Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smjjames]

@reelya: Has that been reproduced elsewhere? What about more variation of ages backgrounds, etc? Flipping it into turning liberals into conservatives? There'd need to be a heck of a lot more investigation into that in order to make any real conclusion IMO

I didn't see mention of a control group or control question.

[SalmonGod]

It seems rather uncontroversial to me that conservative thinking is more rooted in fear, anyway.

[Cathar]

Sup. Just a quick post to let you guys know that the price of steel has almost doubled since the announcement of tariffs. Went from $450 ish to $820.


So... just maybe, it is not a question of conservative vs liberal, big state vs small state, alt-right vs SJW.

Maybe it's a question of who know when to buy raw materials and who can fill the command books of state manufacturers vs everyone else.

Just speculation. European Commission is currently investigating market reaction. They suspect something, that's for sure, and I believe they are on to something.

[smjjames]

Only thing though is that the tariffs haven't even activated yet. Although it's a stock market-like reaction, going on a buying spree to get it cheap when you know (or are anticipating) something bad happening soon that could raise prices. edit: No wait, it's the opposite direction.... Also maybe an insider trading effect since it effectively made everybody insider traders before the tariffs actually happen. Plus the fact that there would be uncertianity on who would be targeted.

Is that a global price or is it the price at some specific market?

Anyways, it's probably innocous, something like people trying to buy cheap before prices spike (though they've forced it to spike). However, the unusualness of it makes it worth checking out who's doing it and where.

[Cathar]

It is the global price. Just took a screenshot from a french market tracking site (boursorama.com). Yeah. Might not be a good idea to jump to conclusions, but this is clearly not usual market noise. The current price is the higher price recorded in ten years, and the shape of the spike is just insane. I gave a graph of a wide 10 years timeline to give a good representation of what is happening and I encourage you to double check me.

The announcement of the tariffs  is at least correlated to the spike, and probably the cause. Even if the tariffs end up not being applied, steel holders have already doubled their bets.

[Egan_BW]

inb4 China ends up making a huge profit due to the tariffs. ;P

[Cathar]

The spike is probably not going to last tho, it's already resorbing itself.
inb4 steel bonds will be sold massively overnight from a fiscal haven somewhere and ad hoc entities will make profit from steel bought from debt, generating money from absolutely nothing.

Don't quote me on that and dont forget to double check, I'm not an economy analist

[smjjames]

It does look like what would happen in a panic buying spree, and yeah, unlike the stock market, prices can only go so high.

Still, that’s either a lot of people doing the panic or it’s some buying huge amounts.

[Cathar]

Or both. Some dude buys massively at normal market price $416/u, give a phonecall to bigape, tell him the password "nutella", and the stage is set to generate buying frenzy with tariffs coming out from nowhere. Sounds like conspiracy theory, but really all it takes is one guy who knows how the market reacts and who has bought steel bonds when the price bottomed, between october 2015 until...well february 2018, and one guy who can generate panic on demand.

Also, steel is a strategic ressource, like food or clean water. There is no "automatic free market" roof to those prices, they will be bought no matter what, which makes them especially vulnerable to speculation.

Butall of that is pure spec on my part. What is not pure spec on my part, is the fact that all the jobs created by the skyrocketting of the global steel price will have a very, very short lifespan. They are created to capitalize on the inflated marketprice, and in the best case scenario, the price should continue to deflate day by day.

[Reelya]

@reelya: Has that been reproduced elsewhere? What about more variation of ages backgrounds, etc? Flipping it into turning liberals into conservatives? There'd need to be a heck of a lot more investigation into that in order to make any real conclusion IMO

I didn't see mention of a control group or control question.

They're not citing a single experiment there, but citing multiple experiments that they conducted over a decade, plus referencing that against research done by other groups, and it's not hard to find other related studies, e.g. a quick google gives corroborating evidence from diverse sources. This article also cites multiple studies:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/

According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them. For example, in a study published in January, a team led by psychologist Michael Dodd and political scientist John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives' eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement—suggesting that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats.

Meanwhile examining the contents of 76 college students' bedrooms, as one group did in a 2008 study, revealed that conservatives possessed more cleaning and organizational items, such as ironing boards and calendars, confirmation that they are orderly and self-disciplined. Liberals owned more books and travel-related memorabilia, which conforms with previous research suggesting that they are open and novelty-seeking.

“These are not superficial differences. They are psychologically deep,” says psychologist John Jost of New York University, a co-author of the bedroom study. “My hunch is that the capacity to organize the political world into left or right may be a part of human nature.”

The fact that conservatives have more cleaning-related items in general and that they calm the fuck down about immigrants when you prime them by washing their hands with anti-bacterial soap seem to be related. Brains have a lot of hard-wiring built in to get organisms up and navigating the world without floundering around having to learn everything from scratch. Having a subconscious connection between the fear of dirtiness and the fear of strangers could have evolutionary survival benefits, e.g. at an evolutionary time-scale if you're scared of getting sick that could be because there's plague around, and in that situation you'd up your survival chances by being averse to interacting with strangers. But you don't want to always be averse to strangers, because that would be suboptimal too, since you miss out on things like mating opportunities, so it makes sense that people are more or less willing to interact with strangers based on their mood, and the brain needs to use fairly broad brushstrokes like "fear" as it's feedback mechanism.

[Cathar]

(76 college students is not nearly a significant sample size to draw any conclusion by the way, this is absolutely moot from the getgo)

[wierd]

Indeed, but it suggests a trend that can be checked using larger demographic studies, such as those from gartner. (Specifically, large population studies that have similar features can be cross compared to determine if there is a trend that follows the supposition. Gartner does demographic studies on thousands of participants.)

[Cathar]

Can I see your source please?

[Reelya]

inb4 China ends up making a huge profit due to the tariffs. ;P

That's not really how it works. This is a short-term spike in prices, which can be put down to market instability.

Once things settle down, this will be bad for Chinese steel exports. e.g. the tariff will make it more expensive to sell steel to the USA, driving down the volume of exports there, and that will mean that additional steel will be dumped into every other market, e.g. the price of steel in USA will rise, but the profits will be more than eaten away by the additional taxes, and there will be increased competition for other markets, driving profits down. This won't help US steel exports either, since they're still competing with the Chinese, except now the Chinese will be diverting more steel away from the USA to other markets.

The whole point of tariffs is that it drives up the local price of the commodity, meaning local producers become more "competitive". But of course, prices going up has another name: inflation.

The irony here is that Venezuela opened a floating currency exchange back on Jan 25th, to replace the government-controlled system, and on that very day inflation stopped, and now the value of the Venezuelan currency has stabilized, and is gradually increasing in value. It would be really ironic if Trump completely fucked the USA's economy by bringing in the very type of "socialist" protectionist policies that fucked up the economy in Venezuela, and that Venezuela's Maduro government is now backing away from.

[scriver]

It seems rather uncontroversial to me that conservative thinking is more rooted in fear, anyway.

Would you say that it's true because it reinforces your pre-existing biases?