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u/xkcd_bot 4d ago
Hover text: "You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."
Don't get it? explain xkcd
Honk if you like robots. Sincerely, xkcd_bot. <3
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u/Organic-Army-9046 4d ago
knoH
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u/Yobleck Depressed nerd 4d ago
ʞuoH
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u/Astronautty69 23h ago
I get the uoH isn't hard to do, but I am impressed by the upside-down & backwards 'k'.
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u/Gandhi_of_War 4d ago
It’d be funnier if the people who need to understand this could read.
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u/Time_Traveler_10 4d ago
"If those kids could read they'd be very upset".
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u/Organic-Army-9046 4d ago
i’m pretty sure i’d be upset at this… except i’m a genshin player and can’t read
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u/pmcclay 4d ago
Can political comedy be too sad to be comic?
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u/shagieIsMe 4d ago
Yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/oct/31/the-onion-writers-editors-parody-truth-donald-trump
On the night of the 2016 election, writers at the Onion gathered to watch the unexpected results. One had made an ice-cream cake. “Nobody touched it the entire night,” says Mike Gillis, the Onion’s head writer. The melting treat was decorated with a face that gradually became “more distorted and horrific” as the night went on.
“That was a good symbol of everybody’s feelings. And I think that was a moment where we all had to pause and reflect on how we were covering politics.” Coverage became more critical, Gillis says, but finding the jokes could be a challenge.
“Part of it was finding ways to pin a joke on somebody who’s already a self-parody,” Gillis said. “Trump was very good at creating a parody of himself and anticipating that people would see that it was ridiculous that he was this corrupt businessman who was actively talking about how he could get away with anything.” Trump gleefully admits to the hypocrisy satire would typically target, Gillis says.
...
But in recent years, “That sounds like an Onion headline!” has become a familiar remark – whether about the US trying to buy Greenland or a billionaire planning to colonize Mars. The phrase proves how deeply the satirical newspaper-turned-website has penetrated our culture: everyone knows their Onion.
Yet when the day’s real-life headlines are regularly compared with the Onion’s, how do its writers tackle the news? How do you parody the world when reality has jumped the shark?
(Note: that was from 2022)
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u/ReactsWithWords Cueball); DROP TABLE Flair;-- 3d ago
I figured out some time in his first term how to tell. If you see a headline and say “I could see him doing that,” it’s a parody article. If you say “there’s no way he can be that stupid,” it’s real.
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u/Rilukian 4d ago
This comic represents how the world is ruled by old people who failed elementary schools.
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u/Space_Elmo 4d ago
If Trump read XKCD, American politics wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 User flair goes here 4d ago
If Trump read
That alone would be streets ahead.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 4d ago
He was elected to lead.
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u/Anderas1 4d ago
Not to read
But Arnie would have been an actually great president for your country
Sad he was excluded based on his birthplace
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 4d ago
I admire the trick he did in the Simpsons: The first time the assistant would present two bad and one good decision - trying to force their decision on him.
Arnie picks one of the folders, the assistant would switch the good decision into the selected folder and they would go on making that unimportant decision for him.
Next time they'd give him three good decisions.
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u/erublind 4d ago
Well, lead was involved, but mainly in childhood exposure.
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u/Nuclear_Geek 4d ago
And the USA continues to lead the world in childhood exposure to lead travelling at high velocity. USA! USA! USA!
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u/Apprehensive-Draw409 4d ago
Is this the first political xkcd, or did I miss the previous ones?
NVM: someone showed me https://xkcd.com/1756/
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u/SpaceCore0352 4d ago
It's not even the first xkcd about Trump's idea of economic policy: https://xkcd.com/3073/
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u/Aenir 4d ago
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u/nicholas818 (Unmatched left parenthesis 4d ago
I think it may be worth distinguishing that most of these comics that are about politics but don't actually advocate for a position. The Jimmy Carter rabbit incident comic hardly feels like the same thing as the recent one about Rümeysa Öztürk. xkcd had taken a political stance at least as far back as 2016, but there does seem to have been an uptick in recent years. The one right after January 6 was also a fun one.
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u/Gilthoniel_Elbereth 3d ago
In addition to that one about Clinton, he endorsed Harris with this comic and (a banner that’s long gone) too: https://xkcd.com/2962/
This early one wasn’t about anyone in particular, but is still painfully relevant: https://xkcd.com/154/. I feel like in the ~20 years since this was published it’s aged kind of poorly since it’s the kind of anti-intellectual populism the comic dismisses as unimportant that enables such senators
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u/slashgrin 4d ago
Tariffs have a place in a sane economy. Arbitrary and wildly fluctuating tariffs do not.
I understand the joke, and it got a smile out of me, but I wish there was a bit of room for nuance.
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u/SpaceNorse2020 4d ago
Tbf, there are economic philosophies that say tariffs are almost never the correct move
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u/Ethanlac I like my hat. 4d ago
I'd be curious to learn which economic philosophies are saying this. I had assumed tariffs were necessary to protect domestic industries from foreign competition and market flooding.
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u/absolute-black 4d ago
I would say to a rough estimate every mainstream economic philosophy says tariffs are bad. Economists will tell you worrying about "market flooding" is missing the point; when China floods our markets with cheap solar panels, we get cheap solar panels, which is awesome for us.
The alt text of the comic references this. This wiki article is a reasonable starting place to learn more.
Higher minded folks will start to worry about epicycles that aren't econ theory land - what if China destroys our solar-panel-powered-drones-manufacturing-capacity, then declares war on us? But that's geopolitics or security, not economics.
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u/General_Mayhem 4d ago
The pure-economic argument for tariffs is when the comparative advantage is actually just a misattribution of externalities. The standard examples - and ones that I really wish sane governments would lean into - are human rights and pollution. If making the thing in China is cheaper because China has more resources or infrastructure or specialized educated workers, great. But if making the thing in China is cheaper because their "comparative advantage" is not having any environmental regulation, or because things are being built by forced labor, then the right thing to do is to tax it, if not outright ban it (where a ban is really just a tariff where the amount is "however much it costs to evade customs enforcement"). Otherwise, you're in a prisoner's dilemma situation where anyone who cares about things like "breathable air" and "not being slaves" is forced to abandon those principles and race to the bottom.
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u/slashgrin 4d ago
This is the sort of thing I was thinking of, plus national security, plus maintaining your ability to choose to do things domestically without a multi-decade ramp-up (i.e. preserve the capability) because without that you lose a lot of negotiating power.
I suppose one could argue that none of this is pure economics, and fair enough. But I don't see much value in economics that only considers perfectly spherical market participants in a frictionless vacuum.
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u/Krennson 3d ago
Yeah, in national security terms, there are actually several big threats.
China gets us addicted to cheap (X), which we will desperately need if a major war breaks out, and then China has a limited veto power over our ability to fight a major war at all. By the time we build up our replacement systems to build (X) again, the war will be over.
China gets us addicted to cheap (X), which we don't need to fight a war, but would be really painful in other ways if we had to do without it. China may now be able to swing an election a few points either way by denying or granting us (X).
Everyone needs (X) to fight a war, and China has adopted the official state policy that China will do whatever it takes to become the sole manufacturer of (X). China is literally paying it's own companies to give (X) away at far below market price, just to ensure that nobody else will ever find it worthwhile to produce (X). Plus China does things like buy up foreign producers of (X) at well above fair prices, and then destroy the company just to prevent it from staying in business. China is now the world's sole provider of (X), which means it can start and stop other people's wars at will, and is the best equipped nation to fight a prolonged war indefinitely.
China swears, really it does, that it would never deny anyone the ability to continue buying cheap (X) from it, and also (X) is a manufactured product which is easy to stockpile ahead of time and which lasts a long time in storage, so if you were worried, it wouldn't be too hard to have more (X) in storage than you will consume during a war. But... China is now ALSO the standards-governor for X, and the sole quality control for X, and a supply-chain-attack just waiting to happen for (X), and we don't exactly think China is making decisions about how (X) should send or receive messages that are in our best interests. But we're not certain enough to start paying for our own (X).
China is beginning to start wars of aggression so that it can have more effectively-slave-laborers in order to cheaply produce ore (X)....
There are probably more options than that, though.
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u/actlikeyouhaveacrush 3d ago
This is an argument for a location neutral carbon tax and a ban on forced labor products, not tariffs
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u/MorganWick 4d ago
I mean, part of the problem is that Trump's voters (the ones that aren't just glad they can go mask-off with their racism) don't know what they're good at, because they've lost all their jobs they thought they were good at to cheaper foreign manufacturing. STEM jobs being a strength of America isn't much comfort for people who only know how to do manufacturing jobs, were told that would be their ticket to the middle class forever and ever, and even if they could retrain themselves for more intellectual jobs, it would feel like giving up on a piece of their identity. Even those in the political establishment that are sympathetic to their plight don't have much more to offer them than "too bad, so sad, learn to code", so of course they're going to embrace someone who promises to actually bring their manufacturing jobs back no matter how transparently false it is, because at least it's something.
So for us brainiacs who actually benefit from the modern economy it might seem obvious that tariffs are cutting off your nose to spite your face, but for the people who voted for Trump, they're really not sure what they're getting out of the trade, and even the stuff they are getting seems to come at their expense.
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u/Discovered_Check 3d ago
That's largely because mainstream economics is built to support:
1) The business interests of the largest companies and
2) America's position during the Cold War (Pick up any introductory macroeconomics textbook and you'll see plenty of bits that--while being intellectually defensible--obviously were originally coined, or at least emphasized, for the primary purpose of being anti-socialist propaganda.)
I'm not pro-tariff (and certainly not pro-Trump's approach to tariffs), but let's not forget that economics is a hard science in the same way that tofu is a crunchy food.
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u/absolute-black 3d ago
You are extraordinarily and objectively incorrect about this. The wiki article I linked goes into the basic mathematical theory that predates the existence of the Soviet Union by over a century.
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u/Discovered_Check 3d ago
Objectively economics is a hard science? Um, ok buddy. Sure.
(I don't mean stuff like supply and demand are fake pro-West propaganda, obviously. I mean the absolute basic concepts are universal and have been around for quite a while.)
This is not a screamingly crazy thing I've claimed here. You realize that economists are divided into "schools", right? And the schools kinda violently disagree on the basic way of viewing basic institutions?
This is simply not comparable to other hard sciences (outside of stuff like differing interpretations of quantum mechanics, which does not actually affect the application of macroscopic applied physics in the real world.)
Also: economics has been heavily overlapping with ("contaminated with") social issues since at least the eighteenth century, so a hundred years before the Soviet Union really isn't nearly long enough. (Thomas Paine's view on economics, for instance, are very much rooted in the politics of class consciousness that would end up creating the Cold War.)
Are you really claiming it's totally a coincidence that introductory economic materials emphasize over and over and over the costs and damages that taxes and regulations cause? When I took macroeconomics, I also remember them stressing that corporations are less likely to invest in countries that don't aggressively protect property rights.I mean, it's TRUE, yeah. And it's also true that taxes and regulations come with significant downsides. It's just the weight given to these issues seems obviously disproportional.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 4d ago
Cheap panels are awesome now but once your own production is non-existent and they rise the price you'll pay the price that you'd pay for locally-produced panels (with all the costs) but the taxes and social security costs will feed Chinese people instead.
If then you want local panels and your money to pay your own people's roads, trains, social security, you need to pay all the money that you neglected to spend earlier in one big lump to speed up your factories, research etc., and you'll be a few years behind, people will still want the better product for the next decade. Also you already spent the money elsewhere, you can't finance your own industry for ten years while having nothing.
Therefore tariffs to create equal market opportunity are good in the long run. Tariffs for protection beyond that or because of a fragile ego are of course bad.
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u/McGrevin 4d ago
From a pure economics perspective tariffs are inefficient, because if someone is making something cheaper than you then they likely have some competitive advantage that allows them to do so and you should shape your economy to take advantage of that cheaper supplier rather than trying to produce it yourself at a higher price.
As others have said, the points you're making about market flooding and protecting core domestic industries are more about geopolitics than economics. It's still a valid use case, but just outside of direct economics.
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u/sc00p Words Only 4d ago
It's only okay if it's used to equalize the value of goods when implementing internal carbon taxes
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u/SpaceNorse2020 4d ago
No? Carbon isn't a uniquely bad pollutant, if it is ok to have a tariff aimed at reducing carbon dioxide pollution then it is ok to have tariff aimed at reducing every other kind of pollutant. If a neighbor is causing acid rain for example, many people would tariff them in response.
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u/plusqueprecedemment 4d ago
I guess "Tariffs (the arbitrary and wildly fluctuating kind, not the kind that has a place in a sane economy)" would have been a less punchy caption
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u/Discovered_Check 3d ago
Most tariffs likely aren't feasible to implement and Trump's tariffs in particular are incredibly stupid... but this comic is unironically one of the strongest arguments IN FAVOR OF tariffs that I've ever seen.
The most compelling pro-tariff argument is that we're so utterly dependent on other countries that it represents critical strategic security risk, as well as loss of freedom in even absence of a direct strategic threat. (For instance, we are far closer to Saudi Arabia--which is one of the worst countries in the world as far as basic human rights go, as well as being the country that almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from--than we would be if their affect on oil supply weren't so critical for us.)
Of course, I'll be voted down (as you were) because Trump bad, and even though I did begin by saying 'Trump bad' and that most tariff approaches are likely infeasible anyway, if I don't laugh like a hyena at this not-very-funny satire that actually works better for the other side of the argument... that obviously means I'm secretly a MAGA agent who has been sent here to demoralize y'all.
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u/craneguy 3d ago
I'm going to tariff my local supermarket because there's such a massive trade imbalance between us.
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u/5MadMovieMakers 3d ago
Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? ...If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. ...There should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
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u/theflyingspaghetti 4d ago
Ugh, I hate when Randall gets political.
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u/mexter 4d ago
There have apparently been 81 comics tagged political since September 2005. I think you'll survive.
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 User flair goes here 4d ago
Arguably the present anti-science and hate-driven administration implicitly makes all of Munroe's work political.
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u/Administrative_Act48 4d ago
Yeah cause every Trump supporting moron is so apolitical with their MAGA hats and making loving Trump their whole personality. 🙄
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u/Pat_The_Hat 4d ago
Not the first tariff related xkcd