341–350 of 672 posts
Gamers Nexus essentially produced a 3-hr doc on how changing tariffs affect the US computer industry: "The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation" https://youtu.be/1W_mSOS1Qts?si=pBVt65SMqb1p-Zte . Best part is having a product manager show a spreadsheet of costs and margins and explain in real terms ($$$) what tariffs do to their business.
Seeds sourced from China - which a lot are - have skyrocketed in price.
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Everyone here is worried about it from the American side, but China has motivation to settle this too, so they can continue to sell their enshitified plastic crap. It's not like most other wealthy countries want it, at least not any more than they are already buying.
China is holding pretty much all the cards here. First, it has a command economy. It's much more equipped to handle this in keeping factories afloat and people employed and housed. Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam) or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tari…
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No, we really don’t. We don’t need a bot bringing marginally positive value for a single person and shitting the bed, cluttering everything with stupid useless noise and bringing negative value for everyone else. "Be more like Reddit" is really not something HN should aspire to. If you like Reddit, it’s ok to be both there and here.
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Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk. And our inability to make those advanced electronics is a specific problem I called out. With respect to the “man up” piece of it - well if you can’t go without TikTok and Temu junk you have a big problem. Both items: inability to manufacture advanced electronics, and inability to not go without cheap junk are separate but related problems. Whi…
>Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk. And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no…
Sure people can be worried. In fact, it's America's great national pastime. But I don't think I made the claim that the Trump administration is going about the decoupling with China in the best possible way, only that the goal is one that's worthwhile precisely because the pain you are describing.
No longer importing plastic junk, again this is separate from manufacturing advanced electronics which are also an important concern, and the effects of which are so devastating that we will trigger as you put it a recession, mass economic hardship, and will cost many people their jobs and savings, seems to place our country in an intolerable situation and a reliance on such imports, which if you read the news from the Right People, China seems to experience no economic hardship from such a decoupling meaning we are simply at the mercy of their benevolence. That's a scary thought, and it seems to me we're just going to experience this pain either way, we may as well do it on our terms, generally speaking.
With respect to TikTok you can just delete it. There's no pain experienced there. I'm close-minded on that specific issue. Social media in general is bad anyway, TikTok is just currently the worst and one we can most easily ban today.
The inability to manufacture advanced electronics at scale in the United States is a self-evident problem. I personally don't care about the arguments suggesting why such things can't be built here, because those just further illustrate the problem.
> Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong"
Well I don't really care much about this tough guy stuff you are talking about, but as an aside it is rather important politically, especially when we're dealing with a despotic regime in China that must save face, both culturally and by virtue of dictatorship. I mostly just care about policy and the results of the policy.
When I say Trump is weak, I don't mean he is weak in the sense of being a macho guy - frankly there's nothing less I care about in the world aside from TikTok videos - what I mean is he doesn't have the stomach to go through with the plan because of the potential economic repercussions in the short and medium term. In fact, his inability to be stalwart on this issue is precisely the greatest problem now in our foreign policy agenda (or what remains of it) because now all we've done is screwed a bunch of things up and pissed off the allies we need to actually achieve the goal. The worst of all worlds, so to speak.
> it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.
The endeavor has merits and likely those are well worth pursuing. I wouldn't disagree that the way in which we are going about things is not the best way, and I think I mentioned that before. I preferred the Biden administration's approach in general, though I don't think they acted with enough urgency.
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People seem to think, including very disturbingly our secretary of the Treasury, the companies maintain huge warehouses of back stock. That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software. If I recall correctly, Walmart was the innovator in this space in one of their key ways to gain economic advantage over other retailers was low back stock demand tr…
Toyota is famous for inventing Just-in-Time production and logistics system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
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China is holding pretty much all the cards here. First, it has a command economy. It's much more equipped to handle this in keeping factories afloat and people employed and housed. Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam) or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tari…
China is selling goods to the US because it's good for China. China not selling goods to the US is, therefore, bad for China. China doesn't care about how it affects the US but it does effect them negatively. They are "holding all the cards" except the one that says "The US must buy things from China" which is the one they care about. > Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continu…
In the case of a hypothetical trade embargo or at least punitive tariffs, who would you rather be: the buyer of insulin or the seller of insulin? The seller can be propped up by the government or loans. The buyer? Well, they need insulin. There's a natural imbalance here.
Us not buying Chinese goods has a ton of downstream effects like what if you need parts to repair trucks and those trucks are then out of service so can't haul stuff around?
> China isn't immune to 15% of their economy disappearing.
It won't disappear. It'll diminish. It'll get diverted through third countries. In some cases, the tariffs will be paid. China will have a reduction in exports. The US will have increased inflation, shortages and supply chain issues.
> That's not relevant at all.
It's 100% relevant. Everything is sentiment based. If the world is on China's side, then they'll look the other way when China buys oil and gas from sanctioned countries, for example.
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This is pretty useful, actually, downvoters. My friends and I were discussing this video yesterday and I was pretty irritated that it took 10 whole minutes to debunk the social media hyperbole. That could have easily been a blog post that I could have skimmed in 1 minute. It's a textbook case of why I tend to dislike video as a format.
An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged. An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community. HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation th…
A user shared a link. Another user provided a summary of that link. I don’t need the second user to provide his own unique take on the link.
> An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run.
You could make the same argument about throwing paywalled links into the Wayback Machine. It does not add a unique perspective to the discussion and anyone could do it themselves, but those links are almost always at the top of the thread.
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Anything low cost that requires a significant amount of manual labor to assemble. So clothes, toys, accessories, etc.
There's going to be a lot of that turning up from other cheap countries like Vietnam, either made there of just stuff from China rebranded. I can see more problems with high tech stuff from China like the rare earths.
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An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged. An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community. HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation th…
I disagree: I think it's a decent summary and it's convenient to be able to read it inline with the rest of the discussion without having to go fiddle with some LLM. And I don't think everyone has an LLM just sitting around that can summarize a video from a link. Having wasted 10 minutes of my life watching the video, it's also an accurate summary - "no, shipping has not stopped completely". I would not be happy if t…
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I disagree: I think it's a decent summary and it's convenient to be able to read it inline with the rest of the discussion without having to go fiddle with some LLM. And I don't think everyone has an LLM just sitting around that can summarize a video from a link. Having wasted 10 minutes of my life watching the video, it's also an accurate summary - "no, shipping has not stopped completely". I would not be happy if t…
Better yet, let’s just add LLM summaries of all articles and links on Hacker News directly. Now I never have to read the linked article.
I think you’re saying this jokingly but it would be an improvement. Most people don’t read the article. This is partially laziness but also has to do with consistency: I know what a Hacker News thread will look like and how it will perform whenever I open one, whereas a lot of the submissions are from sites that are borderline unusable without an adblocker. Posting the full article in the thread would be a vast improvement, but I can’t imagine it would be feasible owing to copyright issues.