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American Disruption

stratechery.com

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Re: American Disruption

#201

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

notatoad wrote: post #110
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your product is imported through China as the supplier, depending on how you structure your arrangement, it can be sourced from wherever you like, at least on paper.

again: that's fraud, it's illegal, and the consequences begin with getting your whole shipment seized. if you want to smuggle products illegally, that's on you. but the parent's assertion was that tariffs can be trivially bypassed by changing the country of origin. maybe we have different understandings of "trivial", but for me it being illegal makes it non-trivial.

It's fraud, and illegal, any way you cut it. It's trivial to commit fraud.

Re: American Disruption

#202

Post by pseudalopex »

9rx wrote: post #198
pseudalopex wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really stood out to me is that they say the factories will produce their own power on-site, with approvals for power plants happening "faster than we've ever had before", because the grid is "at risk of bombings". Where can I read about this?

Right here.

The article? It did not contain the quoted strings. Your comment? An anonymous HN comment is not a suitable source.

Re: American Disruption

#203

Post by gizzlon »

anon84873628 wrote: post #96
morsecodist wrote: post #13

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…

The confusing part is that the actions don't seem logically consistent with any of the possible goals. >The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance Ok, I buy that based on the stupid formula they showed. Is "not ruin everything else" not also part of his goals? Can you explain what I'm missing? I think people just keep underestimating exactly how stupid and ignorant Trump is. That's why nothing makes sense. He…

> Can you explain what I'm missing?

That goal 1 is to make Trump feel important and to prop up his ego. Goal 2 is probably to dismantle the rule of law and democracy in the US.

Re: American Disruption

#204

Post by gizzlon »

hnfong wrote: post #200
iteratethis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific in what you mean by that?

If I were a lazy incompetent politician I'd do the short sighted thing (kiss the Trump ass to placate my voters) and leave the long term thinking to whoever unfortunate enough to succeed my position.

> kiss the Trump ass to placate my voters

Why do you think that placates voters? Quite the opposite for most I believe..

Re: American Disruption

#205

Post by 9rx »

pseudalopex wrote: post #202
9rx wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right here.

The article? It did not contain the quoted strings. Your comment? An anonymous HN comment is not a suitable source.

Article? It came to me by way of a video of it being said (by Trump, if that wasn't clear). You're looking at the only article I know of.

If the content on HN isn't to you liking, that's fine, but, uh, why are you wasting your time reading stuff you don't like? You do realize that you don't have to be here, right?

Re: American Disruption

#207

Post by hnfong »

gizzlon wrote: post #204
hnfong wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were a lazy incompetent politician I'd do the short sighted thing (kiss the Trump ass to placate my voters) and leave the long term thinking to whoever unfortunate enough to succeed my position.

> kiss the Trump ass to placate my voters Why do you think that placates voters? Quite the opposite for most I believe..

Placates the "stonks go up crowd" at least.

Re: American Disruption

#208

Post by torginus »

pkkim wrote: post #196
torginus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated. In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and…

I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.

You probably know much better than I do, but that doesn't seem it would make it impossible to do sharding? You just pick a shard based on the current location of the driver/customer.

Re: American Disruption

#209

Post by pkkim »

torginus wrote: post #208
pkkim wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.

You probably know much better than I do, but that doesn't seem it would make it impossible to do sharding? You just pick a shard based on the current location of the driver/customer.

It has been a long time and my memory is based on hearing about it rather than using it, but I believe there was a notion of a rider's "home" datacenter (based on where they signed up from), and there was some complexity from propagating a rider's data from there to all other datacenters proactively, so that things would just work no matter where in the world they were. And I think the datacenter serving the area where a user was currently located could accept writes for that user, meaning that it would have to get written back to the home datacenter... you can see how this got complicated.

Re: American Disruption

#210

Post by esperent »

turnsout wrote: post #30
eduction wrote: post #14

This essay seems to be built on a flawed analogy. Clayton Christensen’s model of disruption (or models, counting his low end version) involves innovation by both the incumbent and disruptor. The disruptor’s innovation is immediately appealing to the low end of the market while the incumbent is focused on the high end. His example of Hong Kong factories manufacturing Fairchild chips doesn’t fit this template even thou…

Not to be a hater, but this is Ben Thomspon's style. Dial up the word count until people think your analysis is comprehensive, to disguise the fact that you're not saying anything substantive.

I think you're being unfair: try steelmanning. Assume that he is genuinely giving his best and most comprehensive analysis of the situation. It might be a flawed analysis, but at least give credit that it's a genuine effort.

The main flaw of the analysis I can see is that he is seeing patterns that aren't there - being used to analyzing complex international economics, and then being confronted with something as simple as this pump and dump scheme.

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