JoeEvans

I think that Trump can only conceive of business transactions as having winners and losers. He's drawn to tariffs because they make he feel like a winner, doing damage to his opponents and forcing them to submit to his will. But in reality business transactions don't work like that. Every purchase leaves both parties better off - the buyer valued the goods more highly than the money, and the seller valued the money more highly than the goods. Business transactions are therefore collaborative and mutually beneficial, and when you restrict the options for such collaborations, both sides are left worse off. Tariffs damage both countries involved. But Trump can't see that because he has no conception of collaboration, cooperation and mutual respect.

Tesla's price/earnings ratio for forecast sales for 2026 is still 75 or so; a good P/E ratio is normally thought to be maybe 25. So Tesla is still valued three times higher than is justified by forecast sales. I can only assume that stock is bought and held by true believers who don't base investment (or voting) decisions on nasty facts.

The other financial factor that can't be ignored in US politics is cryptocurrencies. The amount of money now invested in crypto is insane, and around 28% of US adults have some crypto investments. For a lot of people it's tied in to a whole worldview - libertarian, techno-utopian, anti-government, and pro-Trump largely because they think he's pro-crypto. There are some wild views out there - a lot of people apparently believe that in due course Bitcoin will become the primary global currency, with a single Bitcoin worth a billion or more. But these are wildly unreliable investments with zero real value - the biggest market bubble in history - and it's highly likely that in due course a lot of people will lose a lot of money. I think that crypto and MAGA are deeply intertwined, not just practically but psychologically - all about belief in something utterly unsupported by reality. I think both bubbles will eventually burst together in a very messy way.

Tesla's share price is utterly insane in terms of price to earnings ratio. It seems to be based on the belief that in due course Tesla will be the leading global car manufacturer and the leading global supplier in a huge autonomous vehicle industry that doesn't yet exist. Meanwhile Musk has gone full Ratner and deliberately alienated the people most likely to but electric cars, ie people vaguely centre or left of centre.

I guess also international trade rules are very relevant to discussions about bass guitars, which are an international product with a lot of US customers and manufacturers.

A DPA would be a great choice anyway, whether or not it was used on that bass, although it isn't a cheap option.

Since about 50% of them are root notes, and 25% are fifths, you can mix up the order a fair bit without it changing much ..

On the plus side, you get the pleasure of being in a band, but you have to play way less notes than anyone else.

Worth bearing in mind that Russia is struggling and failing to invade Ukraine while just fighting the Ukrainians. They are worlds away from being able to roll on across Eastern Europe. The problem is not whether Russia can be defeated, it's whether it can be done gently enough that Putin doesn't lose the plot and do something really stupid.

I gather that Chinese students in particular have been very put off by Trump and that in some academic areas (eg engineering), UK institutions are expecting a significant upturn in enrollments.

I think the thing with low action is that it goes with softer playing - you can't play as hard with very low action, and playing harder definitely changes your tone.

If I was selling I would happily do the following to reassure a buyer that a bank transfer would be ok: - Video call showing the bass, and invite the buyer to record the call. - Hold up my driving licence during the call (with the licence number covered to be on the safe side) and then send a scan of the licence (again with the number redacted). - Step out onto the street during the call to show that my house number and street name were the same as on the licence - Send a link to my employer's website, where there's a photo of me on the 'Our team' page. But the seller takes a risk as well in sending a bass, because there's always the possibility of some scam in which the buyer claims it never arrived. So I'd ask for the same evidence from them. I think if you have a phone call or video call with a seller or buyer and talk this kind of stuff through, you'll quickly get a sense of whether there's the right level of trust in place.

It's kind of a leap of faith, I've done it but it made me a bit nervous. Might be worth discussing acceptable ways to make it a bit safer, eg the seller could send some evidence of who they are, address etc?

The great thing about playing bass, especially with a darker, softer tone, is that very often playing the exact right note isn't critical. You have to get the rhythm right, but a different note is often fine. I once played a couple of bars a semitone up, noticed and shifted down for the next bar, and it actually sounded pretty good in context, but when I mentioned it afterwards, nobody else in the band had noticed.

I think that in any market you tend to get sellers offering a spread of prices to try and work out what the market will bear, but the items that are priced too high don't sell, so you notice them, whereas the bargains get snapped up pretty quick, often before they even reach a public platform.

I think the right hand fingers do a lot - hard or soft skin on fingertips, hard or soft plucking, on the neck, by the bridge or in the middle, effective muting to reduce boomy rumble, etc.

The point is simply that that's where the name comes from. A value-added tax is charged on the value generated or added to a product as it passes through a company. They don't have to do anything to it, just increase the price. If there's no price increase, net VAT is zero; if it loses value, the company gets a net rebate.

Value added tax is a tax on the value added by a company. So if a retailer buys at £5 per item and sells at £10, they have added £5 to the value of the item. It makes no difference whether they processed it in some way or just took it out of the wholesaler's box, value was added during their ownership.

Tariffs do push up prices of imported goods, so in that sense US consumers will have to pay, but it's true that the tariff component of the price rise goes to the US government, and might therefore benefit the US public. However, tariffs also increase demand for domestically-produced goods, which are not subject to the tariff; this pushes up the prices of those goods. And retailers tend to maintain their profit margins as cost prices go up. So if US and EU widgets both cost $10 retail in the US, the retailer having paid $5 for each, with a 20% import tariff you would tend to see US widgets retailing at $12 ($5+20% =$6 cost price, then $6x2=$12 retail price) and EU widgets selling for maybe $11, and meanwhile only $1 from the US widgets is going to the US government. So they have an overall inflationary effect above and beyond the tax raised, which the US public won't like at all, given that inflation was a big issue in the presidential campaign. At some point the MAGA / Musk / crypto bubble is going to burst. It's already at insane levels - Tesla stock is priced at maybe five or ten times what any rational analysis would expect, and the 'memecoin' cryptocurrencies are probably the most unhinged market bubble since the South Sea Company. There's a software company called MicroStrategy that now just buys Bitcoin as it's business model, and its shares are somehow worth vastly more than the actual value of the Bitcoins it owns, the difference being made up with pure unicorn farts. Politics and investing are now deeply intertwined, thanks to the many millions of individual MAGA-supporting investors in the US who are heavily exposed in some very risky ways. Interesting times ahead...

Personally I'm seeing the Trump presidency as a slow-motion train wreck driven by ego, vanity, greed, elective ignorance and deep, deep stupidity. To take just one strand of the story, the appointment of Kennedy, a deluded shyster, to the health post, is going to end very badly. Actual reality still exists, and fantasy and delusion have never been a match for it in the long term. Likewise with tariffs, the US consumers will be paying the bill. They're going to harm other countries as well, but that won't be much consolation.

10,000 troops is pure theatre. Taking into account catering teams, admin staff, logistics people etc that will be maybe 5,000 active soldiers; taking into account shift patterns, leave rotations etc that might be 800 out on patrol at anyone time. 130-odd six-man patrols on a 2,000 mile border. And since when did local border patrols have any impact whatsoever on the supply of drugs? You can get drugs in prisons! Drug problems are demand-led, and opiate addictions are about pain, trauma and hopelessness. Until the US has less of those, they will continue to have epidemics of opiate addiction.

I think Trump is doing a Truss here - a policy move based on the wilfully ignorant application of dogmatic belief, that will crash the US economy and his own political support.

Which basses have you liked the most of the ones you've owned? Top three?

If you buy a decent secondhand fretless and don't enjoy playing it you can sell it for what you paid for it, so the experience will be more or less free. What's not to like about that?