides number xy on the leaderboard"

As it stands a lot of "naturals" are probably pushed out before they talents get to shine by conscientious people (or rather abusive parents and teachers, kids aren't conscientious by default).

And the conscientious but untalented remain forever frustrated.

The outcome of applying conscientiousness & effort will be logarithmic.

The outcome of being the 1/1mil weirdo that "figures it out" will be exponential.

Conscientiousness should only be applied once it's confirmed someone is "a natural"

Watching a conscientiousness athlete, mathematician or any other performer is a "meh" experience. They tend to be boring, samey, they are "ok" but they don't actually stand a chance at achieving anything worthwhile (i.e. pushing the limits of human excellence)

I've noticed with with esports and math -- but I expect a similar dynamic applies to things like normal sports, chess, GO, and a host of other activities.

The most impressive people in those categories tend to "be built different" psychologically and mentally.

Because most theories exists simply to fulfill a psychological need for comfort.

A deep desire for people to "understand what the world is made of".

Some primordial bug in our cognitive, once useful but long-since exhausted of meaning.

Most theory is just religious metaphysics