471–480 of 672 posts
Seattle ports are currently empty, will be interesting to see if this holds true . https://seemorerocks.substack.com/p/port-of-seattle-empty-ze...
(based on other replies I guess I'm not the only one in Pioneer Square lol)
The youtuber 'What's going on with shipping?' has a good description in; it includes pointers to loads of sites with the actual data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgcIuQ4X5k
Sal Mercogliano who runs "What's Going On with Shipping?" is one of the best informed commentators in the subjects of logistics and shipping. He's also a skilled presenter... enough so that I subscribe to his channel and I've not got any real special interest in subject (but I do recognize it's economic importance). Also, in a different comment, his work at Campbell is mentioned, but I think that leaves open why he h…
I wish more mainstream media did this.
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> gross dollars So, not inflation adjusted. Also doesn't capture the mix of what's being produced, i.e., a shift towards only manufacturing high value items versus being more broadly diversified and manufacturing things along a range of price points. In other words, a complete hollowing out of our manufacturing base. Your same link shows $1.38T in 1997. Which is $2.77T today. In other words, DOWN in inflation adjuste…
"Data are in current U.S. dollars." Plus, the growth has been large enough to outpace inflation except for the last couple years. The percent of GDP has been dropping but that is just that GDP has been growing faster. Which means that the US has been doing more valuable things than making stuff.
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It's an unpopular opinion because it's wrong. No single aspect of the economy exists in a vacuum. Tariffs and lower shipping volumes portend thousands of small businesses potentially going under, translating to many more thousands of people losing their jobs and incomes. This has many unforeseen knock-on effects in declining economic activity.
Are we really subscribing to Reaganistic trickle-down economic theory now? How sure are we that those imports aren't mostly just lining the pockets of the rich? We're measuring the wrong things. We need to measure cost of living instead of how empty or full a Port is. We don't know if these two things are correlated yet.
Trickle-down is the idea that giving tax breaks or benefits to the wealthy or big corporations will eventually benefit everyone else through increased investment or job creation. What I’m talking about here is the basic flow of goods and services in an economy—when that gets disrupted, the effects hit workers and consumers directly, not eventually or indirectly.
When imports slow down, businesses have fewer goods to sell or face higher input costs. That leads to higher prices for consumers and layoffs for workers. It doesn’t just impact “the rich.”
This isn’t about trickle-down economics; it’s about how supply chains work. The impact of these tariffs will show up in lost jobs, higher prices, and reduced access to everyday goods. Those are real effects for regular people, not just abstract economic concerns.
Reduced shipping volumes immediately mean less work for truckers—thousands of people taking a hit to their income right off the bat, which in turns leads to less economic activity. This is exactly what people mean when they say no part of the economy exists in a vacuum. It’s all connected.
This could get really ugly when the shelves start going empty. This may make the toilet paper incident seem quaint in comparison.
It's a good thing the United States doesn't depend on China for toilet paper, then. > The United States primarily sources its toilet paper domestically, with about 90% being manufactured within the country.However, a significant portion of imports come from Canada and Mexico. In fact, the United States does not depend on China for any essential consumer goods from what I can find.
American parents would probably put car seats and strollers in that bucket.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/strollers-car-seats-...
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I wonder if he wants to work in a shoe factory?
The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing. Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
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Maybe I am being foolishly optimistic, the section in the video (~ 4:50) where it is mentioned that some giant seed corporation is staying the course betting that this thing will blow over in a quarter or so actually gives me some hope ?
... what hope exactly. The republicans in congress are so lost in the sauce that they won't challenge the great orange hope in the quarter. The soonest I think we can see anyone fighting back, politically, won't happen until the midterms AT BEST. This is assuming that the republicans/trump don't come up with some issue that they can swing the midterms on and/or don't gut the electoral system to the point that they ca…
It takes 20 of 53 Republican senators for impeachment. That's a high bar, but Nixon was close when he resigned.
Useful reading: "How the Good Guys Finally Won" (1975), by Jimmy Breslin. This covers how Nixon and Agnew were ejected. The Internet Archive has full text.[1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/howgoodguysfinal00bres/page/n9/m...
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Retailers and middlemen typically don't like exposing how much -they- paid for an item. Exposing tariffs would show how much things are marked up from time of landing to reaching the shelves.
Varies based on market. Where middle men actually do things and add lots of value they don't generally care. When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is…
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>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 conse…
He isn't actually, if anything he is an empty suit that yells whatever the last guy in the room told him and that guy tends to be the most extreme dumbass on whatever topic it was.
So when you hear him yell about tarrifs, you are hearing him yell whatever peter navaro last told him (plus or minus trumps misunderstanding of the situation, see also trump screaming at the reporter yesterday about how the maryland guy in the el salvadorian prison has literal MS13 tattooed on his knuckles, where it's very clear that the picture he saw had those letters photoshopped onto the photo)
When you hear him yell about immigration/the border/racistbullshit, he's just yelling whatever stephen miller yelled at him.
He is just the avatar for whatever sychophant that is currently in his good graces (ie whoever bribed him or sucked his dick last (see also laura loomer))
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The smart ones will head to the hardware store instead of rushing to the paper: bidet-washing-tube will makes you free of toilet paper for life. Cost: 10-30$ Installation: 20min with basic tools on your existing toilet. Usage: tons and tons of online tutorials because 1/3 of the world already use that daily. But you can also figure it out yourself easely, it’s way easier than managing node_modules on a shared project…
As someone who has used real bidets, I've tried bidet attachments - they suck. I'm going to remain with my traditional toilet until I move into my "forever home" at which point I will install bidets.
Should have gotten three.