Perhaps. It's not black and white of course, more like black and grey.
Majority of all things Cheeto says are either outright lies or just incoherent rambling which is too hard to decipher.
I mean you do have a point about tribalism and the danger of blindly supporting anyone. However that's almost entirely tangential in this specific case. Just stating the fact that Trump and his cabinet are extremely (purposefully or not) incompetent and corrupt is not partisan in any way whatsoever.
And yes, conservatives base their policies and electoral successes on massive amount of lies.
The fact that Mueller couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a specific deal had been made is pretty much immaterial.
Some of the tariff increases are so high that they effectively spoil the cargo; there's no point in bringing it through customs at those prices, and it typically won't make sense to ship it back, and it may not be possible to ship it elsewhere from the port either, so it is most likely to be destroyed at the port. Delaying to see if tariffs go down may be worthwhile for enough of the cargo that it makes sense to slow the whole boat.
Additionally, if demand for shipping is up, going faster allows for more supply, and if demand has slowed, going slower reduces supply.
Tariffs are based on date of entry: https://www.vedderprice.com/remember-basic-import-rules-when... (see 'Rule 2')
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/
Of course enabled by the very tech you mention.
If some companies want the goods now and other companies need to hold off, how does that work?
Just whoever's shipping the most goods wins?
The more reasonable sized ones and the specialized ones (especially the car ones) often service a single buyer at a time
Starting to wonder how significant this news really is?
My companies reporting needs to correct for it since the date shifts on western calendar and if would mess up all reporting otherwise, so yes, this is extremely significant.
Some ISO 8601 week numbers for CNY:
2022 CNY fell on Feb 1 , which is Week 5
2023 CNY fell on Jan 22, which is Week 3
2024 CNY fell on Feb 10, which is Week 6
2025 CNY fell on Jan 29, which is Week 5
Also, in a different comment, his work at Campbell is mentioned, but I think that leaves open why he has anything important to say on the subject. His bio at the U.S. Naval Institute is more informative:
"Dr. Salvatore R. Mercogliano is an associate professor of history at Campbell University in North Carolina and adjunct professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He holds a bachelor of science in marine transportation from the State University of New York Maritime College, along with a merchant marine deck officer license (unlimited tonnage 2nd mate), a master’s in maritime history and nautical archaeology from East Carolina University, and a Ph.D. in military and naval history from the University of Alabama."
I wish more mainstream media did this.
At least they ensure they are well researched on the matters they talk about. Right?
The "Youtuber" is actually a professor and Chair, Department of History, Criminal Justice and Politics at Campbell:
It's a textbook case of why I tend to dislike video as a format.
An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.
HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.
Anyway, I don't mind the downvotes, but it'd be nice if people started including summaries with video links.
And I don't think everyone has an LLM just sitting around that can summarize a video from a link.
Having wasted 10 minutes of my life watching the video, it's also an accurate summary - "no, shipping has not stopped completely". I would not be happy if they'd just pasted it in without checking that.
Videos that take forever to get to the point are something I find incredibly annoying. Maybe you all have a lot more time on your hands to listen to people spend 5 minutes explaining simple charts.
With a written article I can read a bit at the beginning, skim the contents and still get an idea of what it's about and decide whether I want to read more.
Videos are much more difficult to skim or glance over and the beginning is often some boring intro or music or some dudes asking each other how they've been or something equally wasteful of my time.
I think you’re saying this jokingly but it would be an improvement. Most people don’t read the article. This is partially laziness but also has to do with consistency: I know what a Hacker News thread will look like and how it will perform whenever I open one, whereas a lot of the submissions are from sites that are borderline unusable without an adblocker. Posting the full article in the thread would be a vast improvement, but I can’t imagine it would be feasible owing to copyright issues.
A user shared a link. Another user provided a summary of that link. I don’t need the second user to provide his own unique take on the link.
> An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run.
You could make the same argument about throwing paywalled links into the Wayback Machine. It does not add a unique perspective to the discussion and anyone could do it themselves, but those links are almost always at the top of the thread.
But... I may hate links to videos even more. A summary of a video isn't lazy, it's nearly a requirement. So, an upvote for now, at least.
The whole thing is a mess and shows how incompetent the current implementation is.
That should not be possible. The kickback from this mania is going to be pretty extreme pain for these clowns.
If history is any indication, then the blowback will be leveraged (successfully) to point fingers at other parties (doesn't matter who), and then the proposed remedy will be to double-down:
"It didn't work the first time around because we weren't strong-willed/determined/patriotic enough, this time We Must Go All In, and stamp out any dissidents with extreme prejudice, for they are the Enemy holding us back from our Finest Hour!"
etc, etc.
What will happen is either a collapse of the US economy or a collapse of the Trump administration.
Even if the administration grows a brain and reverses course, we are on course for a COVID-like supply chain shock that will cause major pain. Not to mention the loss of trust that will absolutely depress the needed regrowth.
Seeds sourced from China - which a lot are - have skyrocketed in price.
I’m actually not sure this is all bad. A flatter more multipolar world is probably better for everyone, including America. But I think it’ll be a tough time in our history and the people who voted for Trump will be the ones who bear the most pain for his delusional misunderstanding of the way the world actually is vs what he wishes it were.
But if I were to put $5 down, I’d wager this lasts until the GOP political fortunes have been decimated through their hubris and magical thinking and Trump is personally hung out to dry for his strategic blunder in launching a 195 front war.
That's a pretty big caveat.
To frame the question another way -- which does China want more, an international rules based order or Taiwan and nine dashes of maritime territory?
You might argue that absent American military hegemony, Russia and China become belligerent. But the US isn't really doing much about either, so that's a moot point. All the world really loses is America's interference in their affairs, which I think the world can do without.
It's very easy, indeed common, for the "something" to be worse than the status quo.
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 can't lose.
And even then I'm not sure that congress can actually do anything to fix this issue while trump is still in the white house and impeachment and removal seems unachievable. Say congress reverses it's delegation of tarrif power to the president. What happens if trump just does not obey congress, much like they are not obeying the supreme court. Do the republicans in congress have enough of a spine to actually remove him? How do we assure that removal actually takes place in the event that we can even meet the threshold? The man still, ostensibly, still has control of the military. Perhaps the military, secret service, any other guys with guns just refuses to help him resist congress like they did when he tried to deploy the military after jan 6th.. but they seem to have already cleaned house at the pentagon, with hagseth getting rid of more people who aren't sufficiently loyal enough to do crimes and/or coup the fucking government for trump.
shit is getting scary.
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...
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 same blind loyalty to Nixon. They had opposing voices. They had separate factions. Now the only faction is Trump-worship.
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.
It's worth considering the possibility that as a party they're nowadays more into fascism than republicanism. Rome was a republic too, until it wasn't.
The difference though is the Roman republic had a constitutional order that was implicit rather than explicit. The American constitution and bill of rights is very difficult to change, and the order is fairly explicit. This was intentional with the assumption that even if a Sulla like figure emerges and consolidates power, it’ll revert over time to a liberal humanist republic. The anti federalists examine this in some depth and the scenario we are in was definitely considered carefully. It’s remarkable it took 249 years - but it was 430 years before Sulla seized the dictatorship by declaring emergency powers and cracked the constitutional order of Rome.
With the way current events unfold there might not be any more elections.
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.
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 just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.
Let's say 1 pay x for a product. Gross markup is say 100%. Do I sell it for 2x. Let's say there's a tariff cost of y. That means the cost price is x + y. I mark that up to 2x + 2y. It's easy to up the price by 2y and disclose the tariff as "z%".
But this of course presumes all your expenses remain flat. And they likely don't. As your expenses go up (2nd order effects) that 100% markup starts to not be enough. So the markup goes up a bit.
Plus since things are going up anyway, and since there's uncertainty (which has a cost) we need to bump the price up even more (because hey, free market.)
And when the tariffs go away, we can remove the primary cost, but all the secondary hikes remain. Because that's all just extra profit, and, like, free market right?
This round of inflation is going to make covid look mild. (And as I point out to my Republican friends, just remember, you voted for this.)
The way out of this is to devalue the dollar. That would erode the real value of the outstanding debt (which is delimited in dollars.) Alas the US has worked very hard to make the dollar the world currency, so devaluing it is complex.
The US consumer (voter) is of course the big loser. At least this generation is. Folk born around 2030 may be the big winners.
Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
If they're clever enough to do that math, they're clever enough to infer the result from the quality and fact that it's made in China. The ways of obscuring that would be to have paid more for a higher quality item made in China (make a convincingly costly product), or make it difficult to evaluate the quality in the first place.
But I know you're talking hypotheticals and all. It is maybe worth wondering whether in aggregate it'll become more transparent that the U.S economy is based on adding a negligible amount of value to anything from top to bottom.
They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.
That said I wish they would.
“Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”
If anything, what can be more American than making clear when and how much the government is taxing the people? It is like at the core of this nation’s founding.
Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.
The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.
There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.
The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.
China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.
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.
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 or to source key components that they require for their own products. China was not being subtle rejecting delivery of a couple of new Boeing planes. And reductions in container traffic from China (which are the life blood of the US economy) are of course a very visible thing. And since container deliveries are critical for supply chains of most manufacturing that actually still happens in the US, that could get ugly really quickly.
Worst case all this triggers a recession. Those are rarely predicted accurately until after they've happened. But the signs aren't great and wall street is definitely nervous. A few stocks crashing because investors start panic selling could do the job. We're not there yet, but it got close a few weeks ago.
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 sanctions and force them to rely on themselves economically: It reduces one of the downsides of warfighting. Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
World War 1 begs to differ, hell even the Russian invasion of Crimea back in 2014 begs to differ. Economic interdependence dosen't stop authoritarians, it only threatens democracies with a larger margin for dissent.
One of the lessons from the prelude to WWII is to be careful about trade imbalances, as they can breed instability and radicalism. During the 1920s the US enjoyed huge trade surpluses with Europe, which caused all manner of monetary and labor dislocation in Europe. Worse, the US wasn't content with this surplus, so similar to modern China they erected additional barriers to imports to try to have their cake and eat it, too. These effects were amplified by the gold standard, which accelerated deflation and unemployment in Europe, and accelerated (stock market) inflation in the US. And of course all these ill effects were amplified again for Germany.
Toward the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, the whole system was disassembled as every country, understandably, retreated to lick its wounds. Economic interdependence is critical to maintaining global security, but that interdependence itself isn't self-sustaining. It can fall apart if dislocations aren't managed well across the system. For example, the lessons from the 1990s and early 2000s is, "just go back to college or trade school" is an absolutely horrible approach to dealing with labor dislocation. Significant changes in labor structure need to happen inter-generationally, not intra-generationally.
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.
From the Russian perspective, the US promised not to expand NATO eastwards in return for allowing German unification. While Russia was weak, NATO ignored the promise, but miscalculated after Russia strengthened.
Ultimately, you need to understand the Russia reasons, and they had been threatening war since 2008 when Bush announced Ukraine could become a NATO member.
If you rely on Western sources to interpreted Eastern motives, you end up with rubbish like "they hate us for our freedoms".
Myth, refuted by many Russians from different backgrounds, including by Gorbachev himself on multiple occasions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149963
It is a willful distortion of the so-called 2+4 Treaty from 1990, in which the two German states and the four occupying powers negotiated the terms of reunification. Ultimately, they agreed that only West German military forces would enter East Germany until the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which was to be completed by the end of 1994 at the latest. This is stipulated in Article 4 and Article 5 of the treaty: https://web.archive.org/web/20050222182358/https://usa.usemb...
Great point. Also "because of our love of jesus christ" has been thrown at me a few times when I'm trying to provide more nuanced arguments for why people in other countries might not favor us.
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.
It is simply in our best interest to starve cancer whenever we find it and excise it if possible.
If the goal of buying Russian hydrocarbons was to increase the economic stability of Russia and to foster capitalistic market systems in the country to prevent the rise of authoritarianism then the second they invaded Georgia should have resulted in the cutting of those economic ties.
If the goal of opening trade up to China was to prevent a Chinese-Soviet alliance and to weaken the USSR then the second the USSR fell we should have pivoted to defeating Chinese authoritarianism instead of strengthening economic ties to them which has ultimately provided fuel for an authoritarian economic machine that has grown to surpass the capacity of the US and made the US dependent on it.
We didn't do those things and now we're facing existential economic and military threats.
It's not a very fair question to ask, I know, but I think we really need to make sure we are honest about what we're asking people to do.
Cutting economic ties in these specific cases isn't enough to actually stop the bloodshed and bring about stability.
There are practical limits to our willpower and resources and we can't just stamp out every dictatorship in the world, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? I fully support our actions in Ukraine, by the way, and in terms of picking fights that's probably one of our better ones to help stop authoritarianism.
Not necessarily, as I’m not directly threatened, but I’m more than happy to carve out a piece of my paycheck to give Ukrainians any and every piece of equipment they need to do it for me.
However, the parent poster paints a different picture. If people in Moscow were economically threatened by reduced trade caused by an invasion, the elite appetite for such a move would be reduced.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-history-of-nord-stream/a-58618313
"In the early 2000s, however, German politicians had developed a contrary, more liberal theory — that more economic interdependence between Russia and western Europe would create peace in the long run. As trade increased, democracy would inevitably prevail."
>Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
China being cut off from ~15%? of their market does not mean China isolation, it means US rewriting Child labor laws to fill Walmart shelves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/31/us-child-...
https://www.newsweek.com/child-labor-laws-changed-five-state...
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-la...
Common misconception that trade prevents war and war prevents trade. Turns out that it is wrong: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501782466/trad...
If
A -> B
not A -> B
B -> not AChina hasn't invaded anyone. USA is conducting an active genocide in Gaza and the Iraq War wasn't that long ago. I could name so many other incidents of unbridled aggression it boggles the mind.
In a sane world, that's what targeted tariffs are. You don't want to tariffs across the whole board because you might affect exporting manufactures whose prices will go through the roof and might experience disruption. It is kind of what is happening with auto tariffs now that there is a huge blow back but one wonder how many industries out there can't voice their concerns or are not aware of this.
Maybe. It is possible, though, that we are now in a situation like in the third Nolan Batman movie where Tom hardy puts his hand on the rich guy’s neck and says “do you feel in charge?”
Illumina is a special edge case as they've been a victim of souring China-US relations before the tariffs even started: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/illumina-aims-cut-100m...
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, Ford's average market share in China has been a modest 1.8%.
Pharmaceuticals would be a slightly better example.
[0]: https://www.carscoops.com/2024/07/china-gives-its-automakers... [1]: https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/innovation/chinas-automotive-odys... [2]: https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/china-joint-venture...
It was some semi private line, who would have to pay twice the usual price in a unfavorable market.
The part apparatchiks didnt need to order them. They just dont want to overpay.
I sincerely hope you’re right, but all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings. Maybe when it becomes obvious that they’re not getting anything for all that abasement they change tacks, but nothing in the Trump era has suggested to me that these folks have the tiger by anything but the tail.
It was comical how quickly amazon back pedaled on showing tariffs transparently in pricing as soon as the whitehouse complained.
There’s a whole generation of neoliberals learning Littlefinger’s lesson these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaRhL95HUM - it’s a shame the rest of us are stuck on this ride with them.
Which is why you have to occasionally knock the people willing to exploit the peaceful order, off.
But the others will have their peace.
H.R.3040 - To prohibit the use of ranked choice voting in elections for Federal office.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040
You need to present it as a choice: you either bring about ranked-choice voting and a wider range of political parties so that issues can be dealt with peacefully, or, face real consequences for attempts to block the efforts at peace.
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.
Is it controversial to say that if you really wanted to "fight the oligarchy", your policy positions would be pretty similar to the America first agenda (sans social issues)?
This is what I mean when I say the oligarchs have the tiger by the tail - from the time of the Moral Majority through the evangelicals of Bush's era through the Tea Party through MAGA, the business wing of the republican party has been cultivating the populist wing as an electoral strategy. They've managed to muddy the water with enough "government bad, immigrant criminals, trans athletes" rhetoric that what you've got now is a party and a movement that can _feel_ that there's something wrong - stagnant wages, inaccessible health care, deaths of despair, and Jeff Bezos - but the right wing message machine still has enough of a hand on the wheel that they can't actually get their way to things like labor rights and social security and all the other stuff we came up with last time this kind of thing happened.
Then you get Donald Trump, who well and truly does not give a shit about anything at all, and so he's absolutely fine to grab the wheel here and yank it hard into populism land, and now the oligarchs have a problem, because they've got a mafia boss at the head of an angry mob, and no part of that has any coherent ideology except Trump's crystal clear vision of people paying him a lot of money and treating him like a king, and now you've got tantrum as policy and no actual adults left in the room.
So, yes, America First and the MAGA movement are, depending on the day and time, anti-oligarch, but they're anti-oligarch like a dog is anti-car - there's not really a _plan_ there, just a lot of noise and motion and probably some teeth marks, but I don't really think it's gonna work out great for the dog either.
If they call out the active duty military against middle-aged, white, protestors, they'll have a problem. If it's against students and minorities,...
How do we compare the pain (and yes, some destruction) that we have to endure today against the devastation that is clearly in the horizon for both regions within a decade or two?
To be sure, what's going on today should have been done twenty to thirty years ago. Doing this today is far more difficult and painful.
I think Kevin O'Leary put it best: What we want a reasonably free markets. It isn't just about tariffs. It's about regulatory lockout, intellectual property and more.
For example, India imposes as much as a 110% tariff on US cars and trucks. The list of such actions --which also included non-tariff rules-based restrictions-- is long. From China imposing up to 25% on our cars, autos, chemicals and food to the EU, Canada, Mexico and others following suit. Brazil collected over $800 million in retaliatory tariffs blocking US pharmaceuticals, autos and textiles.
In other words, the relationship with hundreds of countries has been very one-sided for a long time. US industry needs to export to thrive, but if countries like Turkey impose 140% tariffs on our autos and trucks, markets are de-facto shut down.
How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?
So, yeah, this is a rough moment. I hope it is for the best. Everyone benefits from a more open and balanced market.
And then, of course, there's one of the elephants in the room: Intellectual property theft.
Going back to Kevin O'Learly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKkdor6_rw4
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=567065763062114
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGFWWqbDwuw
https://www.tmz.com/watch/kevin-o-leary-china-tariffs-04-09-...
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 get more cast iron plants in Cape Cod. I'm off to the mill!
[1]https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2025/04/09/trump-tar...
This isn't about my hopes and dreams, it's about reality. I gave up years ago. I manufacture in China and other places. My take, after suffering the consequences for years, was simple: If my own government does not help me with such things as IP protection, control of currency manipulation, etc., screw it, I'll look after myself and my family. No choice.
So, I sold my manufacturing equipment and got the fuck out. We work with two factories in China and, well, I don't give a shit any more. Sounds horrible, I know, but, as the movie line goes "Mongo small fish in pond of life". This is something for the next generation to figure out...or not...and suffer whatever the consequences might be.
What is always notable is that almost nobody commenting on these kinds of threads know what the fuck they are talking about. A bunch of software engineers playing business person. Not a clue. Go talk to real manufacturing entrepreneurs and see what they say. Until then, you are not at all equipped to understand what's in front of us at all.
Long term, manufacturers will come back or be created to grab all those customers. But for the rest of the world, it's much harder for suppliers who lost a massive chunk of their customers to suddenly find new customers beyond what's already existing. Creating demand is notoriously harder than increasing supply. And it dosen't help that the majority of other major economies are also export-based, so unless if some are willing to run deficits (and they won't), there's literally nowhere else to go other than a global recession. Developing countries are far too poor and would essentially be turned into captive markets bereft of industrialization.
I don't agree with the implementation of Trump's policies, but this is going right back to Keynes' concerns about limitations of global trade balancing, it's a long time coming, and much of the blame does come back to the surplus economies that doubled down on manufacturing rather than transitioning to consumer based economies.
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.
By definition, global exports must be matched with global imports to sum to zero, unless if you are trading with aliens. This is basic double-entry accounting and mainstream economics.
>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
On the long term, factories can be built, workers can be trained. If the price point of manufacturing is more profitable domestically than through outsourcing via tariffs, then investment will naturally flow to account for those opportunities.
But like I said, what you fail to see is that firms like Haas Automation are not reflective of the larger US economy, the majority of the US economy is supported by consumption, not manufacturing, and actually it's the top 10% that accounts for almost 50% of domestic consumption, meaning a whopping 10% of US consumers account for 15% of global consumption. Counter-Tariffs aren't going to mean as much to Investment Bankers, Lawyers, Doctors, Senior SWE etc. People will come to and build production if China is not available because they will want to grab the lucrative opportunities of the largest consumer base in the world.
On the other hand for surplus exporters, bereft of such a consumer base, unless if they find a way to make up for that consumer base (which is very difficult), all those factories are going to close down very quickly, and mass unemployment ensues. It's not just China, it's possibly Vietnam, most of SEA, Germany, Japan, etc. And that matters for the negotiating table, hence why many did not pursue counter-tariffs. But they've been doubling down on manufacturing rather than shoring up domestic consumption, the US reaction is by definition the Beggar-Thy-Neighbour as a consequence of their greedy actions.
The larger argument really is for a more balanced global trade, where countries current account balances would be near 0. It's true that US consumption rate will probably need to go down for it, but that also means that the rest of the world would be increasing their consumption (and their living standards) rather than suppressing domestic demand for the sake of manufacturing fetishism. It would be an all around more resilient to trade shocks than the status quo today.
Let's go back to a real world example -- a successful machine tool manufacturer in the united states, theoretically the very thing we want (which in fact, I totally agree with -- such companies are important in a huge number of ways).
They import raw or partially finished materials (cast iron, blank or partially assembled PCBs); haas does a bunch of work on these materials, puts it all together and sells the finished product for more than all the raw materials cost to lots of other (typically different) people.
Now, because of blanket tariffs -- on things the US has no interest, capacity, or foundation to build, like cast iron. Nobody's going to make a PCB assembly company or cast iron foundry in the USA to meet this need, it'd take years, the products would be way too expensive, and the only possible market is ... haas automation? Never going to happen. Instead, haas will just raise prices and lose market.
The blanket tariff negotiation (I tariff all your stuff, or else!) is "Do what I want or I'll kill your daughter, eat your dog, and burn your farm!" -- but in this case, because trump's said the same thing to everyone, he's actually saying "Do what I want or I'll kill my daughter, eat my dog, and burn my farm!"
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bop.asp#:~:text=The%20s...
I'm talking about global trade balance, your example is examining trade relations from a individual perspective that ignores the activities of other actors, when you need to be looking at the global sum of all exports and imports of all the actors involved. Namely put, in a closed economy, the sum of all the credits and debits between you, the gas station, dentist, etc will sum to zero. The economy of Earth in a similar manner is a closed system, we're not trading with aliens here. This is mainstream economics, you're going to woo-land if you're trying to deny this.
>and the only possible market is ... haas automation? Never going to happen. Instead, haas will just raise prices and lose market.
If the only possible market is Haas Automation then it's economically insignificant and not reflective of larger structural changes in the US economy. But that's a highly dubious assumption. Like I said, the US economy dosen't run on exports, the vast majority is consumption. The incentives are there to raise up entire supply chain given the massive profits involved here.
The thing about the blanket tariff negotiation tactic is that on the flipside, it is true that many of these nations very much were pursuing their own forms of economic nationalism with heavy protectionism and tariffs. For as much as American economists like to say that deficits don't matter, China, Vietnam, Germany, Japan all seem quite intent on maintaining a persistent surplus, whether through buying bonds to weaken their currency, heavy subsidies, or demand suppression at home to bring down wages. It's a bit absurd to expect American to uphold the principles of free trade while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the mercantalism of other nations. What Trump is doing is highly destructive, and there are better ways to negotiate, but it's a problem really that these surplus nations have created from the last few decades. And it's a problem not just for America, but for much of the developing world that will find to increasingly hard to climb up the value chain so long as China is dominating global exports.
No doubt there will be a recession, but on the long term, it will work. But for other countries, the situation will much worse because you cannot increase demand in the same way you can raise supply chains. That's why it's more likely that negotiated settlement similar to the Plaza Accords will occur, really in the question of whether we all seriously adhere to the principles of a free trade, or we collapse in a mercantalist free for all. In the world of a former, trade balances would close to zero because of the self-balancing currency effects of imbalances.
If you actually read the literature before Trump, this is something that has been talked about by Keynes, by Bernanke, by Stiglitz, by Katherine Tao, even admitted to a certain extent by Krugman. The hysterics of modern politics is that notion that "trade deficits aren't necessairly bad" has shifted to "trade deficits are never bad", when there are specific conditions when trade deficits are symptomatic of larger problems, and those conditions may be apparent right now for USA.
https://www.wita.org/blogs/keynes-support-tariffs/#:~:text=K...
I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.
“Plenty” but still less overall than 10-20 years ago, 30, 40, 50 years ago. There’s a quite clear trend to zero here.
If you could explain why it’s trending to zero when the dollar value of American manufacturing outputs keeps rising, I’d appreciate it.
There are plenty of other charts that contradict you on the St Louis Fed FRED website.
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 adjusted terms from nearly 30 years ago.
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.
All dollar values on that chart are adjusted for inflation.
> 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.
The chart does not capture the trend you speak of, assuming it exists.
> In other words, a complete hollowing out of our manufacturing base.
That’s not how I would put it, if you want to look at it through that lens, it’s your right.
I would say we manufacture things higher up the value chain and use the dollars we earn from making that stuff to import cheaper foreign commodities instead of manufacturing them here and using dollars to buy American made clothes and shoes and other commodity items at a much higher price than we can buy them from other countries.
We also export services and receive dollars in return, this is much more lucrative that manufacturing imo.
Why would any foreign nation even want to manufacture goods to ship here, if there's nothing much to buy with our currency? If our currency does devalue, we run the risk of not being able to import what we need, and not being able to afford to tool up to manufacture it domestically. And yet trends are clear that in many industrial sectors US manufacturing has already fallen to what might as well be zero.
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.
I think we both agree that one of us has unrealistic impressions of the big picture here. When we regularly here of layoffs that affect hundreds and thousands of jobs, welders and electricians can't absorb those unemployed to any great degree. Nor all of the trades put together.
There are plenty of jobs. Every person who isn't manufacturing is a person who can do something else. A modern car uses a lot more engineers. While we don't need many spa mangers, it is nice that spas exist and so some of those spa managers are needed.
> How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?
What worries me more is that the US has been funding global military security through deficit spending funded by foreign investors (who got their dollars from US trade). We're cutting legs off that stool, so we might see more wars and a declining dollar, never mind fewer cheap imports.
Because if they can't make thing you can win a war - just stop all their trade and then invade. When they are limited to stick and stone while you have guns war is easy to win.
Of course in reality the US and EU are not in danger of losing all manufacturing, and their military leaders are will aware of this and so put extra effort into keeping some important manufacturing in the country. Politicians are generally (but not always!) aware of this and try to be friends with others who can make things you don't make locally.
One of my career highlights was having him explain how much it will do for my career to do his project at a discount (I was helping a friend as a favor) and I told Kevin that it was just as likely to have the opposite effect.
That's an unreasonable position to take. What matters isn't who says something at all. It's if what the person says is true. And, in Kevin's case, what he is saying is 100% on point and correct.
Aside from personal experience, I have met many entrepreneurs who got shafted by China's approach to business and intellectual property. One of them had to shutter his company barely six months after introducing their first product. The product was successful enough that it got cloned very quickly. They introduced a cloned product at half his price. Orders evaporated. He had to let go of his employees and close the business.
Whether you like it or not, what O'Leary says in his videos is 100% accurate and true. Your experience with him is absolutely irrelevant and not worth discussing.
These comparisons (and conclusions of one-sidedness) always leave the greatest benefit the US has enjoyed: access to a massive labor force willing to do work most Americans aren't[1] at wages lower than are Legal in the US.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...
Which is not being discussed enough.
And that the current situation can go on a long time but not forever.
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.
Yup. China has been systematically stealing the IP of anything made in their country since forever. Companies kept falling for it because the potential market looked so big. Now BYD makes cars as good as Tesla and it's all #ShockedPikachuFace
Not that is matters. Cars, including electric cars have been around for 100 years. There are very little important patents he could have. Sure there is a lot you can patent, but the vast majority is details that are trivial for any competent engineer to work around just using known prior art.
The important patents are likely in batteries which Tesla doesn't develop. Or chargers, but again the important details come with the battery.
TESLA might have some patents on the NACS connector and similar things. Those are easy to work around, but you wouldn't want to.
“I don’t see a complete emptiness on store shelves or online when we’re buying. But if you’re out looking for a blue shirt, you might find 11 purple ones and one blue in a size that’s not yours. So we’ll start seeing less choice on those shelves simply because we’re not getting the variety of goods coming in here based on the additional costs in place. And for that one blue shirt that’s still left, you’ll see a price hike,” Seroka said.
In fact it doesn't take much of a change in regular buying habits to cause that it it's all aligned in the same direction.
i.e. a chunk of the toilet paper "shortage" can just be every customer suddenly buying one more pack that day "just to be on the safe side". Your local supermarket isn't expecting that, so the shelves still clear out that day - then the last person snaps a pic for social media....
It doesn't violate market dynamics that I can see, though I'm far from an expert.
So I wonder how that plays out? My guess is that retailers take fewer risks when ordering, sticking with products that they know they can sell, even if prices are higher.
But they will still guess wrong sometimes.
Currency Manipulation to relatively increase Chinese manufacturing income
Relocating manufacturing based on tariffs
Retail margin
US based design & engineering of products
Advertising and other marketing activities
Depending on the product some will be passed onto consumers. But for something like Nike's it's probably more like fewer shoe designers, Footlockers, less advertising, smaller contracts to athletes, more manufacturing in non-China countries, and so on. Everyone is going to take a bit of a bit and it's probably not going to be super noticable to any one part.
No reason to expect empty shelves. Higher prices for stuff that can't be moved out of China. Sure. But it's a tariff, not an embargo.
Relocation of mfg - years long process won't help the shelves or the prices.
Retail margin - yeah... retail will balance price hikes to avoid hitting profits with not pricing too high to further reduce demand. This is just one of the reasons prices will go up. It will reduce the demand to less efficient and profitable levels, but won't increase the supply. Shelves will be sparsely filled with more expensive items.
US based engineering and design -- analogous to mfg. Not a near term solution.
Advertising -- it doesn't matter how much you tell people to go buy shit if they don't have money and/or the prices are too high.
Why are you still apologizing for Trump's absolutely incompetent policies?
If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly. Other people see the shelves emptying and buy more too.
Going to be messy.
All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.
There are enough people who buy 0 of X normally, but if they think there might be stockouts, will visit every store in their area and buy 100 of X so they can scalp them and make a buck off their neighbors.
Give it a few years. They'll say he did it.
"Why do you think Barack Obama wasn't in the Oval Office on 9/11?" "That, I don't know. Would like to get to the bottom of that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPfRGJRMbN8
Surely you don’t mean to imply the media treated Biden less favorably than Trump?
As a concrete example a great deal of left leaning media was very critical of Biden running for reelection and especially waiting that long to pull out. You almost never see that kind of thing from right leaning media outlets.
So, yes overall media bias favors Trump not because more outlets favor him but because the ones that do heavily favor him. Far left media is simply a more niche market than far right media. Mother Jones for example is well known but only pulls in ~16 million$ / year and even they where critical of Biden.
CNN and Fox don’t come close to canceling each other out because Fox is way to the right and CNN is more subtle. -2 + 4 is not zero.
Similarity Fox viewership is 3 million viewers in primetime vs CNN at 1/6th those numbers.
It’s undeserved praise vs undeserved damnation that signifies a non neutral position.
Objectively FOX isn’t pure propaganda they do include some coverage critical of R politicians and policies. It’s just far less than say CNN spends on coverage critical of D politicians and policies.
There’s simply more left leaning Americans vs the stance of the Republican Party who’s specifically engineered their message to appeal to voters with more political power. Ex: Losing the popular vote when winning the presidential election only happens to Republicans.
However, simply counting the number of companies leaning left or right doesn’t tell you much. A local newspaper with 5k readers just doesn’t move the needle. Neither does an outlet that’s 0.1% left or right leaning.
So the only accurate measurement is level of lean * number of viewers, and when you do that calculation (as I have) you find the overall media landscape leans Republican.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Fox: FOX: 6.7, CNN -3.7, another site giving them 4 vs -2 etc.
Then used numbers from sites like https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/first-quarter-2025-cable-new...
So for most watched cable news show you get FOX 4,552k viewers vs CNN 558k viewers. Multiply and you get a rather shockingly different impact.
It makes some sense!
Not an empty shelf in the literal way but empty on my demand
And depending on how much you’ve thought ahead, a significant supply chain issue for you.
Notably, this is really going to screw everyone using JIT supply chains.
That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software. If I recall correctly, Walmart was the innovator in this space in one of their key ways to gain economic advantage over other retailers was low back stock demand tracking
On top of that the '90s was when free trade agreements came into Vogue and the supply lines and outsourcing of manufacturing cranked up into high gear.
So as we saw with covid, any disruption to this a highly extended optimized supply chain results in massive disruption.
I can't see how any massive new tariffs isn't going to essentially be a covid level or worse disruption to this entire supply chain
I worked on PC software for optimizing warehouse inventory in the mid-1980s. The system was designed by an applied mathematician and used by large national companies. Customers made substantial savings - double digit percentages of inventory cost.
In the 1970's, when Nixon launched his recession after an equivalent lead-up, I worked at the University for one semester in a work-study job. They only paid minimum wage, and these were easy jobs like library assistants where you were expected to be able to study about half the time.
But you were working for the State just like all other State employees.
You know, the maintenance people, the professors, highway patrol, capitol admin staff, etc. Career employees.
Like everyone else, you had to wait two weeks after starting work before you would receive your first paycheck.
About halfway through the semester it got so bad they decided to hold paychecks for two more weeks.
:\
You mean everybody who worked for the State just didn't get anything for two weeks until it picked back up again?
Yup.
At the end of the semester I was made whole because my checks still kept coming in for a couple more weeks after I was no longer employed there.
"Just like" the career employees who would be collecting for a couple extra weeks themselves decades later after they retire.
Well, it was a recession, what do you want, prosperity? That ship sailed a long time ago :\
The source of prosperity done receded.
I guess these US manufacturers will need to step it up: Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Georgia-Pacific
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-tariffs-on-canadian-lumber...
We source chips from Canada because it's marginally cheaper to source it from there. It's not like the US doesn't have a ton of sources of wood pulp. Canada just has bigger cheaper sources (comparing like for like quality).
We also burn a lot of "less than ideal for paper" chips for energy rather than feed them into a paper mill, also for marginal cost per result reasons.
Wood chips suitable for paper pulp are also hugely elastic in the same way that recycled metal is. Huge volume is either directed into the supply chain or not based on marginal price. The people making every wood product are choosing what do with their waste based on chip prices and energy prices. Even your local tree service is choosing what to chip and where to dump based on economic conditions and balancing act between relative prices.
If you wanna be worried about something be worried about stuff we don't make much of in the US. Super high volume commodity widgets made from metal, all manner of electronics, etc, basically the kind of stuff where our only domestic capacity is super high dollar stuff to serve defense and aerospace.
The threat to lumber for building is a much greater concern because there aren't ready and price-comparable alternatives.
An antifragile solution would be learning to use a bidet.
And those are heavily concentrated in certain industries like basic electronics, toys, etc.
in anycase, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I work for an org that does packaging (boxes, pallets, etc) for a whole bunch of manufacturing, ag, and retail firms (Tesla, Thyssenkrup, Target, etc.) and we are booming right now.
Almost all of the food on the shelves is locally produced or, in the very least, not produced in China. Some foods may disappear or become more expensive but there'll really be no disruption in food supply.
This will however affect markets dominated by Chinese goods, particularly clothing. Even here the effects will be somewhat mitigated by existing strategies to avoid China tariffs eg selling through Vietnam.
Certain businesses will be hit hard. And that's really the biggest problem: cascading effects leading to an inevitable recession. Already, truckers who ship goods from ports are sitting around idle. We've cut tens of thousands from the government. More layoffs are to come.
As far as I can tell, literally nothing that I buy regularly is directly sourced from China. Or anywhere other than the US & neighboring countries. The vast majority of my groceries are locally sourced. And the vast majority of the rest come from expected regions, for instance San Marzano tomatoes from Italy. I do not regularly buy clothes, children's supplies, electronics, etc. Sure, I'll buy them once in a while but not with any regularity. My understanding is that the classic paper products famous from COVID shortages are made in the US.
So with that in mind what you say is 100% true, at least for me. But I'm not so sure. Who makes the containers that my local milk is put into? Who makes the cans that my canned goods are using? What meta-products are being consumed by the local industries, such as the ones making my TP? I have a feeling the answer is scarier than it'd seem on the surface. But I don't know.
In other words, the threat model people should be worrying about isn't "bare shelves due to no goods from China to stock them" but rather "bare shelves because the entities who make the goods to stock them are missing critical components". And that's much harder for someone to predict what impact it'll have.
I imagine that my daily life is very skewed away from direct impact from a Chinese embargo relative to other US citizens. And even still, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a problem.
It's one reason why this is happening at all. People not only don't know what makes a lightbulb turn on, they can't imagine the complexity of a power grid and how it's stabilised.
They don't have the first idea how a phone works, or how much science, engineering, and fundamental research went into making it work.
When they don't know any of this, they can't imagine any of it having a serious problem.
That means the prices of your tomatoes are going to go up!
No one is going to be immune from these pricing increases from the tariffs.
For your specific example though, I'm not so sure. As a counterexample, I buy my eggs direct from a local farm, not in a store. Neither the ease of availability nor the price of the eggs I buy have changed one iota over the last several months. And yet I see local friends posting pictures of empty egg shelves here and there on Facebook. My takeaway has been that the average person has no idea they can buy goods outside of a grocery store.
So back to your point, I buy most of my tomatoes direct from local farmers. Unless people start buying from *them* it is fine.
HOWEVER, if those local farmers can't get parts for their farm equipment or something like that, I'm just as screwed.
When it comes to eggs and vegetables there are opportunities for city farms. So there might be some of that.
But meat animals are much harder to "grow".
I’m sorry, but most people live in cities or towns with their only reasonable access to food being via stores. It is one of the wonderful things that civilization has produced and I’m here for it.
I think there will be a lot of unintuitive effects from things like packaging.
First, it has a command economy. It's much more equipped to handle this in keeping factories afloat and people employed and housed.
Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam) or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tariffs will be paid (eg a milk carton represents a small percentage of the cost of a carton of milk).
Third, the US will feel the inflationary effects. China will not.
Fourth, if China needs to raise funds they can and will sell US treasuries, spiking yields, hitting the ability of the US to issue further debt as well as borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses.
Lastly, the rest of the world is on China's side. This whole tariff fiasco may be the largest self-own in American history. Additionally, it's undoing generations of American soft power globally.
The economic outlook in China isn’t great right now. The US and China are playing a game a chicken, not sure who blinks first.
Nobody said that it would be painless for China. Just that
1- it will be less painful for China than the US
2- China is more resilient against this particular kind of stress because they have a command economy and have more control on the population.
If the US blinks and caves, it does not matter whether China got a scratch, it’s still going to win the war. And Covid taught us that something would need to be quite dire for China to blink.
Also, it got lost in the noise, but right now there is still a blanket 10% tariff on anything that enters the US, and presumably these 10% can turn to much more when Trumps feels like it. It’s not the US against China, it’s the US against the world.
But I was told the ports were empty and the shelves would be bare. That implies almost all of that 15% being shut down, doesn’t it?
> Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam)
Sure. 15% of their economy either just disappears, gets dramatically more expensive (laundering goods cost money too) or they have to reduce the prices so they can sell their extra 15% of goods to the people that are already buying them.
Keep in mind that China is also only around 15% of US imports too so if 15% is negligible, it's negligible for the US too.
> or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tariffs will be paid (eg a milk carton represents a small percentage of the cost of a carton of milk).
The tariffs are a percent. Just because the cost of a single item is low doesn't mean the cost of the tariffs paid by the company is going to be low. Low cost goods are profitable because they sell in bulk. It's going to hit their bottom line in the same way it hits everyone else. You've obviously not given much thought into that point.
> Third, the US will feel the inflationary effects. China will not.
China isn't immune to 15% of their economy disappearing. Selling of an extra 15% of the goods in your warehouse at discounted rates while you scale down your factory production 15% is bad.
> Fourth, if China needs to raise funds they can and will sell US treasuries, spiking yields, hitting the ability of the US to issue further debt as well as borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses.
That's a good way to permanently remove 15% of their economy.
> Lastly, the rest of the world is on China's side. This whole tariff fiasco may be the largest self-own in American history. Additionally, it's undoing generations of American soft power globally.
That's not relevant at all. What's relevant is who the American people are on the side of. I'm not saying Trump has unanimous support or anything but he doesn't care at all what Switzerland thinks of tariffs on the Chinese.
Your #4 doomsday scenario is bad for the EU given the role that the US plays in their defense and as trade partners. WTO countries will be urging both sides to come to an agreement.
> Goldman Sachs in its latest China forecast, reports China's GDP is about to fall off a cliff: the bank now expects China's Q2 GDP growth to crater to just 0.8% QoQ from 4.9% in Q1.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/view-chinas-q2-gdp-grow...
In the case of a hypothetical trade embargo or at least punitive tariffs, who would you rather be: the buyer of insulin or the seller of insulin? The seller can be propped up by the government or loans. The buyer? Well, they need insulin. There's a natural imbalance here.
Us not buying Chinese goods has a ton of downstream effects like what if you need parts to repair trucks and those trucks are then out of service so can't haul stuff around?
> China isn't immune to 15% of their economy disappearing.
It won't disappear. It'll diminish. It'll get diverted through third countries. In some cases, the tariffs will be paid. China will have a reduction in exports. The US will have increased inflation, shortages and supply chain issues.
> That's not relevant at all.
It's 100% relevant. Everything is sentiment based. If the world is on China's side, then they'll look the other way when China buys oil and gas from sanctioned countries, for example.
What makes lots of money is not exactly having so many different choices stocked, instead having a good proportion of items "fly off the shelf" can be the focus.
The high-performance store will have numerous shelves completely clear every day, sometimes more than once per day, and they are perfectly geared to accommodate that when it happens without waiting until the more-organized nightly re-stocking.
The store is huge, and if a big shelf stays clear for any length of time it's quite noticeable. But can still represent the tip of the iceberg if that also means that quite a big multiple of inventory is also absent from "behind the curtain" in the warehouses and upstream.
The media doesn't seem to be doing a good job articulating what the (likely) real world impact is going to be. I keep hearing how other countries are negotiating but when you look into the details, there is nothing of substance actually happening.
Ryan runs Flexport which is a supply chain company so its from the "source" if you will.
Even worse is that depending on the product, you might not even be able to place an order from the importer because they are completely unable to actually price the things with all of the uncertainty right now. A friend of mine is a hearing device retailer/distributor. He tried to order way more than he usually does a month ago to get ahead of this. The order was denied because they said they have no idea how to price any of it. So he's just going to have to wait an indeterminate amount of time which then makes it impossible for him to plan. He has to jack up his prices to cover future potential price increases and to be able to keep the lights on if they run out of stock.
> Almost guaranteed.
> There are some categories (toys, pet stuff,computer accessories) where HUGE percentages of goods are made in china. Those shelves will be empty as soon as inventory runs out, which will be soon.
> Shelves would get re-stocked once tariffs are removed and the ships start sailing again.
> If it takes longer than 60 days from now, we're looking at 10s of thousands of bankruptcies. This will make covid look like a weekend at the ritz carlton. Biggest financial crisis since the great depression.
My takeaway: People are not taking this NEARLY seriously enough.
My tinfoil hat interpretation: The US govt knows how serious this is, and they know that if people panic (which honestly, they fucking should) it increases China's leverage substantially.
what does that mean
I agree with your points btw. My friend is a retail director specializing in this area and has been at pains to educate me (and anyone else willing to listen) on the depth and severity of the impending supply dislocation.
Meanwhile, Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, said just yesterday that he doesn't believe any shelves will be empty due to retailers planning ahead for the supply disruption—directly contradicting what the CEOs of those retailers had warned Trump just a few days earlier.
I have serious concerns about the competency of this administration. The CEOs of major retailers have a vested interest in understanding supply and demand and have intimate knowledge of supply chains and retail channels. If they say shelves are going to be empty, then you can take it to the bank that shelves are going to be empty.
Everything is pointing to shelves being empty. What happens after the shelves start going empty is what has me concerned. It could be a minor issue, or it could lead to mass panic. My concern is that I have no confidence in this administration's ability to resolve any issues that may arise due to their actions. They're making the mess and are expecting us to clean it up after them.
As for toys, most kids don't play with a plastic toy for more than like, 3-10 hours of its existence and then it rots on a shelf or in a drawer until is eventually ends up in a landfill. I'm not going to miss that. I'm sure that someone will point out important things that china makes dirt cheap and I'm sure they'll be right. I personally don't care if clothing options are limited or plastic toys are scarce. The US will not implode.
It really seems like china has more to lose than we do, but because they're a communist country they can just deploy troops to quell uprisings. Tiananmen Square comes to mind. So we play this game of chicken and the media screams that they sky is falling.
Of course the Walmarts and Amazons of the world care, most of what they sell is plastic shit and clothes. I have little sympathy for them.
However, it is worth noting that CEOs also have a vested interest in trying to reduce tariffs. And they would absolutely fearmonger if they thought it would help them.
The big outlets are terrified to get on this admin's bad side because their current business wants to do a lot of mergers which have to be approved and the administration can tie those up for years on a whim so they're already lying down.
But yes, whatever the reason, the situation could change too quickly for safe predictions. In 2020, the US economy had recovered from the massive disruptions of the Covid lockdowns by Q4. There were shortages of toilet paper and eggs for a while, then there were surpluses and sales for a while, and then it smoothed out.
That is just one of the many, often conflicting, goals cited by the administration, and doesn’t make sense on its face: the reason we have a trade deficit with most countries has nothing to do with them tariffing our goods or taking other protectionist measures.
If that is the goal, then it’s a terrible way of doing it. And also inflationary.
We will see!
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.
Even cheaper alternative: a simple plastic bottle half-full and half bend. Many cheap labours in my city (Paris, fr) use one at work (cook, night cleaners, construction…). While the bourgeoisie fight for pooping clean during a world crisis, their Pakistani labor do they shit as usual. We should be inspired.
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.
If it's war due to decreased economic interdependence, well yes that would be much worse.
And I imagine this strategy will be more effective than one would first think, since it's nuts. I imagine it will change business behavior, maybe even to the point that business act against their own economic interests, the question is how much? The crazy thing is that will the Trump effect last long enough to negatively impact the next president or the Democratic congress assuming they win in 2026? The presidents numbers wouldn't suggest that it could go that long, but the world is upside down right now.
> 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-...
> The U.S. imports a significant portion of its softwood lumber from Canada, with roughly 30% of its softwood lumber needs being met by Canadian exports.Specifically, in 2023, Canada exported 28.1 million cubic meters of softwood lumber to the U.S. This accounts for a large percentage of the total softwood lumber imported by the U.S., with Canada being the primary supplier.
> The United States can potentially supply up to 95% of its own softwood lumber consumption through domestic production.While the U.S. is a net importer of lumber, its domestic industry has the capacity to meet most of its needs.
That or he’ll make so many deals with CEOs for political support and financial contributions that we won’t even notice that a few smaller companies went out of business or pulled out of the US.
Even if they attempt to switch suppliers to avoid tariffs they'll be at the back of the line behind the bigger fish.
Retailers Fear Toy Shortages at Christmas as Tariffs Freeze Supply Chain: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/business/trump-tariffs-ch...
In a Toy Association survey of 410 toy manufacturers with annual sales of less than $100 million, more than 60 percent said they had canceled orders, and around 50 percent said they would go out of business within weeks or months if the tariffs remained. … She had placed a large order of scooters to arrive for the summer. But the importer rerouted the shipment to Canada because it did not want to pay the tariff.
Trump’s tariffs I think are bad because he is “going after everyone” versus Biden’s approach which was to build a coalition of friendly nations and revamp supply chains to reduce dependency on China who is adamant about being a foe to the United States, European Union, and others. Tariffs are not a bad tool to leverage here against China, but the way this administration is going about it seems like a less prudent approach.
To the OP’s point - I completely agree. If Americans can’t go a day without a flood of cheap, disposable junk (yes this is different than your iPhone or other advanced electronics), our civilization is going to face serious challenges on the global stage and further reductions in quality of life and access to resources.
What so many seem to forget is that there actually isn’t enough to go around. And we have to enact policies and utilize military force to protect our nation(s). Ideally we can do this in a peaceful way that brings everyone up as much as possible but this is only going to occur so long as the great nations of the world see eye to eye on that. We can and should enlarge the pie. But it requires everyone agreeing to doing so. That consensus is failing.
Many seem to think “China will just sell their stuff to the EU and the EU will get cheaper prices!” But that just places the EU in the same intolerable position the United States is finding itself. You must manufacture goods and provide services. You must have industries capable of creating products at all levels. Allowing too much of that manufacturing power to reside in one country, and one that does not like your liberal values, is beyond foolish.
The fact that Americans can’t go a day without TikTok or cheap Temu junk, or stomach paying more for your iPhone and keeping it a little longer should be viewed as seriously and deathly concerning. And going without such things or paying more for them isn’t even in the conversation of national sacrifice or “hard times”.
To add, it seems to me that “we don’t have the ability to build that here” when it comes to something like an iPhone is a serious problem. We have hollowed out our manufacturing capacity.
First, remember that a lot of people voted for Trump despite all thay he said in the election and all that he did last time around. What he says must resonate with a lot of people, or that would not have happened.
Second, anecdotally, there's someone I used to know back in the UK who was absolutely convinced that Brexit would be a success, to the extent that at one point me simply saying "no" to some claim he made resulted in him shouting "that proves we should do it!" (or similar, it's hard to quote exactly from memory, especially 9 years later). Cambridge graduate, did the maths olympiad in their youth, still acted that way.
And third, it's very easy to get anchored on something that was once true, and not update as the world moves on. When I was a kid, "made in China" or "made in Taiwan" was not a sign of quality, but "made in Japan" was; but one of the films of my youth was Back To The Future, and one if the few things you can allow even fiction to inform you of are cultural beliefs, like 1955 Doc Brown being written to expect "made in Japan" to justify component failure.
With respect to the “man up” piece of it - well if you can’t go without TikTok and Temu junk you have a big problem.
Both items: inability to manufacture advanced electronics, and inability to not go without cheap junk are separate but related problems.
While I think the Trump admin is weak and will capitulate on tariffs, and that’s aside from the asinine way in which we are treating our allies with respect to the same, him and others are very much right to point out the underlying concern. Tariffs can help to address those concerns, but they are just one tool amongst many.
And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.
>While I think the Trump admin is weak
Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong" it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.
Sure people can be worried. In fact, it's America's great national pastime. But I don't think I made the claim that the Trump administration is going about the decoupling with China in the best possible way, only that the goal is one that's worthwhile precisely because the pain you are describing.
No longer importing plastic junk, again this is separate from manufacturing advanced electronics which are also an important concern, and the effects of which are so devastating that we will trigger as you put it a recession, mass economic hardship, and will cost many people their jobs and savings, seems to place our country in an intolerable situation and a reliance on such imports, which if you read the news from the Right People, China seems to experience no economic hardship from such a decoupling meaning we are simply at the mercy of their benevolence. That's a scary thought, and it seems to me we're just going to experience this pain either way, we may as well do it on our terms, generally speaking.
With respect to TikTok you can just delete it. There's no pain experienced there. I'm close-minded on that specific issue. Social media in general is bad anyway, TikTok is just currently the worst and one we can most easily ban today.
The inability to manufacture advanced electronics at scale in the United States is a self-evident problem. I personally don't care about the arguments suggesting why such things can't be built here, because those just further illustrate the problem.
> Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong"
Well I don't really care much about this tough guy stuff you are talking about, but as an aside it is rather important politically, especially when we're dealing with a despotic regime in China that must save face, both culturally and by virtue of dictatorship. I mostly just care about policy and the results of the policy.
When I say Trump is weak, I don't mean he is weak in the sense of being a macho guy - frankly there's nothing less I care about in the world aside from TikTok videos - what I mean is he doesn't have the stomach to go through with the plan because of the potential economic repercussions in the short and medium term. In fact, his inability to be stalwart on this issue is precisely the greatest problem now in our foreign policy agenda (or what remains of it) because now all we've done is screwed a bunch of things up and pissed off the allies we need to actually achieve the goal. The worst of all worlds, so to speak.
> it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.
The endeavor has merits and likely those are well worth pursuing. I wouldn't disagree that the way in which we are going about things is not the best way, and I think I mentioned that before. I preferred the Biden administration's approach in general, though I don't think they acted with enough urgency.
What is the upside from the tariffs?
Cost increases from onshoring are more than wage increases from onshoring.
There is no problem with trade deficits. Countries accumulating USD means they have to lend it back at cheaper and cheaper rates.
The real problem is the federal deficit. In 2024 the USA had to borrow $2 trillion to keep the lights on, while foreign countries only had $1 trillion from net trade deficit to lend.
By analogy, the problem isn't that the USA is buying discount goods, it's that it's funding its lifestyle with a credit card. Paying more for the goods and still using a credit card doesn't solve this problem. It makes it worse
What problem is tariffs trying to solve?
If the goal is to plug the budget issue, you want imports to continue so that you can extract more tax from the citizens.
Even then, quality of life is less impacted if you just raise general taxes like a VAT or sales tax. That way consumers still get the best bang for their buck.
It’s not the 90s anymore. Lots of Chinese goods are neither cheap nor crap, nor producible elsewhere.
No (why? what's the actual problem with having cheap crap nobody needs?). But I'd at least agree with something like a carbon tax to target the environmental externalities of the type of commerce you're talking about.
I can see more problems with high tech stuff from China like the rare earths.
Things that wouldn't otherwise be a problem will become a problem. Potentially that includes bottles, tins, plastic food packaging, niche carboard boxes.
Imports from China are ~40% of all US imports. Even a 10% drop would be difficult, and at current levels it's going to be more than that.
You mean 14%?
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports-by-countr...
So I suspect 40% figure is how many items in a typical household are from China.
Edit: in case that's not clear, here's an example:
I have one item from the USA that costs $80. I have four items from China that cost $5 each.
My imports from China are 20% of my spending. My imports from China are 80% of my goods.
If I buy a bottle of wine, a chicken, a cake, and a pint of blueberries, is it correct to say that my diet is 99% fruits? There are more than a 100 of blueberries in the pint after all.
Or one could use a bidet, but I think most of these are imported from China. Oops.
I've also seen pictures of empty roads to Yantian port circulating on LinkedIn (usually it would be completely jammed during May holidays).
I'm very curious!
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/04/commander-of-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/29/fighter-jet-...
But why would you ever think that?
https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/the-guide-for-legal...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-...
Shady ways as well https://www.voanews.com/a/as-us-tariffs-expand-chinese-firms...
A curious dynamic: A seller importing a container of cargo to Amazon (or other US warehouse) has to pay the tariffs up front while trusting that dear leader won't lower the tariff amount before they can sell them. A seller that ships directly from China has a committed purchase with cash in hand by the time the specific tariff needs to be paid. I can see this leading to drastically less selection from US warehouses of long tail items that would otherwise sit around.
Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if Aliexpress (/Choice) charges sellers a fixed fee based on the current tariff rates, but still covers whatever the tariff ends up being when the item arrives at the port, to make it really straightforward for sellers. The kind of eat-it investment you get in a society working to build up institutions rather than tear them down.
Certain goods are extremely high mark up. For example, clothing is typically 100-200% markup. So if you buy a $5 t-shirt and sell it for $15, the tariffed price is now ~$12. You may find retailers will sell that at $20, absorbing some of the cost on a temporary basis.
Also, many such retailers have already sought to diversify their supply chains (eg buying clothing from Vietnam and other places).
these are sad/scary times.
That's gotta be something historians will puzzle over for the next two hundred years. It's mind blowing that we did that.
Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?
It was corruption and ineptitude the entire way down. How could that have happened?
Pick one of two very different sides. If a third candidate tries to enter the race, they harm themselves and the person they are similar to, and they help the opposition.
Any form of ranked voting will rid us of this restriction and allow more candidates to run for an office, and allow citizens to vote their true preference.
Yesterday, HR 3040 was introduced by a GOP member from Arizona, which intends to ban ranked choice voting from federal elections. The GOP has already banned it in the state of Florida.
A radical party is terrified of a system that enables more electoral competition and throttles radicalism.
Some political analysts claim that Perot entered the race not really intending to win but rather as retribution against Bush. In 1979 the Iranian regime imprisoned two of Perot's EDS employees. Perot asked Bush, who was then Director of the CIA, to get them out. Bush refused to act and Perot held a grudge against him ever since.
Most interesting part of that story is that once the government failed to help he organized and trained his own operation and successfully extracted his employees.
edit: https://www.rossperot.com/life-story/iran-hostage-rescue
In an election, the addition of a candidate similar to an existing candidate should not adversely impact both candidates.
Muslims in Michegan were convinced Harris is a genocidal maniac, while most everybody else heard she was in bed with hamas.
Liberal suburban housewives heard she was a merciless prosecutor while others learned she was soft on crime.
I guess you forgot about the corpse of Biden. Harris belongs in that "challengers" category except she had less support than DeSantis and Haley (from both Democrats and Republicans!). Harris has never received a vote in a presidential primary.
The Democratic party enabled Trump to win by not forcing a clearly incapable Biden out of the race earlier, allowing them to run an actual primary and then choosing a terrible candidate because they backed themselves into a corner with identity politics. Remember, the Democratic party was totally fine with Biden until he was forced in front of the American people and they got as good of a look at him as the party had.
That's how our system produces these horrible candidates. Each party acts in their own self-interest because they have a stranglehold over the electoral process.
I'm sure she's a wonderful person in real life, but she's one of the most unpopular people to ever run for office.
Obama actually is likeable, easily winning the primary and both elections.
The Dems, because deep down they'd rather have the GOP over real progressives. Decided to rig it for Hillary again in 2016. Sanders had an actual base, but the DNC didn't want him to win.
Biden was a rigged candidate too, but the pandemic swayed things in his direction.
With Harris, the Dems decide to skip the rigged primary, the little people (the actual voters) don't need to have a say. Here's your moderate Republican from the mid 90s.
At least the Republicans didn't rig every primary they've had since 2008. They don't play the super delegate dance.
Well... Time to try and establish residency elsewhere.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/republicans-cancel...
Sanders was a candidate in the Democratic primary (which is already a significant accommodation, with Sanders not even being a member of the Democratic party), and was strongly rejected by Democratic voters -- twice.
The constant whining from Sanders fans about the DNC is simply annoying, and is basically the same conspiratorial thinking that MAGA adherents display when they complain about the "deep state".
Oh ffs, Harris in charge would've been just fine. If we're talking about economy/stock market only, even Vance as president would've been fine as well, although he'd destroy American democracy way more efficiently than Trump.
He said, "It's just not that hard to get these factories back to the states. We can get that done this month."
The amount of cognitive dissonance and just outright believing the lies is astounding.
Trump won't say that states need to build those factories. He'll tell governors that they're failures for not having done it already.
No, he does not and would not want to work in a shoe factory, but he remembers when he was 16 and his first job was actually in a local shoe factory. He said it was a terrible job, but taught him how to keep a job. And he appreciated being able to buy shoes that were made by people he knew. . . . "I want that opportunity for my grandson."
It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to exist in quantity.
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?
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
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
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
It doesn't sound like you like those jobs, shoe factory might not be better, so yay?
Better than being homeless isn't much of a selling point...
https://www.globalhighways.com/wh10/feature/building-replace...
tbh, as far as I'm concerned the hollowing out of the USG is why we can't do things fast. How many times has your boss had the entire team submit a proposal on how long it would take each member of the team to complete a JIRA ticket and then use that bidding as to who to assign the ticket? Like if you could build bridges and stuff in-house then you really speed things up.
Given that something like a factory is probably going to require eminent domain to get a large contiguous tract (or built in the middle of nowhere so no counter-lawsuit) it seems fine for the government to build the shell of a building and then sell it off to be customized.
I have a metal lathe in my shop, if I thought it was worth it I could turn it into a factory in 10 minutes - including the time to change my clothes. I could a factory to build simple toolboxes in about a month - not much space or equipment needed. Building a car assembly line - one month if you will accept a production rate of 1 every year. Want to turn out a new car every minute and it will take a lot longer.
In my local construction market everyone is already working. There’s no slack manpower, particularly in the skilled trades (mech, elec, plumbing)
The above also ignores the fact that nobody wants to lend capital for such projects, so the government will need to finance it.
But retailers have studied that this trick isn't going to last because not everyone wants to buy candy bars in bulk, and they won't spend more than $3 for a single candy bar, which means if it goes any higher they won't by any candy bars at all.
Only one or two I looked at offered an online quote tool, and none of them came even close to the usability and functionality of PCBWay's website. The best one I found was this ridiculously overbuilt system with an embedded 3D engine and one of those shitty 200MB web apps that take 30 seconds to register a click and breaks your back button.
USA is simply not competitive with China on PCBs. For small, cash strapped business, domestic manufacture has never been an option. I expect prices will only go up and up as our entire domestic capacity is absorbed by big corps that can afford the premium. I have no idea how us little guys are supposed to get boards now.
You're not supposed to. It's a backhanded way to quash all competition.
The thing is that China is just really damn good at electronics manufacturing. Their tooling is cutting edge, their workers are career electronics manufacturing workers, and their supply chain is insane.
However I do have a feeling of "if you build it, they will come". But I think it would need to rely heavily on automation. And I'm also not sure how you would deal with the waste in the US. In China the volume is high enough to have local companies that deal with all the byproduct. In the US I would imagine you would have to pay through the nose to dispose of it through some small time contractor 6 states away.
Something like a smartphone would be borderline impossible to do well in the US and keep up with trends.
OK, then the unavailability of containers is actually due to piracy in the middle east.
The US importing less, by itself, decreases the demand for containers.
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/64...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-the-end-of-the-de-...
I think this will hurt the DIY / Maker / IoT community hard.
Over-enforcement creates its own major issues. The cure is worse than the disease.
https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping
He pointed out that these stats are week on week so tend to understate how big the drop really is on a more long term scale
[not affiliated, just like the channel]
Longer term trends would be nice.
You'll see the trends don't seem so bad yet, but they have a previous-12-weeks graph of current year vs previous year which will be interesting to follow
- https://www.bts.gov/freight-indicators
Soybean farmers are hit hard because a lot of their crops went to China. Meanwhile some other exports are basically unaffected right now.
Other countries have generally not been so haphazard in application of tariffs. They don’t want to actively harm their citizens and they try to plan tariffs with more precision and consideration.
Trump's mini trade war with China in 2018 (for which he had to bail out farmers) led to US farmers permanently losing market share in soybean exports to Brazil.
> In 2018, during Trump's first term, the U.S. and China engaged in tit-for-tat tariffs that led Beijing to take permanent steps to reduce its reliance on American farm goods.
> The share of China's soybean imports from the United States dropped to 18% in the first 11 months of 2024, from 40% in the whole of 2016, while Brazil's share grew to 74% from 46%, according to Chinese customs data.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chinese-buyers-s...
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 wealthiest 1000 people, who already pay almost no taxes, can pay slightly less in taxes. They've already started the rhetoric about tax cuts for average people based on the 2017 tax cuts for people below the top bracket expiring this year. The cut in the top bracket and the corporate tax rate cuts were permanent. So another likely temporary tax cut will be sold while giving away trillions to the wealthiest people on the planet.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-tariff-pause-navar...
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 change any minute. For example, there was no plan to set 145% tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump just did it out of nowhere on TruthSocial.
That's also true of foreign policy in general. Rubio and State Department have zero power at the moment. Neither the Russia-Ukraine peace plan, nor Iranian nuclear arms control, nor Gaza-Israel negotiations are going through the State Department.
>All of this is happening so the wealthiest 1000 people, who already pay almost no taxes, can pay slightly less in taxes.
I disagree with that. This all happening because Trump is incompetent but also arrogant and highly opinionated. I don't think there is a nefarious plan here. Trump probably really does think that you can replace income tax with tariff revenue.
The problem with this is they quickly realised it's easier to BS and lie than to be honest and noncommittal. In the latter case they'd have to fess up at some point and say 'well no we didn't have a plan for that/see that coming/whatever' or admit that they simply don't know the answers to relevant questions. Instead they say one thing one day, and when Trump reverses the policy they come on TV a day or two later smirking and saying 'well this was always the plan'. Once their public statements are disconnected from consequences they realize that lying is a way to wield power and of course that quickly becomes intoxicating and addictive.
Right now it might seem to them like it's just some white lies for the greater good/to assuage public anxiety, but in my view that sort of behavior is a one-way street. I think they've already shredded whatever professional credibility they had, and when things get economically bad they'll be incapable of offering leadership or reassurance that would calm markets (in contrast to, say, Lewis Powell at the Federal Reserve). If the economic situation gets sufficiently bad, Trump will throw them to the wolves and hire in some new faces to buy time. We saw this in the first administration, every time he replaced someone the meda and Congress would grant them a honeymoon period and talk about how much better and calmer things were getting, even though this was based on desire rather than outcomes.
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).
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))
At the time of my response, there are five container ships in Eliot Bay, and a large container ship, along with a smaller container ship that just arrived, docked at Harbor Island (the primary port in question).
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-122.338/c...
(based on other replies I guess I'm not the only one in Pioneer Square lol)
Price gouging is so hot rn…
[0] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202312/1304443.shtml ("China’s first self-built fully automated dock enters operation in Qingdao, Shandong Province" (2023))
The dock owners, OTOH...
Yes, that was the point I tried to make. The story isn't the point; the choice of language Chinese state media uses is the point.
Can you even imagine the US government, under either party, boasting about eliminating tens of thousands of US longshoremen jobs?
Most recent I remember UPS firing 20 000 people.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1090727/000109072725...
https://about.ups.com/us/en/newsroom/press-releases/financia...
On the other hand, I guess it might be a great time for small shops and businesses that produce low to medium tech stuff- from crafts, clothing and furniture to electronics. Even if the country's going to suffer they should profit handsomely (which is not a bad thing per se).
It’s better to manufacture out of the country and let US consumers eat the tariff cost on import while keeping your operations efficient outside of the US tariff zone.
It’s an extraordinarily poorly planned policy.
If you do that now in the USA, there’s a fairly large risk that your exports will be taxed, and, with exports to the USA tanking, there’s excess production in the rest parts of the world, so prices will go down outside the USA, at least temporarily.
⇒ If you’re starting a business in the USA today, you should only aim for the domestic market.
What I‘m saying is: the problem sits in the white house.
As a Canadian, it has been hard to stomach. I thought we were brothers working together towards a common future. It would be a lot less heartbreaking if this really was caused by a single individual.
But like, it's not the 1950s anymore, basically every product consists of parts from all over the world.
You can't unpick that in 90 days.
No, I think you're missing the point. This is not to create world-class companies, capable of selling abroad. This is to inject money and optimism in small, local, antiquated businesses that have been long priced out of any competition with the rest of the world.
My grandparents actually worked and met at a denim factory in west Texas which was renowned for its cotton production. Growing up I remember giant cotton fields which have all been replaced with strip malls and sprawl.
It’s going to be a multi-year project at the very least. And even then probably still cheaper to make clothes in Vietnam.
But that’s what MAGA wants and Trump clearly, like Putin, doesn’t want to go anywhere so maybe start now? I can see, like you, how tragically comedic this situation is.
Absolutely not. All of the small businesses I know are getting crushed by tariffs.
Electronics especially. With 125% tariffs on everyone from China, prices just exploded.
Even domestic PCB manufacturers prices and lead times have shot up due to demand.
It’s extremely bad. I don’t think people realize how devastating this is to company that couldn’t amass huge inventories prior to tariffs arriving and can’t lobby the Trump administration for an exemption.
> Even domestic PCB manufacturers prices and lead times have shot up due to demand.
Exactly this, I bet those PCB manufacturers are quite happy. Some of their employees might get the idea of setting up a new business, too.
Not true for many businesses. It’s common to have some inputs or machinery that is imported. Maybe you can win while you’re working through inventory and your machines aren’t breaking down, but if your COGS also go up with tariffs then it might not be a clear win.
Unless those businesses have inputs that rely on China...which many do, those guys are going under.
>Exactly this, I bet those PCB manufacturers are quite happy. Some of their employees might get the idea of setting up a new business, too.
Those US PCB manufacturers didn't care for that business before, they focus on getting fat government or industrial contracts. The reason China was so consumer focused was because they have so much capacity that they must be friendly to my dinky $5 order. Furthermore consider that with 1.4 billion people, there are so many engineers that its extremely cutthroat. You then have a scenario where they assign an engineer to look at my dinky little $5 order because they can.
But since we’re being cynical, is importing stuff just to keep the port workers busy a good idea?
Sure, if we were in a downturn it would slow but not come to a standstill.
From this article "Even during the COVID nonsense, the supply chain did not experience THIS kind of sudden shut down."
Sure but you were being cynical and presented port workers not having having thing to unload as a major issue to worry about. In the whole scheme it seemed like not the first problem to solve.
I love it! If that's the case, then it's easily solved, just ship empty cardboard boxes back and forth to/from Hawaii. The workers can diligently load and unload them, and then load them right back. The truck drivers can do a few loops around Los Angeles even to keep up their training.
That that kind of happened during a phase of the Soviet Union's economic development. The economic success of a branch was measured by the amount of resources consumed and the allocated work done. So they had started building large couches and started running empty trains back and forth to consume wood or fuel and add up "miles driven" to their ledger. We can do the same /s
By all means, retrain the blacksmiths in the early 1900s… but this isn't that sort of situation. We'll need the port workers again.
Well I agree with that phrasing however the OP said it as:
> to be so cynical [...] that would mean a lot of dockworkers/longshoreman are out of jobs or not working right?
That leads to a different interpretation and sounds like something else than what you said (which I agree with).
"Data from the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound, an industry association, shows the number of arriving container ships berthing at Seattle and Tacoma terminals from April 1 to April 24 was down 12% compared with the same period in 2024."
Make no mistake this is bad, but "Port of Seattle EMPTY - ZERO Inbound Ocean Container Ships" is some straight up bullshit.
The stat for "April 1 to April 24" is likely to be different than the stat on April 27th alone. Both may be true.
The port does look pretty empty on https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-122.373/c...
Your stat also includes Tacoma, a close but different port. The Port of Seattle isn't quite empty, but numbers... aren't awesome.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/verify/what-we-can-verify...
> Northwest Seaport Alliance Port of Seattle Commissioner, Ryan Calkins, said the future does not look as good. "The last forecast I saw was forecasting out over the next three months, and each month was forecasted to be down around 25% per month,” Calkins said. The Seaport Alliance said some ships are coming in with less cargo than anticipated. In some cases, it is 30% lower.
(How do you even possibly bankrupt a casino, much less multiple casinos a decade? Is it money laundering or is it being so terrible at running a business that you can't even run a business with the House Advantage of a casino?)
Trade with China is bad. It means a race to the bottom with a foreign country that doesn’t have our labor protections or environmental laws, and whose “comparative advantage” is cheaper labor. This was a widely accepted belief among the left until recently: https://youtu.be/kHRZnz5oHsE?si=A3QViVdPHISAP6qI. It’s insane to give up on beliefs-especially when you’re right—because you’re mad the “wrong people” have finally come around to agreeing with you!
What would the tariffs be if you made them only high enough to offset China’s looser regulation and cheaper labor? The current tariffs probably are in the same ballpark.
That is a wild exaggeration!
(Not that I want the flow to stop.)
Given that the ILAB link you posted itself is maintained by EO 13126 signed by the Clinton Administration, I think there can be nuance in the discussion around whether or not the blanket application of certain foreign policy instruments is the right way to induce a change in the domestic policy of another country to solve the problem of bad labour practices.
We can do this without it becoming an argument about whether trade is "good" or "bad" depending on what "side" you are on.
I remember you used to complain about the degree of corruption in your country of origin and contrast it unfavorably with the solid institutions and procedural safeguards in the US. How times have changed.
I sometimes deal with a Canadian vs a Chinese supplier for a component of a consumer product, and the difference in customer service, quality, and speed is stark. AND it’s cheaper. The only issue from a logistics point of view is that China is far and shipping is slow.
But the item I in question is low-cost and plastic.
There are other, higher-margin things we buy from Canadians and the experience is very different. But these aren't the things people typically want to onshore with tariffs.
But even then "better labor laws" or "stronger environmental protections" aren't among the demands being made to China.
First of all, nobody in the current administration would give a shit if somehow China made a deal. The Tariffs would go back down again. The Tariffs are not contingent upon good labor laws in China or anything like that. Like seriously. Yes, the left wants better labor power and yes the left continues to understand that offshoring reduces labor power. But Trump et al are not credible as champions of the working man and this policy is not even really directed that way.
Second, even if this were a policy goal, going about it this way is, and I really can't put this any other way, fucking stupid. Even your dumbest leftist can understand that if you want to make changes to your economy you do so with some lead time and in such a way as to, you know, not empty shelves and drive up costs for the regular working people.
By all means, we should pursue a humanist trade policy that pressures developing countries to improve labor rules, human rights, democracy, etc. But to characterize this present circumstance as that is ridiculous.
But nobody besides Trump is going to do that, because everyone is addicted to the short term boosts of free trade. Obama talked a big game and then in office became a free trader that was pushing TPP before Trump killed it.
The reason Trump happened is because the grownups have been rowing in the wrong direction for 40 years.
Trump clearly has zero interest in the human rights of people who are not American, and even Americans don't seem to rate too high if they don't support him. Just because liberal politicians did too much free trade we do not have to pretend like this is a good policy or that Trump cares about International Labor.
Gdp, consumer index scores, all that stuff is a measure of how much poor people are willing to spend and how hard they're working. What really matters is, can these people buy a house? Can they buy eggs?
I don't know how many of them will be all that caught up that they can't buy some disposable flip-flops on Temu anymore. We need to focus more on how hard it is to live than how hard it is to import stuff.
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.
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.
I'm not an economist or supply chain expert myself, so I rely on actual subject-matter experts to interpret and contextualize the raw numbers for me. So far, they're all painting a pretty gloomy picture.
Good people to follow on this are CEO of Flexport Ryan Petersen [1], Jason Miller from MSU who had a great podcast with Derek Thompson [2], CEO of FreightWaves Craig Fuller [3], etc.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/small-businesses-buying-impo...
[2] https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/04/28/its-about-to-get-much-...
Same if they were transporting them to the store, or delivering them to a home, or…
[1] https://www.traceone.com/resources/plm-compliance-blog/foods...
[2] https://www.nahb.org/advocacy/top-priorities/building-materi...
[^1]: Of course, the whole "eggs as an economic indicator" was far right propaganda to conflate the bird flu with the broader economy