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Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

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Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#391
post #301

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.

The retailers need to start showing tariff charge as separate line. People have the right to to see what they voted for. Yesterday Trump frantically called Bezos when Bezos threatened to do it, and Bezos seems to have backed up (probably got some concession for that).

Edit: it is also can be treated as a consumer right to know, by analogy with food labeling), what are the major components of the price they are paying, and thus allowing for informed choice.

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We all have LLMs available we can feed things through of we want a machine summary and don't want to read ourselves, please don't choke HN with machine generated content.

Speak for yourself. I have no such llm as easily accessible as this comment was.

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of that impact will be positive, as de minimis shipments are a major route for importing drugs and their precursors into the US: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/buyer-beware-bad-actors-exploi...

And strip searching everyone who enters a school building would have a positive impact on the rate of school shootings. Over-enforcement creates its own major issues. The cure is worse than the disease.

We don't have 120,000 school shooting deaths a year, but we do have that many overdose fatalities. I'd say the cure is just fine in this case.

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only trend is the amount of labor in manufacturing. the US produces just as much or more than any other year. However we do it on far less labor.

Not sure how this comforts anyone. We need labor, there aren't enough spa management and pet groomer positions to build an economy upon. What good does it do for anyone that we manufacture more, if there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around to support a broad consumer base for those same products you say are being manufactured without (much) labor? Why would any foreign nation even want to manufacture goods to…

> We need labor, there aren't enough spa management and pet groomer positions to build an economy upon.

Is it your impression that spa management and pet care are the only working-class service jobs available?

Most of the trades are categorized as service professions in the statistics. So is construction.

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#395

I'm moving internationally (from China to EU) and the quote is 2.5-3x higher than 3 months ago. Sea freight seems to be inspected at a much higher rate, and they don't recommend it, and air freight is more expensive because of much lower volume overall. Not a good time to ship your stuff. And that's when you think "I'm far away from the US and the madness does not concern me"...

>And that's when you think "I'm far away from the US and the madness does not concern me"

But why would you ever think that?

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#396
post #110

There are two things I want people to remember: 1. The administration has absolutely no idea what they're doing. Don't be tempted to think this is part of some grand plan. Don't believe any narrative about how short-term pain was intentional. There's borderline or actual panic in the administration, going so far as to sideline Peter Navarro to get Trump to back down [1]; and 2. All of this is happening so the wealthi…

>The administration has absolutely no idea what they're doing. In general, I agree with your sentiment, but there are competent people in the administration. However, all of them are paralyzed because Trump can alter any plan or policy at a whim, and he insists being involved in everything. And you can see that in the interviews Bessent or even Lutnick give - where they hedge everything because they know it could cha…

Trump is the culmination of the 50+ year Republican project, a project intentionally designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. He's not an anomaly. He's the inevitable end product of decades of consistent insitutional destruction and corruption.

I agree that Trump is delusional about tafiffs but think abou tit: income tax is pretty much the only progressive tax left. There's serious momentum in the conservative movement to get rid of it for that reason: it's further wealth transfer to the ultra-wealthy.

It sounds like you're not seeing the bigger picture here: the wealthy view themselves as inherently better. In tech circles (including Elon and Thiel) transhumanism is popular.

What is transhumanism ultimately? it's eugenics. It's why these weirdos fill the world with their IVR fetishes, spreading their "superior" genes. It's co-opted the conservative movement, which itself is rooted in eugenics (ie white supremacy).

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#397

I was going to purchase a shipping container for my property in the US a few days ago, but the company I was talking with has raised their prices 70% over the quote I got 2-3 weeks prior.

Wouldn't there be an excess of containers?

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#398
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst case all this triggers a recession. Recession is probably the best case scenario. If only we get through this with just a recession! The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades. Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading. Russia shows what happens when you economically isolate a country with sa…

That isn't the lesson from Russia invading Ukraine. The lesson from Russia invading Ukraine is that the presence of authoritarians anywhere is a threat to democracies everywhere. The kind of people who crush freedom aren't content to just do so within their own borders and will eventually do so to others around them. As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.

It's also just not the general lesson from history either. Plus you have to recall that in many cases war is about resource acquisition as much as anything else, and sometimes wars are popularized as ideological crusades when they are masquerading as resource disputes in order to motivate a populace.

Something that has become apparent to me is that in our years of somewhat peaceful economic growth, we seem to have forgotten that there are haves and have-nots and that the economic system that was created to hopefully replace war with peaceful competition only works so much as the large powers decide that it works well enough. Those who are have-nots tend to not have the proportional military leverage to do something about their position.

Our rejection of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism in favor of a "rules based international order" has blinded us a bit through abstraction and legalese to the reality of how the world works and the limits of resource availability given the size of the planet and the population numbers.

> As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.

I used to think this as well, but I recently re-read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address [1] and it aided me in coming to the conclusion that such a moral crusade is neither wise, nor moral, and least of all practical.

There will always be some nations that have governments, authoritarian in our eyes or otherwise, that we disagree with from a political perspective. But we simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to do something about all of them, and even as we try to do something about one or more of them we wind up with others popping up. Instead we should seek to treat fairly where possible, and treat not at all where necessary due to immoral behavior and stop trying to control the entire world. That doesn't mean we should never intervene or do anything, as in the case of Nazi Germany or perhaps other atrocities, but a national policy of extinguishing authoritarians seems to me to be one that isn't in our best interest.

[1] https://www.georgewashington.org/farewell-address.jsp

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empty shelves are just one of the symptoms. The real pain will come from companies having to deal with increased taxes (that's what tariffs are) for Chinese components, decreased exports (counter tariffs, anti US sentiments), etc. and then their follow up to that would be using tools like layoffs, price increases, etc. Some of those companies might have to close doors and go bankrupt. If that happens a lot you get th…

> There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer. That's a stick that can be (and probably already is) wielded that might produce results soonish. I…

Dictionary definition of oligarchy: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

If you're "kissing the ring", you're not in control. The people with the ring are.

To spell it out, the US is not governed by a billionaire oligarchy.

Re: Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And strip searching everyone who enters a school building would have a positive impact on the rate of school shootings. Over-enforcement creates its own major issues. The cure is worse than the disease.

We don't have 120,000 school shooting deaths a year, but we do have that many overdose fatalities. I'd say the cure is just fine in this case.

If searching every single de minimis package would actually save 120,000 lives a year, I might even agree with you. But it would not. It would accomplish next to nothing. To say nothing of the fact that fentanyl is not just a supply issue, the supply would just shift to other routes of ingress.
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