Entropy SC @SC_Entropy

@elonmusknews30 👍

@salmaogs @grok how should we interpret this? What’s the implication on stock price?

@mindthelongterm @grok what’s this relaunch about and why it’s so significant ?

I’m playing everyone’s favorite party game: guess the Trump administration’s strategy. Like most of you, I have no inside information. But that’s what makes it fun. Here’s my best theory. Some assumptions first: 1) They’re not crazy. There is a strategy. It doesn’t align with conventional economic principles. But there’s something they’re playing toward. 2) They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots. They may be making what will turn out to be accurately predicted to be horrible decisions, but they do have a plan and it’s coherent. As part of this, while I think they think they can increase U.S. manufacturing, they don’t really believe they can bring everything on-shore. 3) They’re intentionally being opaque as to what the real plan is. Trump fashions himself a negotiator. Holding his cards close to his vest, even lying about what cards he has, is part of the game. 4) They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift. Even if you believe it is, suggest that’s an easy out to thinking through what may be more complex motivations. 5) China is the real enemy. China has done some things in the last two years that have made even the China doves in the last administration into hawks. Again, I know there’s lots of media saying Trump wants to kiss up to Xi. But, having spent enough time with enough folks in this and the last administration, they really worry about China morning, afternoon, and all night. So with that context, I posit the strategy is entirely: destabilize and ultimately decapitate China. If that’s right, you could just impose tariffs on China. But China has lots of export markets, so goods will just flow out through those. What if instead you impose tariffs on everyone? While China and the U.S. have similar GDPs, China is much more dependent on exports. That means while the countries of the world like cheap Chinese exports, they don’t depend on the Chinese market for their exports (yet). China has actually been on a nationalistic spree recently so foreign brands are more out of favor, meaning they’re an even less interesting market to sell to. The U.S., on the other hand, is the world largest buying market. We are the consumers to the world. If we stop buying, everyone suffers. That means nearly everyone needs to come to the table with the U.S. if there are universal tariffs. The U.S. is also unique in that it is among the only countries that doesn’t need to import anything. Don’t get me wrong, we want to import iPhones and PlayStations and French wine and German cars. But we don’t need oil or food or water or most the other raw materials to make sure people stay alive. So the U.S. will hurt under a high tariff regime but won’t collapse. Some manufacturing will move back on shore. But the biggest thing is every country needs to negotiate with the U.S. What does the U.S. ask for? I’m sure a bunch of nits with every country. But what if the big ask is: it’s us or them. You either trade with the United States, or you trade with China, but trading with both isn’t acceptable anymore. For some countries — Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines — the promise is to be the next China, but this time under more careful rules dictated by the U.S. For most the rest of the world, they’re already massive net importers from China. Forced to make a choice between selling to China or selling to the U.S. I’d guess most will pick the U.S. German automakers are terrified of BYD. And the Italians and French haven’t proven they can sell wine or cheese to China at any real volume. What’s China’s response? It’s tricky because they’ve preached self-sufficiency and internal focus. But if the whole world order suddenly aligns against them, what do they do? I have no idea if this is the Trump administration’s plan. But it’s the only thing I’ve come up with that passes the sniff test.

MY OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP The frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly. I’ve said it publicly. I’ve written about it in this very feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table -- picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic workforce would adapt. Eventually, that had to stop. It was unsustainable -- financially, politically, and morally. We couldn’t keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero-interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation. That would’ve been leadership. But that’s not what this is. What you’ve rolled out isn’t detox -- it’s whiplash. This isn’t strategic decoupling. It’s scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There’s no roadmap. No operational playbook. No clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It’s not an attempt to responsibly unwind America’s role as the global shock absorber -- it’s a brute-force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place. You can’t replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience. You can’t build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination -- especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn’t have the labor force, permitting structure, or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed. And now -- after years of deportation policies and underinvestment in vocational training -- you’ve made the labor gap even wider. Capital isn’t going to rush to fill that void just because you raised tariffs. It’s going to wait. It’s going to sit on the sidelines and preserve optionality. Because right now, no CEO can confidently model a five-year capex plan. No board can greenlight supply chain onshoring when they don’t know whether a tariff rate will double next quarter based on your Twitter account or some arbitrary trade deficit formula. That’s the issue. This wasn’t rolled out as part of a comprehensive American renewal strategy. It wasn’t coordinated with the Fed. It wasn’t communicated clearly to Treasury. It wasn’t backed by a labor reskilling program or any form of public-private manufacturing incentive beyond empty slogans. It was dropped like a bomb -- seemingly designed more to shock than to build. And in the absence of credible structure, capital is retreating -- not realigning. I was ready to endure the pain of a thoughtful, structured reset. Most long-term investors were. We’ve lived through tightening cycles. We understood that globalization, as it stood, had reached a breaking point. But this isn’t a correction of imbalances. This is a rupture without scaffolding. What you’ve created isn’t reindustrialization. It’s an intentional sabotage of capital planning. No executive is going to build a factory with four-year political horizon risk, a floating tariff regime, and no labor certainty. No investor is going to fund expansion in a market where the basic cost of imports can change weekly based on what country has a current account surplus that week. The system you’ve launched isn’t designed for certainty. It’s designed for control. And the irony is -- we’re not even punishing bad actors. We’re punishing everyone. Allies. Poor countries. Longstanding partners. Israel gets slapped with 17% tariffs while dismantling their own to support American imports. Vietnam gets hit with 46% because it’s become too productive. Lesotho, one of the poorest countries on Earth, faces a 50% tariff because it doesn’t buy enough U.S. goods -- as if that were a sign of unfairness rather than poverty. It’s incoherent. It’s cruel. And it undermines any claim to moral high ground. You say this is about protecting American workers. But no worker is helped by policy so erratic that no employer wants to hire. No consumer is helped when import costs rise and domestic capacity doesn’t exist to replace them. No investor is helped when the cost of capital spikes in the face of weaponized uncertainty. This is not a plan to make America stronger. It’s a gamble that markets and allies will blink first. It’s brinkmanship with no floor. And the most maddening part? There was a path. A real one. A version of this policy that could’ve worked -- not in headlines or soundbites, but in practice. A path that applied pressure with purpose, that aligned economic force with long-term national interest, that sent a clear message to adversaries and partners alike without destabilizing global commerce or blindsiding capital allocators. You could’ve gone after China -- hard -- and had the backing of nearly every serious investor and strategist on the Street. Not just because of trade deficits or currency suppression, but because China has been actively undermining our economy and our people. I would’ve supported a four-year plan to end all dependence on Chinese manufacturing unless they stopped stealing American IP (DeepSeek). No more games. Make it explicit: if they don’t comply, we’ll back Taiwanese independence and bring the entire global semiconductor economy with us. No ambiguity. No half-threats. As I see it, China is at war with us -- and our policy should reflect that. With the EU, you could’ve played it clean. Match auto tariffs percent-for-percent. That’s fair. And then leave the rest alone -- especially goods and services. We run a huge surplus on services with the EU. It props up some of our biggest competitive advantages -- enterprise software, consulting, cloud, defense tech, streaming, media IP. Tariffing the EU outside of autos would be like shooting your own foot for balance. We’re not in a trade war with Europe. We're in a competition for global enterprise dominance -- and right now, the U.S. is winning. That’s what real strength would’ve looked like. That’s what an America-first trade doctrine could’ve achieved. You’d be rebuilding the system from the inside out -- not just throwing bricks through the windows and calling it a redesign. Investors would’ve backed it. CEOs would’ve planned around it. Global partners would’ve respected it -- even if they didn’t like it. And capital would’ve flowed toward American resilience instead of retreating from American unpredictability. But instead of that, you went with chaos. And now, confidence is shattered. Not because the numbers are bad -- but because no one knows what the numbers mean anymore. That’s the cost of burning down the rules without building new ones. So no, this is not the detox we needed. It’s not strategic decoupling. It’s not a path to renewal. It’s a slow, loud dismantling of the very foundation that has allowed American capital, innovation, and enterprise to dominate for decades. And it didn’t have to be this way. But now we’re here. And the market is reacting accordingly -- not to the fundamentals, but to the sense that the future may no longer be modelable. That’s not a trade. That’s an exit. I don’t want this post to be hyper-political. This isn’t about red or blue. It’s not about the 2024 election cycle. It’s not about ideology. It’s about strategy. It’s about execution. It’s about understanding that when you're the United States -- when you sit at the helm of the global economic engine -- every policy you roll out reverberates through capital markets, supply chains, boardrooms, and governments. Words become signals. Signals become pricing. Pricing becomes pain -- or progress. And I hope -- for the sake of the markets, for the sake of businesses trying to plan, and for the future we’re all investing into -- that it’s not too late to recalibrate. Because we don’t need more noise. We need a plan.

The Chinese Communist Party has routinely dismantled the autonomy that Beijing promised to the Hong Kong people & the world in a UN-registered treaty. @StateDept released a report on 10 individuals whose actions have undermined freedoms of assembly, speech, press, or rule of law.

Defend the Truth. Defend freedom of the press.

周庭氏は現在保釈され警察署から離れています。ご心配くださった世界中の方々に心から感謝します。#FreeAgnesChow

網友在白宮外拍到暴徒之中有人用普通話叫同夥快走……

BREAKING: Boris Johnson reportedly said he is going to help Hong Kongers in a Ugandan-style "lifeboat" immigration scheme. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 We should be cautious. We need to see the detail - and @Number10press response - BUT:

These days we've been busy packing face masks for countries hard hit by #Coronavirus. Allies & friends, #Taiwan is coming! We'll beat the challenges together. JW

‼️WOW‼️ Bruce Aylward/@WHO did an interview with HK's @rthk_news & when asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asks again & he hangs up! She calls back & he said "Well, we've already talked about China." ENJOY+SHARE THE MADNESS! #CoronaVirus

Now on each time @WHO holds a press conference, reporters should ask WHO the same question about #Taiwan.

🇺🇦Hong Kong World City☔️ @HKWORLDCITY

7 years ago

‼️WOW‼️ Bruce Aylward/@WHO did an interview with HK's @rthk_news & when asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asks again & he hangs up! She calls back & he said "Well, we've already talked about China." ENJOY+SHARE THE MADNESS! #CoronaVirus

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Don't interrupt! We want more Americans to watch this clip. She plays into our de-coupling hand.

新闻/真话 @TuCaoFakeNews

7 years ago

红色匹诺曹！从形象到语言，一切都透漏着虚假

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【内容暴力慎入】深圳松岗有一位男子在朋友圈写到：湖北人全部都死，害了我们全中国，过年无聊，又上不了班，湖北人该死，多死一点湖北人。 结果被一群湖北人找上门群殴，满脸是血！

100,180 signed the White House petition 2 #stopBeijing2022 in ONLY 7 days. It is a 2020 New Year's gift 2 Uyghurs & supports🇭🇰2020 New Year's Day rally. Thx 2 ALL freedom loving/god fearing/human rights defending people worldwide. We've built a 2020 united front against🇨🇳tyranny.

新闻/真话 @TuCaoFakeNews

7 years ago

红色匹诺曹！从形象到语言，一切都透漏着虚假

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We will discuss US should permanently ban their family members later.

新闻/真话 @TuCaoFakeNews

7 years ago

红色匹诺曹！从形象到语言，一切都透漏着虚假

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That's a political motivated/fabricated charge! @hkpoliceforce is violating🇭🇰ers' civil rights again. It's an escalation. Online fundraising 2 support protesters' rights 2 legal representation & medical treatment is legal. This should motivate🇭🇰ers 2 vote in 2020 LegCo election.

Brian Kern / Kong Tsung-gan / 江松澗 @KongTsungGan

7 years ago

Now TV reports 4 arrested for money laundering, allegedly over online fundraising of Spark Alliance, an org that aids arrested protesters. Police are applying to freeze HK$70million. 1732 警方拘捕四名人士涉及洗黑錢，相信與「星火同盟」網上眾籌活動有關。並將申請凍結款項7000 萬。

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Remember 2047 isn't that far away. What will the UK do then for the children of these (overwhelmingly) young pro-democracy demonstrators? What would you do if this were you own children? You would give everything for this cause. So are they. And we should we defending them.