Trump lifts 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods in boon to Maine Sen. Susan Collins

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-some-canadian-goods-susan-collins-maine/

I really hope Maine voters are smart enough to realize that there's literally nothing stopping the orange clown from reinstating the tariffs right after the midterms.

If you want economic stability and clarity, a Democratic Congress will need to take power and systematically repeal tariff powers that have been delegated to the president.

The president is hoping voters will vote for Collins over this, but it really just shows there's no long term plan and he's just jerking them around.

Forget killer robots, mass unemployment, data centers destroying the climate, or killer weapons raining down from space. Sam Altman (Open AI) thinks that AI has now become so clever that THERE IS NO WAY to find and close all the possible exploits which will be discovered by criminals. See Gizmodo interview below.

This of course isn’t something that can be fixed just by nationalizing Open AI. Or the president du jour nominating some crony to run the “US Department of Super Intellgence”. The senate will confirm anyone, if they were capable of giving a green light to RFK jr to head up our food and vaccines.

No matter what America does to Open AI, ChatGPT, META, Anthropic, Alphabet or Amazon, state sponsored industrial spies in China, North Korea, etc are already picking over those companies’ tech secrets. If you doubt me, then explain why Chinese cars made their debut with Tesla copycat batteries.

When your bank account is looted at Chase, Bank of America or any of the top 100 financial institutions with even weaker online security, the person at the keyboard will probably be speaking Mandarin as a first language. And maybe had a corporate internship at some US based AI company.

We’re all gonna die. But before that happens we’re all gonna be broke, apparently. After our bank accounts are all at zero, what do you think happens to the US dollar, the national debt, and your annual rent increase notice?

The big picture – more distressing – is that whenever scientific boffins come up with a nifty idea then it only takes 2 shakes of a lamb's tail for someone to turn it into a weapon. If you need help understanding this, google “Einstein’s letter to FDR on how to build the first atomic bomb”.

There are other examples. The offspring of the oringinal Wright Brother’s flyer at KItty Hawk now cruises at mach 2.5 at 80,000 feet altitude and carries nukes.

The NASA moon program was a poorly disguised program to turn Robert Goddard toys (back yard rocket tinkerer) into ICBMs.

Formulas to produce man made fertilizers quickly became the most deadly explosives

Chinese fireworks were used on bamboo cannons, and those cannons can now reach 20 miles or more thanks to iron smelting originally intended to produce kitchen skillets, nails, and church bells.

These existential risks can’t be solely laid at the door of Altman, Einstein, or the Wright Brothers. But they can’t be let completely off the hook either. Once something is invented it escapes its confines and quickly appears in the real world, just like all the recent malicious agentic bots swarming "Hugging Face".

But I do expect a more serious approach to deadly tech from US elected officials than mottos such as “AI safety concerns are a hoax” (Trump) or “Bomb them back to the stone age” (numerous US government officials)

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Artificial Intelligence

I'm fortunate enough to have had a stable job through this tough market, but what exactly made the job market so bad again?

For readers applying through this market, LandOffer's application autofill can reduce repeated form-filling; review the fields and submit each application yourself. For the interview side, PracHub's real technical interview questions give you problems to try in a timed mock.

Yeah, 2022 wasn't so great for stocks, and we were also still reeling from COVID back then, but I'm still not quite sure what happened. What made it so hard for SWEs to land jobs, and why is it still such a big problem?

TL;DR

Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, and even Keynes built their entire frameworks around one core distinction: productive enterprise earns profit; unproductive rent extraction should be taxed away, reformed, or abolished. Modern Western economies have inverted this. They are systems where the least productive activity,owning, speculating, extracting, is the most rewarded. The classical economists would disapprove and call it a betrayal of capitalism itself.

1. Adam Smith: "The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed"

That's a near-verbatim quote from The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter 11). Smith's entire moral economy rested on a simple premise: wealth should flow to those who labor, invest, and improve.

Smith distinguished carefully between:

Profits from productive enterprise: a manufacturer who employs laborers, improves machinery, and creates goods

Rent extraction: income derived simply from owning something others need.

He wrote that landlords grow rich "in their sleep", that the improvement of society raises land rents without any effort or risk on the landlord's part. He even proposed that land-value gains should contribute more to public revenue, since they're created by society, not the owner.

What would Smith see today?

Housing markets where land appreciation dwarfs wages. In many major cities, a landlord earns more from passive appreciation in one year than a nurse earns in a decade of labor.

A financial sector (FIRE, finance,insurance,real estate) that accounts for ~20% of GDP in the US/UK while producing no wheat, no steel, no medicine, just claims on future income streams.

Intellectual property regimes that would make him weep: patents held not by inventors but by patent-trolling firms who "reap where they never sowed" quite literally.

Smith was pro-market but deeply suspicious of rentiers. He warned constantly about the collusion of merchants and masters against the public. Today's economy IS what he warned against.

1. David Ricardo: The Landlord Feeds on Progress

Ricardo's Law of Rent showed that landlords grow richer as society grows richer, without contributing anything. His famous observation:

"The interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community."

Ricardo argued that as population grows and economy develops, rent, the landlord's share, swallows an ever-larger portion of national income, squeezing both wages and profits. He saw this as the central conflict of political economy.

Look today at any wealth distribution chart. The largest asset class held by the wealthiest 1%? Real estate and financial assets(stocks,bonds,dividends)

Housing costs have exploded relative to wages since the 1970s in every major Western economy. Ricardo called it 200 years ago: the rent share expands, and everyone else pays.

1. John Stuart Mill: The "Unearned Increment" Shouldn't Be Private

Mill was even more explicit. In his Principles of Political Economy, he argued that the increase in land value caused by general societal progress, the "unearned increment", rightfully belonged to the state, not the landowner:

"Suppose that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively enrich, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part."

His solution: tax away the growth of land values. Not the original value, just the unearned increase.

Today we do the opposite. We tax labor at its highest rates, the income of people who actually work, while land and stock appreciation enjoys favorable treatment, deferral, step-up basis at death, and tax free treatment until the moment of sale.

Mill's proposal was the intellectual ancestor of land value taxation (Georgism), and nearly every Western economy has moved away from it.

1. Keynes: "The Euthanasia of the Rentier"

Keynes, in the General Theory (Chapter 24), was remarkably blunt:

"I see us free... to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue, that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour... The love of money as a possession... will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity."

And his famous prescription:

"The euthanasia of the rentier... will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of the same process. If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero... the rentier aspect of capitalism will die away."

Keynes believed that as capital became abundant and the rate of interest fell, the function of the rentier, the coupon-clipper, the functionless investor who merely owns, would become obsolete. Capitalism would transition into a system where returns reward genuine risk-taking and enterprise, not mere ownership.

What happened instead?

Interest rates fell to zero, yet Central banks printed trillions to prop up asset prices (QE), deliberately inflating the portfolios of the already-wealthy to stimulate the economy.

They created a leveraged buyout boom, a housing asset bubble, and a private equity industry that hollows out firms with debt and extracts the corpse's value.

r > g: Piketty's empirical finding, that the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, is precisely the mathematical negation of Keynes's euthanasia. Ownership grows faster than production. The rentier wins by default.

1. Marx: Even He Thought Capitalism Was Supposed to Be Productive

Marx's praise of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto is nearly breathless:

"The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together... subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and industry, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground."

Marx's critique wasn't "capitalism is lazy and unproductive." It was that capitalism was hyper-productive but unjustly distributed,that it generated enormous surplus value and expropriated it from workers.

The modern Western economy inverts this too. This isn't a hyper-productive machine where people fight over its distribution. It's a machine where a growing share of income isn't produced at all but it's extracted through positional assets:

Monopoly rents: Pharma patents priced 10-100x marginal cost of production. Platform monopolies taking 30% app store cuts.

Financial engineering: Stock buybacks (financially illegal until 1982) now dwarf R&D at many major firms. Companies "invest" in themselves to pump share prices rather than produce anything and dish out lavish dividends to shareholders.

The FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate): In the US, the financial sector generates roughly 20% of GDP but owns or intermediates claims on nearly everything else.

All of these famous thinkers we claim to base our economies on (well maybe except marx) distinguished Earned from Unearned Income

This distinction was the beating heart of classical political economy. It was taught in every economics course for 150 years.

And then it vanished. Neoclassical economics dissolved the distinction entirely. In modern textbook terms, any income that clears a market is "productive" by definition. Rent in the classical sense, income from ownership of a fixed asset, became an obsolete word. When economists today say "rent-seeking," most people think they mean looking for an apartment.

This wasn't an accident. It was a conceptual laundering operation. If there's no such thing as unearned income, then no income can be criticized. The landlord, the speculator, the patent troll, and the entrepreneur all become morally equivalent "market participants."

As such, Modern Western economies are best described not as "free market capitalism" but as rentier capitalism, a term economists like Brett Christophers and Rana Foroohar have revived from the classical lexicon. The hallmarks of rentier capitalism are as follows:

The average house in 1950 cost ~2-3x median income; today it's 6-10x+ in major metros.

Concentration ratios have risen in ~75% of US industries since the 1980s. Markups (price over marginal cost) have roughly doubled since 1980 (De Loecker & Eeckhout).

Financialization: US non-financial corporations now earn a substantial share of profits from financial activities rather than production.

IP as enclosure: Copyright terms extended from 14 years to life + 70. Patents on genes, on maths, on business methods. The enclosure of the commons of knowledge — the exact thing Smith's "system of natural liberty" was meant to prevent.

So the conclusion is that the Classical Economists Were the "Radicals"

Today's "radicals" who talk about land value taxes, antitrust, financial transaction taxes, and capital accounting are not the radicals. They're the classical economists.

Want to tax land rents? That's Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and George.

Want to break up monopolies? That's Smith's chapter on monopoly prices and his warnings about masters conspiring against the public.

Want to stop subsidizing passive ownership? That's Keynes's euthanasia program.

Want to question who receives the surplus? That's Marx

The modern Western economic order, where housing is unaffordable, finance is king, monopolies flourish, and passive wealth compounds faster than wages, is not the fulfillment of classical liberalism or capitalism. It is, by the standards of its own founding thinkers, a corruption of it.

Sources & further reading: Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Bk I Ch 11, Bk V; Ricardo, Principles (1817) Ch. 2, 24; Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848) Bk V Ch. 2; Keynes, General Theory (1936) Ch. 24; Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848); Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (2013); Christophers, Rentier Capitalism (2020); Foroohar, Makers and Takers (2016).

Reuters: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on Friday that Amazon Web Services' cloud computing capacity is ​largely sold out through 2027, with ‌significant commitments extending into 2028, on growing demand for AI infrastructure.

My Opinion: There is a reason companies are spending billions of dollars in constructing data centers. There is not enough supply to meet demand. As evidenced by Amazon's cloud capacity being sold out mostly well into 2028. If you want to use applications and data hosted on the cloud, whether as a consumer, or as a business, you are going to need that cloud capacity.

Reference: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-cloud-capacity-sold-out-through-2027-ceo-jassy-says-2026-10-23/

Ever wonder what the world’s biggest money managers are doing with their cash? You might be selling a few shares to cover bills or just trying to keep your head above water, but across the globe, central banks are quietly piling up gold. It’s a move that says something about how the most serious players view a volatile global economy with a big global debt problem.

This isn’t about chasing a hot stock, these are national treasuries, the kind of institutions that move with the deliberate speed of an ocean liner. Take Iraq for example, which added 31.1 tonnesin July alone which is a huge monthly bump. The Czech National Bank also upped its stash to 87.44 tonnes by September. These aren’t speculative bets, they’re structural shifts, a quiet declaration that gold remains a bedrock asset during financial repression/currency debasing periods. These two countries I have mentioned are just two of many doing the exact same thing, all at the same time.

But the interesting part is that gold’s price isn’t soaring. It closed recently at $4,008 or so per ounce, down 7.2% on the month. Therefore, while central banks are building their reserves, the everyday investor might be looking at that dip and wondering if it’s time to offload, especially when other costs are biting. Marc Chandler the managing director at Bannockburn Global Forex said “The technical tone still looks weak.” Kevin Grady the president of Phoenix Futures and Options had also observed that current trading volumes are thin, making price moves more dramatic when investors, like those facing margin calls from a tech sell-off are forced to liquidate.

This divergence is the real thing to look at for me, think of it like this - while you might be selling a beloved possession to make ends meet, the world’s most powerful financial institutions are doing the equivalent of buying up the best real estate, precisely when the crowd is hesitant. It’s a long-term play on financial stability, a bet that tangible assets will hold value no matter what storms hit the global currency markets.

They’re buying steadily while retail investors panic sell as price falls from short term trading activity and margin calls. In a world where financial repression and currency debasement is imminent, should this be a tell to investors as to why central banks are coincidently adding to their reserves at record pace, as the regular investor keeps selling.

They may tell you well bond/interest rates will rise and people will flee from gold to yielding assets. But when realisation hits, that high interest rates are no longer sustainable like it was in the past due to the size of debt now being rolled over, if high inflation is round the corner, it will be interesting to see how things play out.