On Sunday, June 4, 2017 at 11:59:06 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, June 3, 2017 at 12:23:24 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
Chain lubes are such a racket.
-- Jay Beattie.
You don't need to be a victim of the chain lube racketeers. Chain lubes -- and chain-lubing -- are easily dispensed with. All it takes is some brains and a little money.
To save bandwidth on RBT, see the full instructions for installing a zero-maintenance chain at
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=6813.0
and a photo of the chain after running service-free for 3500km at
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index....77889#msg77889
with the final report of the experiment at
http://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index....79431#msg79431
Of course, some cyclists measure their manhood by their chain-cleaning exploits: they're the natural victims of the chain lube racketeers, so there's no help for them.
Alas, I have derailleur bikes, which kind of moots the chain-case thing. Also, I can't buy a Rohloff hub because it would add to the US/Germany trade imbalance. That's wrong, and I'm going to fix it, if I can get Congress behind me.
-- Jay Beattie.
That's not a trade balance, that's an investment balance. Here's the short version: American manufacturers, when they sell abroad, get taxed at punitive rates when they repatriate their profits, so they leave them abroad. That reduces trade numbers and increases the imbalance. Foreign manufacturers, like Mercedes, find it costs too much to ship whole cars, and German workers are pretty pricey too, so they invest their profits in American factories where they build their cars with American workers. So that's German money coming into the States, but it isn't counted (it isn't offset against outflows of cash to Germany to pay for imports from Germany) because it is investment, not trade. What Mr Trump is looking at is obsolete accounting methods failing to keep track of modern realities, not real a trade imbalance. The Japanese "trade imbalance" works the same way.
I think I've said enough to demonstrate that it's more complicated than the populists make it seem. Tariff barriers made the Depression run for nine years instead of the one that should have shaken it out; your President appears unaware that tariffs will cost American jobs and on a very large scale.
The only remedy is free trade, but it has to be fair free trade, not dumping such as the Chinese indulge in, together with aggregating trade and investment balances in the national accounts for a truer picture of what isn't a zero-sum game.
It gets more complicated. The Germans aren't the trade culprits Trump makes them out, even if he's right about them being too cheap to pay for their own defense. The fact is, Europeans with their minds in gear like a toothless Germany very much indeed. We don't want Trump to conflate his misunderstandings of economics with his ignorance of history, because we know in our blood that his attempt to rearm Germany can only end in tears. The European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the EU, was specifically a deal between Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer that Germany would get access to everyone else's markets, which is what Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler fought their wars for, in return for a promise not to rearm; more politely it was usually expressed, before it became axiomatically internalized in a smug, unearned, unexplained and unexplainable Franco-German pose of moral superiority, as French food for German cars. We fixed the German problem (and coincidentally the French peasant problem); we don't want an ignorant cowboy to start the Germans marching again.
Once your Treasury writes up the books up (there was a great man at Harvard, Wassily Leontief, ironically a Russian refugee, who was the great expert on national input/output -- I wonder if he's still sprightly enough to go straighten them out), the White House will call to say that, thanks to your pal Andre Jute, they've looked at the numbers again and you can, after all, give the Germans a grand for a Rohloff box so that you can join the 21st century.
Andre Jute
If you take it step by step, it soon becomes real clear