511–520 of 672 posts
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
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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…
I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best. How do we compare the pain (and yes, some destruction) that we have to endure today against the devastation that is clear…
It's my genuine belief that the vast majority of intellectual property ownership is purely to draw a moat around a country's oligarchs. Copyright does not protect creators and patents do not protect inventors[0].
Trump's thinking is:
- America used to have lots of tariffs in the 70s, and lots of jobs in the 70s,
- But we got rid of the tariffs and the jobs moved,
- So if I put the tariffs back the jobs will come back!
Problem is, we're not in the same market we were in the 70s, and all those tariffs risk turning us into Brazil. More specifically the reason why the intellectual property system we have is fucked is because it's designed to let corporations move jobs to foreign countries while still maintaining maximum control over the end result. It's designed to facilitate neocolonialism.
The "open and balanced" global market you're decrying was, until recently, heavily tilted to favor American ownership over everything. China and Mexico are there to castrate the unions: if you don't work for peanuts, we move the work to another country that will, and we don't worry about any of the business risk that entails because WIPO and Berne ensure none of the goods the other country makes get to compete with us unless we put our stamp on it.
You know what would really break this system? If China, Canada, or some other country were to junk WIPO and DMCA 1201 and start up a national lab to develop and distribute jailbreaks for shitty disposable American tech. Practically speaking, America can't stop knowledge from entering the country, and it would spur a huge explosion of new American businesses to fix the shit our own oligarchs broke.
In a world where you can't rely on intellectual property bullshit, outsourcing becomes a crapshoot, and it makes a lot more sense to pay workers what they're worth and focus on automation instead.
[0] Yes, they can and have been used by creators in the past, but that's not what the system does today.
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He's not wrong. It is technically possible. However, transforming the US into a command economy may not be the best thing to do.
We can build a factory in a month, including permitting, acquiring the land, planning the building and constucting it, as well as procuring or building the machinery and setting it up in the factory, programming it and hiring and training the workforce during high employment? That's very impressive!
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> impeachment and removal seems unachievable. 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...
The Republicans are the party of Trump. You're going to get nowhere near 20 out of 53 to convict. They will not let him get thrown out of office. If they didn't vote for impeachment in the two times he was impeached in his first term, and if they supported him after January 6th then they're not going to vote for impeachment now. The Republicans under Nixon were the same party in name only, and they did not have the s…
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I wouldn’t say extremely critical of Trump. He brings half of it on himself. Simply reporting what he says and does that makes him look incompetent is not being particularly critical.
The media has been extremely critical of Trump. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. But impossible to deny the bias.
It’s undeserved praise vs undeserved damnation that signifies a non neutral position.
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Whatever your hopes and dreams around domestic manufacturing, blanket tariffs capriciously imposed at random are unlikely to get any dream closer to reality, except perhaps the dream of total devastation of all manufacturing. Let's look at what an actual domestic manufacturer has to say about tariffs[1]? Oh, looks bad! Turns out, manufacturers import stuff, add value to it, and sell it for more money! Hopefully we'll…
While there are more peaceful ways of rebalancing trade, unilateral tariffs would be able to rebalance things on the long term. The problem is that alot of people in HN think in terms in export-driven economy, when in reality the majority of USA's economy is consumption, it's the largest consumer in the world. Loosing access to foreign markets dosen't mean as much to USA as it does to the rest of the world loosing ac…
If you read that article about Haas automation, they say that they import cast iron and PCBs, presumably they import some chips and use some domestic chips, they put these all together and sell machine tools (big machines used to make machines, the exact sort of thing that trump et all are banging on about needing to be made in the usa, which last I checked, Oxnard california counts as "USA").
Nobody in the USA makes cast iron in the volume needed by haas; nobody in the USA makes PCBs at the price point needed by haas. Nobody's going to be able to start domestic production of either now, because they'd need to import all the materials from elsewhere to make the cast iron foundry, and nobody's going to take the chance that their multi million dollar investment isn't going to be ruined by trump changing his mind in a month.
So whatever you think you're arguing for, the world's way more complex than you think it is. And this execution of whatever the plans are, has been so far beyond inept as to land in a different scale altogether.
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> At least, I imagine the CEOs of GM, Ford, Boeing, etc. might have a thing or two to say about seeing China disappear as a market where they can do business to sell stuff.... They largely weren't doing this anyway due to Chinese economic policy. For example: > Ford's market share in China has declined significantly.In 2024, Ford's market share was 1.6%, down from a peak of 4.7% in 2015. Over the past three years, Fo…
Ford is a bad example because the Chinese never really liked American cars. Before the EV boom they preferred BBA (Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi). Right now it's homegrown brands. Pharmaceuticals would be a slightly better example.
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> impeachment and removal seems unachievable. 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...
The Republicans are the party of Trump. You're going to get nowhere near 20 out of 53 to convict. They will not let him get thrown out of office. If they didn't vote for impeachment in the two times he was impeached in his first term, and if they supported him after January 6th then they're not going to vote for impeachment now. The Republicans under Nixon were the same party in name only, and they did not have the s…
The real test will be the summer and fall as natural disasters and the accumulation of cuts and the trade war all converge into a crescendo of negativity.
Not too long ago I tried to raise money for a PCB assembly plant in the US, but couldn't raise the funding and got a "real job". Posts like these really make me wish I didn't give up lol
An on shore competitor to JLCPCB would be amazing. I assume most of the work is automated as well.