Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Okay, the live stream is going. Let me make sure it gets published properly. Do the live stream check. Okay, successfully posted. We will wait for it to come over on our screen, screen, thing, thing, and then retweet it. You know, I'm thinking at some point I should check to see if all the automation is in place that I can auto post to Blue Sky at this point too, because, you know, I like my Mastodon, but it seems like all the activity from, you know, folks I, like, follow and care about is moving over to Blue Sky. So, like, should I set up a curmudgeon's corner Blue Sky and automate the posting to it and all that kind of stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There probably is. But, you know, I managed it, but anyway, we'll worry about that later. Anyway, the live stream is going. I have retweeted it on Mastodon.
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Sam:
[1:08]
| Of course, no one's actually watching. That makes me so sad. Anyway, let's get this started. Here we go. Intro time.
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Sam:
[1:50]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, April 12th, 2025.
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Sam:
[1:56]
| It's just after 22 UTC as I'm starting to record. I am Sam Minter. Ivan Bo is not with me this week. He had a death in the family, unfortunately, and so is dealing with stuff associated with that. Not, and yeah, I, from what I understand, it was someone who was quite elderly. So it's not completely, you know, an unexpected event, but at the same time, that's, you know, never fun or good, no matter the age of the person. So he is not here. I, and I didn't, you know, all of you know how I usually, I have a list of people who sometimes co-host and I send out an email and sometimes we get somebody sometimes we don't i and and sometimes i talk with chat gpt apparently as i did a couple weeks ago i didn't even send out an email this week honestly i have been extremely busy at work really for a while but uh this week also and you know i just every time i got home and thought about sending the email, I was like, I don't know. I, I'm, I'm, I'm burned out. I'm exhausted. I'm ready to like, just sit and chill with Alex watching TV.
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Sam:
[3:23]
| Sometimes I had more work to do at home. It was, you know, all of this kind of stuff. And so I didn't do it. I didn't send out the email. I was also thinking like, you know, I, I don't know, like even, even at the times I normally record, you know, I want to retain some flexibility. So I was just like, you know, I'll, I'll do a solo show. Haven't done one of those since October. Might as well do one. And next time Yvonne can't make it, I will once again, send out one of those emails to everybody and see who's available and blah, blah, blah. I will say, though, agenda-wise, this first one, I'll do the movie review that I didn't do last week because we ended up just talking about tariff stuff the entire show, basically. And then we will have a couple of other segments. The first segment, though... Ivan may not be here, quote unquote, live, but as he has done at least once before, maybe twice, he sent me a recording of his thoughts on stuff. And so that'll be the second segment. I will play what he sent me and then maybe react to it a little bit. That segment is on the continued tariff developments and economy and stock market and all of that kind of stuff, which I'm sure if Yvonne was here, we'd be talking about that kind of thing anyway.
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Sam:
[4:49]
| And then the third segment, I don't know. I'll figure it out later. There are a couple things I have as potentially in mind to talk about, but I'll worry about that then. And as usual, when I do solo shows, I'm not going to go straight through from beginning to end. I'm going to record one segment and then I'm going to do other stuff for a while. I do have more stuff for my day job to do over the weekend. So I'm going to do some of that. It is April 12th and I haven't even started our taxes yet. And they are due on the 15th, which is very soon. So I'm probably going to try to do some of that over the weekend too. Although, you know, you know, I could wing it and just do it on the 15th anyway. So that, that, yeah, I, you guys don't care about logistics, but anyway, uh, and I don't know, like, yeah, I I'm hoping the stuff that's kept me swamped at work. The, the last of three major deliverables that I had is actually due this Monday. I'm finishing it up over the weekend. It's pretty close. I just hopefully have to tie up some final, like, you know, make, make some revisions based on some feedback I've gotten and be done.
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Sam:
[6:06]
| So I will be very glad to be done with that and then figure out what I'm doing next at work. But anyway, movie, I'll just jump straight to that. And I thought about doing two movies this time, but then I don't really want to. So, you know, there are enough movies in the backlog that I really should be doing two movies every week to catch up. I'm not. So, and I only every few months, like, write down all the movies that Alex and I have watched. And so I haven't done that since January. It's now April, which means once again, when I sit down to do it, it's going to take me hours to do it because it's not just here's the ones I watch, but also here's the ones that I've I what I do. I've mentioned this on a show before, but I'm going to mention it again because why not?
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Sam:
[7:08]
| When I finish a movie watching with Alex, I sort of take a screenshot showing that, you know, we were watching the credits to indicate, okay, finish that movie.
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Sam:
[7:20]
| And of course, we watch every second of the credits. And if you don't, you're a monster.
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Sam:
[7:25]
| You know, you need to pay proper appreciation to all the people who made that movie. And also, if you haven't watched every second of the movie from the beginning to the end, you have not watched that movie. You've missed it and and you know you should be using those utensils those whatever that hardware was from a clockwork orange to make sure you don't blink too because you know you're missing a big chunk of the movie just from blinking so yeah i don't wear the things on my eyes when i watch movies maybe maybe i should but yeah no any anyway what was i saying oh yes i take the screenshot to we're finishing the movie. But also whenever I hear about any movie like that might be interesting or TV show or book, I basically take a photo or a screenshot to indicate that. So like if I actually like see it like on a screen or something, I'll take a picture of whatever I see. If it's something that I heard of and then I'll look it up on Wikipedia or IMDb or whatever and take a screenshot out of that. Anyway, so when I go through this stuff, I'm basically going through everything on my camera roll since the last time I did it, looking for the photos or screenshots that indicate either I finished a movie book or TV show or that, hey, here's a new movie book or TV show that you might be interested in.
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Sam:
[8:54]
| And then I put them on a wiki page on my website and build up the list that we pick from.
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Sam:
[9:02]
| I don't know what the point of sharing that was this time. Anyway, it's always we're falling behind. It's going to take me hours and hours to catch up. And I'm pretty sure Alex and I have been averaging more than two movies a week or certainly more than one. Maybe more than two. Maybe not more than two. Probably right around two. It varies. It varies up and down by month. And what's going on, like, certainly there are some months that have less than one per week. But there are some months that have a lot more than one per week typically those tend to be like.
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Sam:
[9:39]
| Holiday areas like i'm looking at last november we watched a lot of movies last november but there were a bunch like concentrated around the holiday at the end of november so we were just taking the time to do that there were a bunch in december too but they were less I don't know. I don't even know what I'm saying. Anyway, the movie this time to talk about is Psych the Movie. So this was a, so first of all, by the fact that it has the movie, you probably already know it is related to something called Psych that was not a movie. And that's the the tv show psych and uh let me i'm gonna check when i watched that the actual the actual tv show psych i finished watching in 2015 i started it before i was keeping track like religiously of everything we were watching but i i finished it in 2015.
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Sam:
[10:50]
| There was a the tv show psych was on the air from 2016 to 2014 which indicates like i finished it right around the time it actually finished i think this is one of those shows where we were well i finished in 2015 so we were a little behind but like we we were watching the show while it was actually on the air and while they were still making new episodes and it was one of the shows that the family sort of usually watch together. But anyway, it was on from 2006 to 2014. There were 120 episodes over the course of eight seasons. The basic...
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Sam:
[11:30]
| Premise of the tv show was you know there's this there's this guy sean spencer he's his dad is a cop or a retired cop something like that and he basically sets up a a private detective agency with the notion that he is a psychic detective now the show goes into really what it is is he just has a really really good photographic memory and ability to like sense patterns and all of that kind of stuff and he just plays it off as being psychic and that that was the premise of the show went for eight seasons it's a it's a dramedy i guess it's it's like part like police procedural because he works with the police a lot and and solves crimes and blah blah blah so you you have sort of the detective crime-fighting police thing going on. And you've got some dramatic elements that occur, and there's what are his interpersonal interactions with his best friend, Gus.
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Sam:
[12:43]
| And, oh, I should mention, Sean Spencer's played by James Roday. Gus is played by Dulé Hill, who is also famously in the West Wing. He's been in other things afterwards. Anyway, it's mostly a comedy, you know, it's, so it's not, it's not to be taken seriously. I don't remember if I actively reviewed the show here on the podcast, uh, since it was way back in 2015. And I'm not sure we were regularly doing that at that point, but I would give it a thumbs up. I enjoyed the TV series. It was a fun show. this psych the movie is a a tv movie that uh was in 2017 so three years after the show ended which basically picked up the adventures of you know all the main characters and what happened next and so first of all i'll give the thumbs up for the show itself good show watch it i will give a thumbs up for Psych the Movie as well.
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Sam:
[13:51]
| But two things. One, it is really a continuation of the show. Like, you don't come in cold to Psych the Movie. You watch it if you've finished watching the TV show and now you want to continue. Because they've actually made three TV movies afterwards. Words it's so there was psych the movie then psych two lassie come home and then psych three this is gus those were in 2017 2020 and 2021 um, Alex and I actually just recently watched Psych 2, but it won't come up on our list for a long time. So I'm just talking about Psych the movie for now. So one, it really is a continuation.
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Sam:
[14:42]
| And you would never watch this if you had not watched the show. They're essentially just long episodes of the TV show. I mean and that's fine it's good i liked it i am giving it a thumbs up i will also say that even by the end of the tv show sort of a lot of the shtick that is the main sort of comedy the show was based on was starting to wear a little thin i mean there's only so many times the characters can sort of essentially play out the same types of jokes that are centered around how they interact and the fact that he's like pretending to be a psychic i think in the movies they actually really play that down and sort of it's much more just him you know using his skills, but you know.
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Sam:
[15:54]
| It's still, it's still fun. It's still good. I mean, I, you know, it sounds, it may sound like I'm wishy-washy and sort of leaning towards the sideways rather than the thumbs up, but I'll still give it a thumbs up. I think they're fun characters. It's a fun little adventure. They, they do their thing, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really just more of the TV show. Like if you like the TV show, definitely watch the movies. If you haven't watched the TV show, don't watch the movie unless you go watch the show and then like it. I mean, it's really that simple.
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Sam:
[16:32]
| And, you know, the other thing actually, like, and I admit, I was thinking this more as we, like I said, we recently watched the second of the movies and that's fresher in my mind than the first. But i think this was true even in the first movie another part of it is just the characters sean sean and gus the two main characters is also like his girlfriend and and a few other people but like sean and gus the two main characters when this started out you know it they were, I don't know how old the actors were actually, but my impression was these are characters in their twenties, maybe they're late twenties, but they're, they're in their twenties. They're still young kids. And the sort of goofiness is like, okay, it's fine. They're kid kids, you know, as a, as a person in my fifties, I could call people in their twenties kids. Yeah. Yeah. But.
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Sam:
[17:39]
| It was sort of like, oh, yeah, they're goofy. They're young. It's fine. They're playing around. By the time we get to the movies, they're older. They look older. They're in a later stage of their lives. And it's like, okay, shouldn't they have grown up a little bit? They're still acting like they were a decade earlier.
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Sam:
[18:02]
| Shouldn't they just grow up a tad? And I know like the whole premise of the show and later the things is around how they're goofy with each other and how they're how they're goofy with the stuff that they're interacting with as they go about and solve the crimes and all this kind of stuff. But but still it's like it's one of the act your age a little bit i mean even in their 20s they weren't really acting their age they're mean but you know you you kind of like can understand it when they're older in the movies and i guess to some extent even in the later seasons but like it really it starts to like be okay come on dude you're clearly if you're not already 40 you're close and, and you're still acting like a kid and really, you know, so let, let, let me see how old these, these characters act, well, the actors actually are right now. And the, the, the movie I'm looking at was 2017. So that's. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. God, that was eight years ago already. So subtract eight.
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Sam:
[19:25]
| James Roday is currently 49. So he would have already been 41 at that point. Dulé Hill also 49. So yeah, they were over 40 in Psych the Movie. And they're still running around acting like, you know, with the maturity of college kids, you know, their characters were out of college. They were, you know, but so mid, let's call it mid twenties. Let's see, how old would they have been when this thing was originally, when the TV show started? 2006. When was, when was he born? 76. So 86, 96, 06. So he was 30. They were both 30 when this thing started out, probably playing people in their mid to late 20s. And, and it's just, yeah, it's, it's, it's just less convincing when they're like in their early 40s instead, sort of playing things the same way as they did. I don't know. But I mean, it's still funny just to be clear. It's still funny. It still works. I still kind of care about these characters to some degree, especially when they're like getting in and out of relationships and how, you know, is the, what's going to happen there and blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
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Sam:
[20:51]
| But not in a serious, it's not even like a romantic comedy where you like get caught up in that. It's just that those kinds of things are sort of side issues and they make jokes out of that too and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, the plot of this one, just to give you a little bit from the Wikipedia summary. So at the very end of the series, they all moved to San Francisco. In the series, they were in, where were they?
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Sam:
[21:27]
| Somewhere in Southern California I forget the town oh Santa Barbara they were supposed to be in Santa Barbara.
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Sam:
[21:36]
| Anyway at the end of the series they move to San Francisco, and you know Sean and Gus show up anyway to find out who shot his girlfriend's partner she was on the san francisco pd she moved there blah blah blah they yeah and there's a mysterious organization and she wants to solve the crime as you know and and and without them and then they got they decide they need sean's help because of course they do sean wants to finally get married to juliet he was she was his girlfriend in the last half of the series and And, you know, there was a will they, won't they at the beginning of the series. And, but he doesn't want to until he can find his grandmother's ring that he wants to use for the proposal. And, you know, he ends up being in, you know, comedy ensues, adventure ensues. He gets in trouble with criminals as he's trying to track down the ring. And as they are trying to track down the killer of his partner's, the killer of his girlfriend's police partner. Or did he die? Or was he just shot? I don't remember. Anyway, and of course all this stuff comes together and hijinks ensue.
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Sam:
[22:58]
| Thumbs up if you've watched the show and liked the show. If you haven't watched the show, go check out the show. I give it a thumbs up too. With a tad of, like most of these long-running shows, the quality slowly goes down over the course of the history of the show. And I think that continues with the movies. But they're still good. And if you end up as a fan of the show, you will want to watch the movies, too. We haven't watched the last movie, the third movie yet. Although apparently they want to make more there is a fourth one so they've done three of these movies there's a fourth one in development the producer says they want to do, five, six, and seven as well before they're done. But, okay, come on. I'm already complaining about by the time we get to psych the movie, let alone two or three, that they are too old to play their characters. Well, I mean, without the characters growing up. I mean, I don't know.
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Sam:
[24:15]
| If they actually grew up, you'd change the character of the whole series. I don't know. I feel like they're diminishing returns in this series as we go on. Anyway, you got my ideas. You got my thoughts. That's it for now. The next movie, by the way, that I don't feel like talking about right now, I feel like we can talk about this with Yvonne here, is Chinatown from 1974. Very, very different vibe than Psych the Movie.
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Sam:
[24:48]
| Yeah more serious movie got academy award nominations we watched it because it's on that afi list of the hundred movies of the first hundred years blah blah blah very different vibe anyway i'll wait to talk about that next time and yeah maybe one of these days when there's maybe we'll just do an all media show one week i don't know to to try to catch up on these things And Yvonne could contribute sometimes. You know he watches stuff. He just only very occasionally decides to talk about it on the show. So, you know, it is what it is. Okay, we are going to take our first break. And for you, it'll be a couple minutes while the break plays. For me, it'll probably be many hours, because I've got that other work to do. I want to watch some more TV or movies with Alex. I've got some personal projects I want to work on. I probably should do some laundry. And did I mention the work I have to do for my actual job? I need to do some of that. Oh, and taxes. I mentioned that. I don't want to do any of these.
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Sam:
[26:02]
| You know, I want to just sit down and work on my other personal projects. Like, I've got a couple, like, projects I'm working on that I'd like to do that I haven't had a lot of time to do in the last month. I'd like to just spend some time on those. I'd like to alternate between working on those things and watching TV with my son. You know i don't want to do taxes i don't want to do the work for work you know laundry okay i i will be honest i actually kind of enjoy doing the laundry because you know this this aside from putting the machine there's like putting stuff away the sort sorting stuff like i sort the dirty stuff into like is it my stuff is it alex's stuff is it brandy's stuff etc is it like sheets and towels i i i do the sorting i don't sort by color i sort by who it belongs to sort of i enjoy like because i i can put my headphones on i can put on music or a podcast or whatever and i sort of am doing something semi-physical for like an hour while i do that kind of stuff and i have fun doing that i i don't you know so i wouldn't mind right it's the same thing like when i do some cleaning stuff i mean i can dishes cleaning stuff like that i haven't i haven't done a bunch as much of that as i would like lately just like i haven't done as much with my personal projects as i would like.
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Sam:
[27:29]
| Because of being swamped with the work for work stuff the the one i haven't ignored is the sitting and doing stuff with alex stuff mainly watching tv but also sometimes playing computer games sometimes doing other stuff. We've been doing that. But also, finally, I'm hungry. I did have a snack earlier today, but I am hungry again. And so there will be food. There will be food.
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Sam:
[27:56]
| So if you are also hungry, feel free to pause the podcast, go get food, and then come back. Or you can actually listen to the podcast and eat it at the same time. It's hard for me to eat and record the podcast at the same time a couple times i've had i've been hungry and i've had food here while i'm recording but then i realize i can't really eat and talk at the same time efficiently for the podcast and so that doesn't work anyway i said there'd be a break here's the break and then when we come back the next segment will be basically me playing what yvonne had to say about tariffs and everything, and then me reacting to that.
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Sam:
[28:40]
| And then the third segment will be whatever I feel like after that. Okay, here we go.
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Sam:
[29:52]
| Okay, we are back. And like I said, yeah, it's the next day for me. I didn't do it in the evening. I did other things. I'm behind on the stuff I have to do this weekend, but that's okay. That's okay.
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Sam:
[30:09]
| I'm about to play the recording Yvonne sent me to talk about his thoughts on tariffs. Just to place this in time for you, Yvonne recorded this after Trump added the 90-day pause on every country except China. But before, he also announced that he was exempting consumer electronics, like phones and computers and stuff. Now, as I am recording this, I just saw that on one of the morning shows, one of Trump's advisors, one of the Sunday morning morning shows, that is, one of Trump's advisors said, well, that's probably only temporary. We'll be bringing back tariffs on computers and electronics and semiconductors and all that kind of stuff. We just have to, you know, we're going to figure out a new form. They'll be back in like a month or so. That was a Lutnick. The quote was correct. That's right. Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to reshore in response to the host, Jonathan Karl on ABC's This Week saying, so you're saying that the big tariffs on things like smartphones and tariffs, all those phones, iPhones built in China, that none of those tariffs are, are temporary, that those tariffs are temporarily off, but they're going to be coming right back on in another form in a month or so.
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Sam:
[31:31]
| There you go. And you can tell my age because I almost said this week with David Brinkley, but it has been a long time since David Brinkley hosted that show. Anyway, let's, let's, let's go to the Yvonne clip. I'm going to hit the button, see how this works. Here we go. I'm hoping that folks on the live stream will actually see the video, not just the audio. But of course, if you're listening to the audio version later, it's all audio anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Here you go.
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Ivan:
[32:03]
| Hello, curmudgeons. Sorry I'm not on this week, but unfortunately, I had a death in the family, and this made it that I had to play cancel on Sam, but I, given the turmoil of this week, I did not want to leave the guys without. I think if any of you have followed on the Slack, you know that I have been very actively sharing what the hell is going on like right now. But let me give you the big highlights this week. One of the first things is that Trump caved and Trump caved because he was scared. They scared him. And the main reason why he caved on the tariffs after these rounds of Trump saying he's got all the cards, set all these tariffs, set them sky high, stock markets kept just plummeting. Even after he went he said that he's suspending the tariffs there's something that's happening that's a very bad sign which is that bond yields, have soared and they continue to soar even with the expectation of a recession right now that's a very bad sign.
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Ivan:
[33:20]
| The two main reasons why this is probably happening is that number one you've had a lot of people that must have had margin calls and the most liquid things that they can sell on a margin call. You have to sell what's unfortunately valuable. I unfortunately lived through one of these a long time ago. So you get a margin call. It's usually because your dodgiest investments are the ones that really took the worst beating. So in order to cover for that, you have to sell the best stuff you've got. And so in many cases, what that means to hedge funds is they got to sell treasuries.
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Ivan:
[33:56]
| So that's causing that to go up. But A lot of information really indicates that both Japan and China have been dumping bonds. And they're doing this in retaliation. I have no doubt that they're doing this in retaliation. Trump kept going out there talking about how he's holding all the cards, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. It's complete horse shit. As a U.S. Imports goods we pay in dollars, they in turn buy a lot of treasuries. And that money flow has happened like that for decades. And the reason why a lot of people want to do that also is because the U.S. Is a good place, has been historically a good place to invest money, has been a safe haven to invest money. People want money in the United States because they expect stable government. They expect stable monetary policies. They don't expect arbitrary changes. And unfortunately, Trump has come in and broken that.
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Ivan:
[35:01]
| He has severely broken the faith that people have in the U.S. Dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds. And so that's why you're seeing a situation that I don't remember ever seeing in my lifetime, which is stocks are getting dumped. You're not seeing the race to safety as going to treasuries. They're going somewhere else. the money's going somewhere else one thing that has taken a lot of that money is hold i think i probably mentioned i know on the slack i mentioned this but in february i did sell a substantial part of my holdings in the stock market and bought gold precisely because i feared something like this and also because another guy that's smarter than all of us, as time has become more obvious, was a whole courting cash and had sold a lot of his stocks. And that's Warren Buffett. And that guy doesn't take such a decision lightly. He was reading the room better than any of us. And he thought a lot of this was very possible. And so Berkshire Hathaway is holding around $400 billion in cash and equivalents.
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Ivan:
[36:26]
| You know, he's the only guy that's up in the year. Everybody else, top 10 richest people are down. They're down a lot.
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Ivan:
[36:36]
| We are in a uncharted territory situation here right now. Where the tariffs, not all the tariffs are the one. Many of them are still in place. You've got a lot of small businesses that are trying to clear merchandise at customs now from China, and they can't afford to. The tariffs are so steep that you're having people not being able to afford the shit they ordered months ago. So this is a difficult situation for many, and nobody is coming to the rescue of these small businesses right now. And when a lot of this merchandise will get through, if it gets through, it's going to push up inflation. There's no way around it.
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Ivan:
[37:25]
| So we are right now in a situation that is, I've never lived through my lifetime where I saw just somebody dispurposely trashing a good economy. And that's what Donald Trump just did. And the pain of this is not all here yet, not even remotely. We're going to get a lot more pain as the months progress even if some deal is cut like right now, he didn't suspend all the tariffs not only one he said that he's going to negotiate 70 deals with, deals with 70 countries in like 90 days that is an insane amount of deals to cut in 90 days most of the trade deals that were in place that we had up to now were the byproduct of years and years and years of negotiation. And so all of a sudden trying to cut 70 deals in like 90 days seems completely nuts.
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Ivan:
[38:31]
| So look, every indicator right now for the economy is bad. There are no good indicators, consumer sentiment, interest rates. They're not looking good. Trump's approval ratings in tandem are collapsing like right now. Congress hasn't done anything. I'm wondering when, when the breaking point is going to be, I think at some point, if this continues, there will be a breaking point because one of the things, you know, people are talking about authoritarians and how they handle things. Look, the two best examples I can give, Putin and Hitler, one of the things they did was like prop up the economy as they took control. That was, that was key. I mean, Putin went and in his first decade really improved Russian economy. So did Hitler coming out of World War II. That's how you, that's how you make sure that your supporters are on board. But Trump instead went and like inside 90 days, not even 90 days. You know, kneecap the economy.
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Ivan:
[39:41]
| Just kneecap the economy for no good fucking reason whatsoever. And that pain, the worst of the pain, is going to hit his supporters. Already his supporters on the Wall Street, all of them, most of them realize that he is a complete idiot that cannot be trusted. That's a fact. Whether they're saying it out loud, that's a different thing, but Most of them have to come to that conclusion. And as the pain of this self-inflicted wound starts reaching everybody, this will cause a lot of people to get really angry. A lot of his supporters get really angry. That's when we see whether this starts having a significant effect on whether Congress acts to basically take control of the situation at some point. I mean, it's just one of those things where right now you got Congress then.
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Ivan:
[40:45]
| Just acquiescing at every turn to the lunacy of this administration. They're pushing this economy to the breaking point. I mean, forget about all the other things that they're doing in terms of... I mean, I'm not even going to discuss that. They keep doing all these things that are wrecking every other institution, you know, undermining science, undermining our bilateral security agreements.
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Ivan:
[41:14]
| Undermining the health of the average American.
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Ivan:
[41:18]
| Just so many things. But it's going to be... This is not... This is bad. This is bad. And just rolling back... There was a relief rally this week, to some extent, about him pushing back some stuff that hasn't translated into the bond market. And I think that is the key benchmark. I think American companies, to some extent, the global ones, because they sell so much outside the U.S., I mean, in the case of Apple, for example, more than 60% of revenue comes out of the U.S., they probably aren't taking the total brunt of some of the stuff. And the dollar devaluing in terms of like, hey, if you're selling Europe, well, that increases the value of what you sell overseas. So that's beneficial in certain ways for the profit or loss of the companies. Now, the other thing is the Chinese are really, really pissed, and they've decided that they're unlike before where, you know, they were allowing Trump to be a bully. I think that one thing that's broken this cycle like right now is the fact that they they stood up and said, fuck, you know, and I had hoped that other people had been taking a harder stance against them. These things. But we'll see what happens.
|
Ivan:
[42:44]
| They said they're going to negotiate. I don't know when that's going to happen, but hopefully we'll talk to you guys soon next week. Okay. All right. Take care, guys. Bye.
|
Sam:
[42:53]
| Okay. So there was Ivan on the tariffs. So, you know, this is his expertise more than it is mine, but I'll add a couple of thoughts anyway, before we break and move on to something else. First of all, This, I think, absolutely is an indication of a, you know, a true Trump back off. And we have seen, this is not the first one. There have been a number of situations where when something has gotten a significant amount of negative pushback, Trump has actually backed off or his administration has backed off.
|
Sam:
[43:35]
| You know, there, there were more minor examples, like, you know, even things like, Hey, the bathrooms closed at national parks and stuff. They figured out a way to back that out. There were some other policy changes that, you know, people were like, this is really stupid. This is dumb. And things that were getting universal mocking, not the things that, you know, your usual suspect Democrats would complain about because they want that. They love that.
|
Sam:
[44:09]
| All the better. All the better if all of the blue politicians are upset and Democrats are freaking out. But the things that were causing everybody to go, wait, what? What are you doing? They have backed off on a number of those things. Before this, most of them have been smaller items, though. They have been things that, you know, you had to be, you might notice if you paid attention to that particular thing, but they weren't big headline grabbing backoffs. They were sort of little incremental things. This is, I think the first one that's really big. And, you know, up until like the day before Trump backed off a bit on this, he was saying, no, we're not backing off. This is what we want. And there was back and forth with various people of his spokespeople not quite being coherent on their messaging, but some saying that there was going to be negotiations, some saying there were not, and this is just how it is. We're clearly now on the, we're making negotiations. But here's the thing too.
|
Sam:
[45:21]
| Yvonne and I had said last week that, look, yeah, we talked a bit about the worst case scenarios if this just like stuck, but we said the most likely scenario was Trump would claim some sort of minor concession as a huge win and use it to declare victory and back off. Here's the thing there wasn't even that fig leaf this time the closest to what he said was he was keeping the tariffs on for countries that had retaliated specifically China I noticed there were there were some EU retaliation too that apparently got ignored but, You know, we're keeping the, keeping the tariffs on for the countries that retaliated and for everybody else, we're backing off. Now they didn't back off completely. They kept like the 10% minimums across the board everywhere. They kept like previous tariff increases. This was just like on some of the new reciprocal, quote unquote, reciprocal. We talked last week how it's not really a reciprocal tariff, but there was no wind to claim. It was, it was a straight up back off. It was a, we're going to, we're not going to do this. We're going to push another 90 days. And, and this, this matches what he did earlier with, you know.
|
Sam:
[46:47]
| Canada, Mexico, et cetera. Remember before those things, he, the deadline has been announced a couple of times and then they moved it at the last minute and then they moved it in the last minute. Some of them are in effect now to be clear, I think.
|
Sam:
[47:03]
| But they and this time it was sort of allowed to go into effect and then pulled back but you know it was such a short time it was unclear how many people actually paid things by the time they backed off again but this was a this was a straight off back off and the only the other thing that i think is important there's been reports like the biggest guy pushing for this tariff approach within the administration was Navarro. And it appears his role has been diminished.
|
Sam:
[47:38]
| You know, the drama inside the Trump administration was significant here. We have sort of the rift with Musk over this. Like Musk clearly did not want the tariffs and he was vocal about it and was talking about how stupid Navarro was and how he hoped President Trump would reconsider and all this kind of stuff. But that was not the only one. This was something that clearly was producing divisions within the administration between the people who were like, trust Trump, which was the official line, versus people who were like, I'm not so sure about this.
|
Sam:
[48:23]
| And then we have this further back off on electronics and then the reversal of that from the Sunday morning shows that I mentioned right before playing the Yvonne clip that those might be back, Which leads to Yvonne's comment about, look, we had a relief rally when some of these things were backed off, but then things started going down again in the markets. And as he said, the bond markets have still been acting weird because completely aside from the specific tariff policies that are being put on, taken off, put on, taken off, adjusted, the point is the unpredictability and the lack of a coherent plan that anyone can discern. Like, I've listened to a bunch of people, you know, financial expert type folks being interviewed about this. And as far as I can tell, even on the otherwise Trump supporting side of things.
|
Sam:
[49:31]
| Nobody can articulate a coherent, workable plan for what they're really trying to accomplish. And how it will be accomplished and what kind of timeframes it will be accomplished in and how, you know, how this would all work. I mean, as Yvonne and I mentioned before, like, okay, look, they keep talking about reshoring various manufacturing. Now there's some problematic things about how, even if you do that, you're potentially replacing, you know, high skill, high-paid jobs with lower-skill low-payer jobs, which is that what you really want to do. But assuming you want to do that, there's still the question of, okay, if we're going to build up.
|
Sam:
[50:23]
| American manufacturing capabilities again and try to bring them back to how they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago or whatever the goal is.
|
Sam:
[50:34]
| The tariffs aren't enough, especially erratic tariffs like this, because at the bare minimum, you have to convince companies to undergo this long-term investment to turn that ship around and say, okay, I guess the international investments aren't coming back. We're going to have to do something. Maybe there's an opportunity here. but we're talking years and years of investments to build factories and set that up and get that moving and figure out what's going on and you know huge dollar amounts associated with that too, so certainly no one's going to do it if they don't believe that what's going on is going to last more than a few days before it changes again it has to be not it has to be stable on the time frame of years, maybe decades, like for them to really, really and truly believe it. Or there has to be substantial governmental guidance and funding and all this other stuff to sort of kickstart it. And there's absolutely no interest from the Trump administration on doing that kind of stuff. You know, and they're dismantling the kind of thing, the things along those lines that were already in place under the previous administrations as so how how is instead.
|
Sam:
[51:56]
| You're you're just threatening the price increases and that's it and you're not even threatening that consistently because of all you know all of the back and forth and there'll be a delay and then we'll figure this out and then it'll be back and then nobody knows what to believe other than this is uncertain and this is bad. And so, yeah, we're still way, the market's still way down from where it was. Consumer sentiment is plummeting. Expectation of inflation is rising rapidly. You know, Yvonne had mentioned that within a few weeks, we should actually start seeing the inflation in our day-to-day lives when we go to the store.
|
Sam:
[52:45]
| The back-off this week may delay how obvious that is or when that is to some degree. And maybe he ends up delaying it indefinitely. And so he freaked out the Wall Street people, but Main Street's not going to see the effects right away. Maybe. But these things have a tendency to get out of control. And so we'll see. Tariffs are still up. from where they were. They're just not catastrophically up now that he's backed off. And even with China, even with China, with the additional back off of consumer electronics, this will be less impactful. I'm not going to say not impactful. Like there's a lot of things that China puts out there that are not consumer electronics. And there was actually a good table. I shared it on our curmudgeons corner Slack I'll see you next time. But let's see if I can get you guys a reference to it.
|
Sam:
[53:51]
| Okay, this was from the New York Times. Published on April 12th, or updated on April 12th anyway. How much are tariffs on Chinese goods? It's trickier than you think. Because everybody keeps talking about a top-line number. you know, with it's going to be, you know, 145% tariffs or whatever on, on China. But in fact, it's, I mean, first you said 125, then 145, then it all, because people were trying to figure out how to add up the previous tariffs and the new tariffs and whatever. Anyway, but it's actually more complicated because it's different depending on which goods you're talking about and their components of it. This New York Times article breaks it down. Look, there's a standard base rate. Apparently, there's a 3.4% average, again, depending on the type of goods. So there's a base rate that was already in place worldwide before Donald Trump's second term. There were some pre-2025 term tariffs, some of which were introduced by Trump and kept on by Biden. Some were even increased by Biden that vary based on product, country, etc.
|
Sam:
[55:06]
| And then even within Trump's term so far, there's different sets of tariffs. He's done tariffs on steel, tariffs on aluminum, tariffs on car parts. Then we had the fentanyl tariffs, and then finally the reciprocal tariffs. And they're all different, and they're all different by country, and they're all different buy type of goods. So specifically on China, this article points out that the range, apparently the highest tariffs out there are on syringes and needles from China.
|
Sam:
[55:43]
| And the total of all of those things is a 245% tariff on syringes and needles from China, apparently. Going down some of the list, lithium-ion batteries, 173%. Squid, 170%. Wool sweaters, 169%. Plastic dishes, 159%. And then there's a whole bunch of other things. And goes down at the bottom few metal furniture 70 percent door hinges for cars 67 percent laptops only 20 percent and apparently children's books zero percent apparently and i did not know this but like most children's books sold in the united states are imports from china who knew i guess if you're in the children's books industry you probably knew or if you, have a child and have taken the time to read the front of the book where it gives you all that information maybe you do i didn't know but apparently there's an exemption for educational materials and children's books falls in that category and zero percent on those but.
|
Sam:
[56:57]
| Here's the thing like electronics i i was worried i am hanging on to a really old, iphone 12 pro max i've mentioned this on the show before last couple of cycles.
|
Sam:
[57:12]
| Is is the new phone that's out there significantly nicer than my current phone yes is it old enough to upgrade absolutely they're on the 16s now this is a 12 that's four cycles old i used to update every two or three right originally it was every other i i got every other then i sort of expanded to three and then this one stretched to four now it's getting up to you know if i wait till the 17 it'll be five years because i.
|
Sam:
[57:41]
| Keep telling myself well it's it's it's working it's it's doing everything i need it to i i don't really have a justification to replace it like unless it breaks but i was still thinking five years is a long time when the 17s come around i'll get a new one because it is feeling a little slow now a little sluggish there's some like i've been like minecraft over the last couple weeks has had a special event associated with the movie and so alex has been asking me to play along with him and i have been and i've noticed i've been like it's been a little sluggish the the latest versions of minecraft on this thing compared to how he has it on you know so i'm like okay mate you know seven and and i was thinking like have i made a mistake in waiting for the 17s because if if the full weight and force of all these chinese tariffs come on you know am i going to be talking double the price for an iphone maybe i should rush out and get a 16 now before that happens.
|
Sam:
[58:51]
| And then, you know, they've been exempted. Well, I mean, it's still going to, apparently, things like smartphones are still on the hook for a 20% tariff from the fentanyl stuff, but not the others anymore. At least until maybe they bring them back in a month from now. So I'm like, okay, I don't have to rush out and get that 16. I can stick to my plan, replace it when it breaks and or when the 17s come out.
|
Sam:
[59:20]
| But there's lots of other stuff too you know we we we get get lots of stuff from china i i don't know if you folks have noticed we get lots of stuff from china i i i once remember people pointing out and and maybe it i'm sure it was slightly exaggerated but they basically said look, everything walmart sells is from china that's the secret to their pricing you know their, So this is going to still affect people, but maybe less than it was, and maybe there'll be more backing off.
|
Sam:
[59:56]
| I i think the key is you know yvonne mentioned what's the breaking point and i think the important part to remember here is i think trump himself breaks and backs off before things get to the point where anyone else would break against him you know we were sort of talking in the context of like, okay, when will Congress have had enough and we get enough Republican senators and representatives, including the leadership in both of those bodies for them to actually overtly go against Donald Trump and do something like restrict his powers on tariffs or something. The answer is it would have to be so incredibly disastrously bad that they felt there absolutely was no other choice. And they were not just ditching Donald Trump over this one issue. They were ditching him over everything. In that kind of scenario, maybe we are also talking like Vance in the cabinet trying to do the 25th or something. But in that scenario, or impeachment into Congress with Republicans on board. But like, honestly, I can't really imagine those scenarios.
|
Sam:
[1:01:18]
| Congress has been like, congressional Republicans gave up a long time ago. They made their deal. And then we've had more elections where more intensely MAGA politicians have been elected over the last eight years. So that's going to be hard. The cabinet was chosen completely based on loyalty.
|
Sam:
[1:01:46]
| And so, yeah, no, no. But what I think would happen is if you even started seeing things tilting in that direction, Donald Trump himself backs off. And that's exactly what happened this last week. You had a number of congressional Republicans signing on and saying, yes, they would support legislation restricting presidential power around tariffs. It wasn't enough yet to actually move anything, but it was non-zero. There were a handful. And they were speaking out about it. And there were even more that were publicly expressing their uncertainty about what was going on. And then you had the bond stuff that Donald Trump, Donald Trump, that, that Yvonne mentioned. And you had more and more indications that all of the economic indicators were going bad fast. I heard someone say, Donald Trump is okay with a recession. He thinks maybe a recession is okay, and that we can do that, and he can move on beyond that, and that maybe it's even necessary to accomplish his goals, but that he's not okay with the depression.
|
Sam:
[1:03:02]
| And of course it's a fuzzy boundary between the terms but basically there's a difference between hey we're going to have some economic times that are a little bit rougher than we would like for a couple quarters and then we're going to bounce back versus you send the entire country into an economic spiral where there's mass destruction and it lasts years and so donald got scared donald backed off apparently he's you know wasn't done backing off because a few days later there was the electronics thing and i just saw a note too that you know the headline was the electronics but apparently there's more to it than that and there's maybe some additional back off in other areas too yeah and maybe don't maybe he wasn't expecting all of these effects he made some comments about, I forget the word he used. It was a funny, unusual word about how people were getting queasy about things and how people were reacting to this. And so he had to back off a little bit. He actually admitted that he had to back off because people were reacting to it in a bad way.
|
Sam:
[1:04:14]
| And I think that's important. I mean, it does indicate that there is still some degree of, okay, Donald Trump will react to the public and the markets thinking that what he's doing is bad. And that's why you had that sort of relief rally when that was first announced.
|
Sam:
[1:04:39]
| It's good that there is that reaction. It's better than a president who will continue on no matter what as the country descends into chaos, but only a little better. Because we still know he's erratic. We still know that all of this, you can't, there is no certainty. The things that are missing here are, A, no sense that this is actually part of a coherent plan that would work, and two, no sense that there'll be any stability that it won't be something completely different in five minutes or a week or a month. So you can't plan on anything because it always seems like and like you know the markets were apparently finally learning this lesson this last week or two but this has been the case in all of the other policy areas since inauguration day i mean hell last term too this is it's all brand new. It seems to be intensified this time, but everything just seems to be, what's Donald Trump feel like doing today? What are his whims?
|
Sam:
[1:06:03]
| In his last administration, we had the adults in the room trying to slow things down. This time, we really don't. Donald Trump wakes up in the morning, decides he's going to do something crazy, and there's executive orders on the table that afternoon around the crazy thing and then it happens and then there's reaction to it and then if the reaction is bad maybe he drops maybe maybe he backs off maybe he changes it maybe he adjusts it maybe he doesn't but it all depends on what he feels like that moment and as usual who's the last people that were talking in his ear very chaotic very unpredictable which results in typically very negative results in the end. And frankly, it's like, you know, for the most part, I think the things that Donald Trump wants to do are bad anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:07:00]
| But frankly, even if we had in place somebody who I agreed with on everything policy-wise, this kind of chaos would still be negative.
|
Sam:
[1:07:10]
| Add to it that everything he wants practically is bad to begin with, and it makes it so much worse. But anyway, I think that's enough on that. I'm going to take another break. Break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break, break. And then when we come back, I will talk about something else. I think, you know, that's my list. I mean, I'm going to leave it open a little bit because, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:07:40]
| Something new may come up while I'm taking this break since I'm going to go off and do other things. I'm, I'm, I'm going down, I'm traveling to Olympia to visit my wife for lunch and to sign some papers we need to sign on something. And so I'll, I'll be gone quite a few hours before the next version of this. So who knows, there could be like big breaking news to talk about that does everything but my my gut right now is that what i will want to talk about is the court case with that guy who was mistakenly sent to el salvador the supreme court ruled on that the administration is still hemming and hawing about trying to get him back and that leads more generally into conversations about trump versus the courts and all of this kind of stuff and And it leads into the conversation about sort of people being disappeared in general. So that's probably going to be my next topic.
|
Sam:
[1:08:41]
| Absent major breaking news or something else just coming up that's not major, but I decide I want to talk about it. But you will know in minutes. I won't know for hours, at least. Anyway here's another breaky break break break thing break break break go blah blah blah break, And we are back and it is hours later, as I said, it would be, and I'm still behind on all the other stuff I need to get done tonight in my, it's, it's, it's now Monday UTC just after four and to, and here in the Seattle area, that means it's just after 9.00 PM on Sunday evening.
|
Sam:
[1:10:07]
| And aside from the before I go to bed tonight I've got some stuff for work I got to get done and I've got to get this podcast done and out the door and I'm running out of hours and so I'm getting stressed about it so so do I dare say I'm going to try to wrap this up shortly and not like talk for a long time because whenever I say that I end up talking even longer and that's probably not what i want to be doing anyway we are not nothing else breaking news came up so i'm going to talk about what i said i was going to talk about which is the case of let's see what's tilmar armando abrigo garcia is the guy's name i looked it up to to be sure that i got it right Because usually I would just say the guy, because I am so bad at names. Anyway, he was mistakenly removed. I'm not even going to say deported, because as many people have pointed out, that implies a process. He was removed to the prison in El Salvador, which even the government admits was a mistake, because there was a judge's order saying, no, he should not be removed.
|
Sam:
[1:11:30]
| Now, the latest filing has them, DOJ is sort of being like, well, yeah, but there was that order, but we don't think it was valid anymore, blah, blah, blah. Bottom line, here's the thing here.
|
Sam:
[1:11:44]
| DOJ, they picked the guy up, they stuck him on a plane, they sent him to El Salvador. Then they're like, oops, apparently we shouldn't have done that. And then, of course, we got lawsuits going back and forth. The judge was basically like, bring him back. And they appealed that. They said, well, he's not ours anymore. You know, this went all the way up to SCOTUS. SCOTUS responded, basically saying, yeah, you got to do what the lower court judge said. Sort of. There were some questions about wording. The original judge said, effectuate the return. And SCOTUS basically sent it back and was like, well, you have to specify what you mean by effectuate. And, you know, and they use the word facilitate in their own order, like facilitate the return. So what the hell does that really mean? So they remanded it back to the lower court.
|
Sam:
[1:12:55]
| And then, you know, the judge is like, hey, tell me what you have done. Because before this order was stayed, he'd already made an order that they needed to do what they had in their ability to get this guy back. And so he just wanted a status on where is the guy and what have you done so far? And when this first went back, they're like, we don't know. We have no information. We have no information at all. The judge was really pissed by this. The DOJ was like, hey, we'll give you an update Tuesday. The judge is like, no, I want an update every single day before 5 p.m. Every single day, over the weekend, etc. Tell us what's going on.
|
Sam:
[1:13:45]
| Basically, I expect to see some motion here. So the government's first update on Saturday basically said, we've confirmed the guy is alive and at that prison. And that's basically all it said. Nothing about anything they're doing, nothing like that. Their update Sunday basically said we have no update beyond what we had yesterday. The point eight of it, I'm looking at the legal document that was filed. I have reviewed the declaration of Mr. Michael Kozak, which was filed in this case yesterday, April 12, 2025.
|
Sam:
[1:14:29]
| It is my understanding that defendants have no updates for the court beyond what was provided yesterday. As I said, though, they put in some caveats. Section 7 here. On March 15, 2025, Abrego Garcia, a native and citizen of El Salvador, was removed to El Salvador pursuant to Title VIII of the United States Code. Although Abrego Garcia has an order of removal issued by an immigration judge, I understand that he should not have been removed to El Salvador because the immigration judge, had also granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal to El Salvador. However, I also understand that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13, which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.
|
Sam:
[1:15:20]
| And apparently there was proceedings in 2019 where an immigration judge upheld a decision not to grant bond because of a determination about MS-13. Yeah. His current lawyers say he absolutely had no involvement with MS-13 or any of these other gangs, etc. The authority they supposedly pulled him over wasn't MS-13 related anyway, but I think the current judge has asked for some evidence and none has been supplied so far. So anyway, the key here is they, look, SCOTUS, the ruling was nine to zero. It was unanimous. So a lot of the early coverage was about how, look, this is SCOTUS slapping this down. This cannot happen. This is not okay. They have to do something about it. As additional people looked at it more carefully, they started to say, okay, but some of the language here is wishy-washy. This allows a whole bunch of areas where the government can equivocate. It isn't directly demanding, bring this guy back.
|
Sam:
[1:16:43]
| There's lots of wiggle room still left. And so there are a lot of things the government could do. And so far, they've been stalling. So people have said, like, is this the one, is this the one where the Trump administration will decide to directly violate a Supreme Court order? And it looks like, no, probably not. You know, because SCOTUS has given them wiggle room. It's given them wiggle room in interpretation of exactly what they said. It's given them a process that may take time. So they'll have time to go back and forth and back and forth and probably back up to SCOTUS again. If the judge decides to hold them in contempt, that'll get appealed, that'll go up, you know, and so not yet. And also this is one where, you know, well, in a normal administration, they would probably decide, you know, this isn't the one to fight. Like we admit it, There was a mistake that was sort of admitted. Yeah, this isn't one of the ones where they're like, yeah, we definitely want whatever. There was an admitted mistake, like go to the bat on one where there is no admitted mistake. And it's just a question of what's the president's authority.
|
Sam:
[1:18:08]
| But we shall see. It's still playing out. And the key to all of these, because there was also a set where the more general evacuation of mostly Venezuelans based on this emergency authority thing that the president is claiming there is an invasion by this gang, not MS-13, but the other one, I forget the name, whatever. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:18:42]
| The courts did say that for these removals, you have to give notice and you have to give them a chance to file, you know, do a habeas appeal. And there's, sorry, there's so many of these. And I may be getting some of them mungled together. You've got the Venezuelan gang removals. You've got this one guy who was sent by mistake to El Salvador. You've also got these miscellaneous random people who are being, who are getting their visas revoked. Like there was that graduate student whose visa was revoked and she is now in detention in like Louisiana or somewhere because apparently, you know, and they're not giving lots of information on why. But the only thing people can find is she signed on to a pro-Palestinian, not pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian, anti-the-way the Israelis were handling their policies.
|
Sam:
[1:19:46]
| Incursion into gaza editorial in the school newspaper and she was she was removed as well.
|
Sam:
[1:19:54]
| So far we do have scoda saying look there has to be some ability to you know for these people to file their habeas petitions and there needs to be a process there needs to be notification they need for the visa removals there needs to be notification you can't just like the the one grad student they revoked the visa but didn't tell her and then just yanked her off the streets like there are other people who are getting notified like if your visa is revoked and you're given like 10 days to leave the country or whatever then at the very least you have the opportunity to actually leave the country under your own power you know put your affairs in order buy a plane ticket go home, You know, I say that like it's easy. It sometimes might not be. But in the case of like, you know, a graduate student who is here for school, it might be possible. It's not going to be good. It's not going to be what they planned for. It's not going to be what they wanted, but at least something, right?
|
Sam:
[1:21:00]
| But in every one of these rulings that's gone to SCOTUS so far, from what I understand, they've done the same thing. They've done these sort of, Even when they're ruling against the administration, they are ruling against the administration in a way that still gives a lot of wiggle room, doesn't give the people who are targets of these things a whole lot of options. Like even in the Habeas case, for instance, they ruled that they have to make the appeal in the jurisdiction where they've been taken. And the administration is intentionally taking them to facilities in jurisdictions that are less friendly to those kinds of appeals.
|
Sam:
[1:21:50]
| And they're not necessarily requiring like timeframes and things like that. So like there's the possibility that like, you know, someone gets picked up and yes, they have the right to do the petition, but it's not a requirement. So they have to know they have the right. They have to find a lawyer who will do it for them and have to do this quickly. And so there are a lot of wiggle room. There's lots of wiggle room. That's the right way to say it. So they're ruling against the administration, but they're trying. It seems very clear to me that Roberts and a couple other of the conservative Supreme Court justices are very much trying to avoid the possibility of actually getting to that confrontation where they flat out tell Donald Trump, no, you may not do this at all. undo what you have done. Because, of course, there's always the possibility that Donald Trump and his administration will just decide that now is the time to ignore it.
|
Sam:
[1:23:06]
| So they're trying in all of these rulings to provide enough leeway so that the process can be kicked a little further down the road so that more loopholes can be found so they can at least delay that final confrontation where they might push donald trump into a corner and on this one with the guy whose name i've already forgotten so you have it up kilmara garcia skipping the names in the middle for now.
|
Sam:
[1:23:49]
| It, you know, this is one case where it, it was nine to zero, but I've seen a lot of speculation that this was probably sort of a heavily negotiated nine to zero position. It was, it was released unsigned. So it's not actually like, you know, they have the option of signing them and producing. And as an unsigned, there's the possibility that nobody wanted to go on the record objecting, but they were willing to sort of go along with it. And so the speculation is that John Roberts basically negotiated a back and forth and was like, how can we soften this enough so that even Thomas and Alito are willing to let this go out? And so you ended up with what you had rather than something that could have been stronger. And again, all in terms of avoiding that final confrontation where you push the issue completely. Or, you know, avoiding at least delaying. It seems like eventually you're going to get there. Now, the other thing they could slap them down for, by the way, is the president's supposed to obey the lower courts, too.
|
Sam:
[1:25:10]
| If you have an issue, appeal it. But in the meantime, you're supposed to be obeying them. And in this particular example, I mean, one of the reasons, you know, the lawyers for Garcia have officially put in their notice that they want to have the judge ask DOJ why they shouldn't be held in contempt, because from everything we can see, they have been ignoring that judge's orders. Even in the time period before there was a stay or whatever, they're different terms at different stages of the process, and I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know them. But there was a period of time when the order was in effect before it was appealed, before it was stayed, where, you know, the judge had said, bring him back.
|
Sam:
[1:26:01]
| And, you know, one of the things SCOTUS could have done here or in some of these other cases is slapped the government for not obeying the lower courts while this was under appeal. And I think this applies to some of the other cases too. They've been, they've been sort of the DOJ's approach has been to sort of. Do things that could reasonably be interpreted as ignoring judicial orders from lower courts while pending appeal, even in the absence of stays and the equivalent. They argue that that has not happened, but there's a good argument that it has. The other example was the Venezuelans being sent to El Salvador.
|
Sam:
[1:26:56]
| Including some after the judge gave a verbal order saying, don't do this anymore. And if their planes in the air, turn them around. They did not turn around the planes in the air. And there was another plane that took off afterwards, but they say on that one, they had other reasons besides the order that was in question for what the judge had done. So that one they could go ahead and do. So there are arguments, there are arguments, but it clearly, you know, the approach is to at the very least go right up to the line of defying the order, but I think in many cases, arguably going over the line and just saying, well, we'll appeal it and basically ignoring it until it gets to SCOTUS. And now this is, we've got the first couple of things at SCOTUS and we'll see how they go. This Kilmer-Garcia case is the one that's furthest along and is most direct at this point.
|
Sam:
[1:28:09]
| And so far, you know, the order is to, you know, facilitate the return of this guy. So far, their official, like, every day at 5 p.m. notices have basically said, we can't. You know, they've said he is now in the custody of the El Salvadorans and there's nothing we can do.
|
Sam:
[1:28:31]
| Well, we're paying El Salvador to hold him. Have we asked them not to? Are they going to ask him not to? I suspect that this will, well, there are a couple possibilities. The president of El Salvador is actually coming to visit Donald Trump tomorrow, the next day, or early this week, early this coming week. He could just bring the guy on the plane with him. Say, here you go. Here's the guy. And done. Over. We move on. and we deal with a bunch of these other cases, but they get this one off the table. And then by the way, they could, they could still deport the guy. Apparently the, the order was just, he couldn't go to El Salvador. They could send him somewhere else. They, they could follow the actual processes to try to do this right and get this guy removed.
|
Sam:
[1:29:33]
| But for the moment, bring him back. So one possibility is that, you know, hey, they bring him back on this plane. Donald Trump says, hey, we did what the court says. Here's your guy, whatever. And then maybe they try again later. Or we go right into the defiance where we get these daily updates and every daily update is just we have no update. And then what does the court do? And then if the lower court does try to hold somebody in contempt or issue further orders or anything like that, you know they're going to be appealed again, and they'll make their way up the chain and eventually to SCOTUS again, and then SCOTUS will have to say something else. They can play this game a long time. And if the administration wants to play the game where they just keep running this up and down the court saying, I didn't understand what you said, or I couldn't do anything, And then it goes through the process. This cycle can continue a long time, especially if SCOTUS wants to play the game. If SCOTUS wants to play the game of giving them that wiggle room. Then, you know, that is what it is. Now, if SCOTUS at some point puts down their foot and gives an order with no wiggle room, then we'll see what happens. But it's still murkier.
|
Sam:
[1:31:02]
| Murkier is a good word. I was going to say muddier, murkier. I was starting to mix them up. Anyway, the situation is not 100% clear cut yet in sort of that fully legal way. I think in terms of, is the administration effectively saying we don't care what the courts say? Yes, because they are consistently doing things that previous court precedent has said is not allowed. They are consistently pushing to the edge of the interpretation of every order they get. Sometimes I think beyond, but that'll go through the legal process, you know, and basically.
|
Sam:
[1:31:50]
| Whether or not we sort of get that, there's that situation where there's absolutely no question. Supreme court said X, Trump did not X. I'm not sure, but I think effectively we're there anyway, because the end result of all this is the court said, first of all, the court said this guy should not be deported. They deported him anyway, or sorry, removed, not deported. They removed him anyway. Now, then they admitted it was a mistake. They shouldn't have done that. They didn't mean to do that. Then the court said, bring him back. They are not bringing him back so far, And there's no evidence that they've made any serious attempts. I mean, this is one of those situations where, I mean, come on. Donald Trump calls up the president of El Salvador and says, I want him back yesterday. And unless he's back safe and sound, X, Y, Z happens. Would the guy be given back? Yes. Unless he's already dead. But they say he's not. They say he's still alive. I don't know if you can hear my dog barking or not. If you can, I apologize. I'm not going to take the time to deal with it this time because I don't have the time.
|
Sam:
[1:33:12]
| The automatic editing tools will either remove it or it won't. That's all I can say. Anyway, the only other thing I want to say before wrapping this up is...
|
Sam:
[1:33:22]
| The mere fact that we are now talking about the scenarios where people are being quote-unquote removed without notice, without due process, even though the court has said we need to allow some due process, is incredibly disturbing and everyone should be worried about this. And yes, they're trying to say they're doing this on, you know, these are gang members. Well, apparently their evidence is really, really flimsy. And there are certainly people who have been picked up who do not appear to actually have been gang members. And then they're like, well, and they're all illegal, of course. They don't, they're all here when they shouldn't be. But the thing is, if you don't have sufficient processes and protections in place so that someone can dispute that and say, no, I'm not a gang member or no, I actually am legal or even no, you know, really, I'm a citizen. Unless you have those processes in place, it's guaranteed at some point, you know, and I think it's actually already happened. Innocent people are caught up and you don't have the processes to deal with that.
|
Sam:
[1:34:45]
| And if you don't have the processes to deal with that, what's to stop them from doing it intentionally? This guy was a mistake. What's to stop them the very next time from picking up an actual U.S. Citizen that they're upset about something. They don't want to bother taking them through the normal legal process. You know, arrest them, indict them, take them to court, have a trial, have them convicted, then decide on sentencing. You know, they don't want to do all that. They just want to get rid of somebody. So send them to the notorious prison in El Salvador that's known for human rights abuses. Awesome. Or even short of that, picking them up and putting them in the detention centers that they've got scattered throughout the country now.
|
Sam:
[1:35:42]
| Everything that weakens the processes that are in place to protect the innocent against these kinds of things endangers everybody and they try to position it again as like oh these are dangerous people whatever and so people don't have sympathy because oh they're dangerous people their gang members, let them, let them rot, let them be sent out. We, the key to all of this. And like, look, not everything is about process. Like there, you know, but process is actually important. Process is what protects everyone from arbitrary actions by the government. So you want those processes in place and yeah, it slows things down. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:36:37]
| But that's good. I don't know. Like, I think a lot of people are willing to say, well, you know, if, if the government says they're bad, then let's get rid of them. What's the big deal? They're bad.
|
Sam:
[1:36:51]
| The problem is trusting the, trusting like ICE or DHS or the FBI, any of these to make those determinations by themselves. You want checks and balances. You want to make them prove it. You know, and if they don't have to prove it, then it's not just going to be the bad people. It could be anybody. That's the whole point of all this stuff. And now, you know, we're having people disappeared. That is not something that should be happening in this country. But it is. And the question is not what did these people do and do they deserve it? It's just a fundamental, this should not be happening, period, end of story. If they actually have done a criminal act, then deal with that with the mechanisms that are set up for people who do criminal acts.
|
Sam:
[1:38:00]
| If they have indeed violated immigration laws and are here without the proper paperwork, then there are processes for that too that you should deal with and go through all the steps and make sure you've done it all properly, including all the mechanisms for them to appeal and take it up and down the chain and prove it or whatever. And even then, you do it humanely.
|
Sam:
[1:38:29]
| I would typically default to like letting most of these people stay, you know, unless there is a real problem. Like, you know, I, Yvonne, myself, our listener, Bruce, when he's co-hosted a few times have all said we're, we're essentially in favor of open borders. Like, you know, often like, you know, Democrats and liberals are put in a position of sort of deny. Oh no, no, no. We do believe in a secure border. Just not like, yeah. Okay. Secure border. Fine.
|
Sam:
[1:38:57]
| But fundamentally, the default should be freedom of movement. People should be able to go where they want to go, live where they want to live. There should be a really good reason to stop that. Not just because we've reached our quota from people from your country or we don't like brown people or whatever. No, no. But, but even assuming all the laws are in place, you need to like follow the processes that are defined and, and the processes are there for good reason. We shouldn't be getting rid of them. We need to have people have the ability to dispute whatever you're doing to them and have it go through an appropriate process. We should not just have people being picked up off the street and sent off to.
|
Sam:
[1:39:55]
| Notorious foreign prisons just no it's ridiculous it's horrible, it's good to see the courts pushing back on it some even if it's not quite as strong as it could be and we'll see how it continues to play out but it's a very dangerous process precedent. Because the more power you give the executive to do things on their own without judicial processes to check them, the more dangerous it is to everybody. Just as a universal principle, not just on immigration, but on everything. You know, the founders, when they set up checks and balances, that was actually kind of important. And I know it's frustrating to everybody that it slows things down when you're trying to accomplish X, Y, or Z, because there's so many choke points and so many places to sort of stop things and slow them down and whatever. And I'm sometimes frustrated by those too.
|
Sam:
[1:41:00]
| But there's good reason to have checks and balances and to not have sort of an ultimate concentration of power in the president to do whatever the hell they want. And the Trump administration's whole theory, this unitary executive theory, is all about giving the president close to unlimited power. And it's a really, really bad idea. even if it's a president you agree with let alone if it's a president you disagree with but you know i wouldn't want joe biden or obama to have that level of power either or harris if she had won no you just don't want that kind of accumulation of power so and so yeah that's happening okay with that let me wrap it up i've probably spent too much time anyway oh what do we say hopefully yvonne will be back next week go to curmudgeons-corner.com see all our stuff you can see all the ways to contact us a link to our youtube where the unedited video live streams of this podcast lives.
|
Sam:
[1:42:15]
| You can see our transcripts. You can see our archive of old shows. All of that fun and exciting stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff. I have still not put a link to TikTok. TikTok is still out there. You know, when I first started putting out the TikTok clips, They were routinely getting hundreds and hundreds of views. The last few weeks, they've gotten very few views. If they continue to get very few views because the TikTok algorithm is burying them or whatever, I might stop. I mean, I think they're kind of fun, so I've enjoyed doing it so far, but it also takes time. I had been specifically...
|
Sam:
[1:43:00]
| Cutting down on activities I do to get this podcast out after recording it. I am doing much less manual editing than I used to do. I'm basically just throwing it through some automated tools and saying, whatever it does, it does. That's fine. There are only a handful of things. I mean, the last time I mentioned Yvonne was like coughing all the time, like constantly, the automatic tools actually got rid of most of the coughs, not all of them, a couple snuck through, but I listened to that show or most of that show since I put it out. And I can tell you for sure, most of the coughs were taken out by the automated tools. So I'm like, good. That leaves one less thing I need to like note down and manually remove. I'll just let the automation handle it. And if it misses one or two every once in a while, whatever. Like, so I'd cut down a lot of the stuff I did. I used to do all kinds of manual stuff. I don't do that anymore. I'm just like, you know, the automation will cut out big gaps, the automation will cut out, you know, the filler words. I almost used some filler words, but then they would be cut out and the sentence wouldn't make sense.
|
Sam:
[1:44:12]
| You know, it does this stuff. And like, so I saved a lot of time, but then I added the time back by doing these stupid TikToks where, yes, the Riverside program gives us suggested TikToks, but I watch all its suggestions and pick the ones I like. And I've even started editing the ones I like a little bit because they often don't start or end at a place I like. So I end up extending them a little bit to make it go to a natural endpoint. And by the time I've done all that, I've taken a whole bunch of time generating the stupid TikToks. So yeah, so we'll see. We'll see. But they are kind of fun. I don't know. But if nobody's watching them, Then, oh, well, and also, even when people were watching them and commenting on them and stuff, I'm not convinced that they ended up like deciding to subscribe to the podcast. So what's the point then? You know? Anyway, you could all, I did not, I have not linked to the TikTok, but I do link to the Patreon where I, where you can give us money at various levels. We will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. I still owe several of you stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:45:30]
| Pete, Greg, and Ed, I still owe stuff to you. I have not forgotten. I have a note here. As I mentioned, the last of my three big deadlines for work is coming up in, oh God, 11 hours from the moment I'm recording this. So after that, hopefully things will relax a little bit and I'll be able to take care of that next weekend or something. I also have to do my taxes. Yeah, it's it's Sunday night. Taxes are due Tuesday. Haven't even started to look at it yet. My wife was going to start looking at it because I was busy, but I don't think she's had a chance either. So I guess that's what I'm doing Monday night. We shall see. Anyway, I've been busy. I apologize. I will eventually get to your stuff. Anyway, and at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, you will get invited to our Curmudgeons Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and various other folks are chatting throughout the entire week. It's a lot of fun. Please join us. You know, the more the merrier. We would love to have you. So, talk to us. So, a highlight from there.
|
Sam:
[1:46:49]
| Here's one that I shared and then Ivan found some more information on after the fact. There was a car in Indonesia who was following their GPS somewhere, and their GPS took them onto an unfinished bridge. Now, apparently there were, you know, cones and barriers and whatever, but the guy, like, I don't know, didn't think they were for him and went right past them.
|
Sam:
[1:47:22]
| Ended up flying off the edge of the unfinished bridge, landing on a roadway below, and was fine. His passenger said, they're never riding with that driver again. And apparently the driver was worried that his car was totaled. There's video of this. There's video of the car going off the bridge. If you Google driver shoots off unfinished bridge while following map on phone, You will probably find the video.
|
Sam:
[1:47:55]
| And yeah, Ed commented on the curmudgeons corner slack. Are you saying I need to not only watch the map, read my mail, text friends, and listen to the news? I also need to look out the window of the car to see where it is going. Just how multifunctional must I be? And I agree. Because I am one who would follow the stupid GPS. I have indeed in the past gotten in trouble by following the stupid GPS and getting stuck places. So I will specifically point you to one of them. If you go to abulsme.com, A-B-U-L-S-M-E.com, which is my blog, which I haven't posted to in years now, since 2022, when my dog Miley passed away, when I posted about that. That's the last post. But if instead you look at the navigation and go to random trips and then pick the trip for, which one was it?
|
Sam:
[1:49:00]
| 2002 Q2, Grantsville, Nevada, USA. You will find on day three of that trip. I followed the GPS onto a dirt road and ended up stuck in the mud in my rental vehicle and could not get it out.
|
Sam:
[1:49:26]
| I don't even know if I had a cell phone at that time, but I didn't have coverage in any case. It was out in the middle of nowhere. I pitched a tent and slept the night out there. It was very cold. I did not have the proper equipment for the temperature it was. Now, I did not die, obviously. I did not get significantly hurt or anything like that, but it was very cold. But I spent the night, and then in the morning, I walked back to the main road. That wasn't that far from the main road. a road that actually like had occasional rare traffic as opposed to this dirt road. I, I put like a shirt on a post to get, to maybe get people's attention and then just started walking to try to find somebody. And I eventually, you know, found, I forget if they found me. No i yes i found them i found i i found a a ranch and you know got up to talk to them and you know basically some cowboys you know actual like ranch hands on an actual like nevada ranch.
|
Sam:
[1:50:52]
| Rescued me. They brought their truck. They brought stuff so they could pull me out of the ditch. And they pulled the vehicle out of the ditch, or the washed-out part of Muddy Road, whatever is the right name for it, and rescued me. So anyway, there are pictures and the full story on the website that I just gave. So go check it out because I did not fly off a bridge, but I did get myself in trouble. And if the circumstances had been just a bit different, it might not have worked out as well as it did. There have been other cases of people who have gotten stuck on a back road in the middle of a snowstorm and people have died.
|
Sam:
[1:51:42]
| So I would like to think that now, more than 20 years after this particular adventure, I would be a bit more cautious.
|
Sam:
[1:51:52]
| Also with current technology if i was going to do a trip like that again, where i knew i was going to be going on back roads in the middle of nowhere you can well now now even the current iphones not my iphone 12 but the current iphones can do an emergency satellite call so i would definitely make sure i had equipment like that if not one of those other sort of dedicated emergency beacon things that you can use to call for help, if you are out of service and, you know, whatever, that also are satellite-based, you can guarantee I would have all that stuff if I was going to do an adventure like that again. Anyway. Or maybe I would be like, this road doesn't look safe. Maybe I shouldn't go there right now. Maybe, I don't know. You know, but fundamentally though, like that little adventure was what made the trip for me. Like the rest of that trip was fun too. But that one day getting stuck, that is the story I remember and the story I will tell. And like when I was doing those random trips back in the early 2000s, that was what was fun to me was the unplanned nature of them and the fact that I was making it up day by day and would have little adventures.
|
Sam:
[1:53:18]
| Although it is nice to have adventures that are, you know, safe. Yeah. Anyway, this is not the only one where I got into a little bit of trouble.
|
Sam:
[1:53:32]
| Hell, elsewhere on this exact same Nevada vacation. No, no, no, it was a different vacation. Yeah, there was the one to Mariposa, California, I think also included me getting in trouble almost running out of gas or something. Maybe that was Grantsville too. Actually, this is a theme. there there was one to lac lac menuane quebec anyway look there's several of these where i've gotten in trouble maybe it's good i stopped doing these at some point i would like to do them again the next one is supposed to be the next one that has been the next one for decades now is to chichoban in quintana rue mexico it'd be nice to do that again uh that's just north of the belize border but yeah like i got in trouble in a lot of these i had never like but like getting my car stuck almost running out of gas in a place that would have been like i would have been stranded if i had run out of gas you know getting yeah i think there was more than one time i got my car stuck. I had a car damaged in one of them, but they were fun.
|
Sam:
[1:54:54]
| Anyway, I've talked long enough. Thank you for joining us for yet another Curve of Scorn, or me. Like I said, hopefully Yvonne will be back next week and we'll be back to normal. And yeah, thank you. Have a good week. Stay safe. Have fun. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Goodbye.
|
Sam:
[1:55:47]
| Okay. For those of you who stay past the credits or those of you on the live stream, I'm going to hit stop now. I don't know why I leave these things in. Sometimes they're funny, but sometimes it's just like, okay, he's hitting stop. What's the point of leaving that in? But like you know it gives a little character i don't i don't know like usually i only keep the intros or outros well i started out only keeping the intros and outros if they were funny in some way now i sort of leave them in even if they're not in a lot of cases or at least some of them i i do cut some stuff out of them sometimes but anyway if you're still here why goodbye for real Well, Alex used to say that a lot on some of his videos on alexamzilla.com. Anyway, hitting stop now. Goodbye, folks.
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