491–500 of 610 posts
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Except they have dormitories with safety nets in India and Vietnam too. The riot in India was because they weren't getting paid, not because of the work conditions.
Gosh, they were not getting paid despite those conditions? That’s batshit crazy.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international... Restored already. It's all about chaos.
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Great for who's economic growth? As in, when staring at the graph of GDP vs wages plotted over the last 50 years, that big-ass pie slice that everyone's excited about? That appears to have ended up in roughly 800 people's pockets. Meanwhile even mention domestic manufacturing in the country that basically invented consumer electronics and kazoo music starts playing in the background. grits teeth We knew NAFTA was bul…
For humanity? It is the same reason most of us don't grow our food or make our shoes. Specialization makes a lot of sense. Western tech wouldn't have been able to grow as fast if electronics manufacturing were not concentrated in China. It is (was?) a win-win.
This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes. I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages…
Oops. But at least big shareholders made a lot of money, and GDP is up!!
(I don't think most people realize how easy it is for China to f*k with the US for this very reason. Yeah, they'd also be shooting themselves in the foot, but they're a country that might be willing to do that if they had to, because they don't have elections to worry about.)
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Only if "utterly fucked" somehow means you can still pay a bit more to DHL and get packages even faster than USPS. Your fast prototypes coming by air freight likely aren't routed through USPS at all unless it's the last leg of a consolidated shipment that's broken apart once it reaches the US. Those would be using some other carrier to get them from China to the US and then USPS only inside the US. USPS all the way f…
> Paying ~$30 for express shipping through DHL (plus whatever the new tariffs end up being) will still get you those parts in 3-5 days to most major shipping hubs in the US, your suppliers will just need to start filing the export paperwork correctly. In my european experience, DHL is anything but fast when customs are involved. And I doubt they have the manpower to handle it for the new US rules. > These changes wil…
This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes. I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages…
Big US corps moved manufacturing to China to save money and destroyed the supply chains that used to exist in the US. Oops. But at least big shareholders made a lot of money, and GDP is up!! (I don't think most people realize how easy it is for China to f*k with the US for this very reason. Yeah, they'd also be shooting themselves in the foot, but they're a country that might be willing to do that if they had to, bec…
People demand cheap shit, and riot over expensive stuff. Hell Trump is arguably in power because people couldn't handle prices increasing since 2020 (despite wages increasing too).
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It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point. It started in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed it from a government department to an independent government entity that was expected to fund its operations entirely through its own revenue. Then in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the PAEA wh…
USPS does more or less teeter on the edge of solvent and sustainable depending on how you measure and when you measure. All things considered, I think that's pretty damn good. Pretty much no other government service can claim that. I think the retiree funding requirement is/was dumb and an unnecessary handicap but the way USPS runs itself should be a model for other government services. The only reason we don't look…
Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.
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Cheaper and better. This country is so painfully stupid. Now I have to pay 2x as much for inferior products, if not the same exact stuff imported by an American company. This alone is probably going to cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year. We literally don't make much most of this stuff in the US. For example I just ordered a guitar bag, 15$ direct from China. The same exact bag, made in the same exact factory is go…
>15$ direct from China. The same exact bag, made in the same exact factory is going to be 40$ on Amazon. Do you have examples of this? It hasn't been the case for me. Usually the prices are similar and I tend to find that Amazon is slightly cheaper.
AliExpress , 17$( see coupons below). https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806198514308.html
Plus AliExpress tends to offer coupons.
So let's say you buy 300$ of stuff from Amazon, and 300$ of stuff from AliExpress.
Even if the products are the same price, AliExpress will offer a 30$ off coupon.
Amazon has to build in a higher margin though, they practically have a no questions asked return policy for anything less than say 100$. AliExpress is a bit more difficult here.
I even remember getting on chat support with Amazon, and telling them I was basically too dumb to put a table together right. No return, they just refunded me $200. You don't get that with AliExpress.
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> You metaphorically need to invent the universe to make it work in the US. You didnt answer the obvious question of the why things are the way they are now? US used to have their entire electronic supply chain, save from raw materials, in USA in the 70s... So why cant US build its own Shenzhen or Hong Kong? taxes? corporate taxes are relatively low in some US states, infrastructure? US has all the infrastructure nee…
The boston-95-ring-vs-silicon-valley/noncompete-enforcement story gets close to this. Or the detroit-automotive-supply-chain story. It's largely about can you set up an effective ecosystem of suppliers. The story of the Traitorous 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight is basically the tale of how free-market competition spawns the economic prosperity of an entire region. In those times, Boston's 95 ring wa…
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international... Restored already. It's all about chaos.