But when tariffs change faster than it takes to get the shipment from source to destination, the bond won't be for the right amount. You then enter the wonderful world of "insufficient bonds". Here's "Understanding Insufficient Customs Bonds in Nine Easy Steps", which outlines the process and tries to sell you on a service that deals with the problem.[1]

Coming May 2: the end of "de miniumus" customs exemptions for small packages under $800 value. Goodbye, Shein, Ali Express, and dropshippers. Unless, of course, the rules are changed again.

[1] https://www.afcinternationalllc.com/customs-brokerage-news/u...

The invisible hand of the market will let you know what aspect of your output is most valuable for others.

The benefit of this invisible hand is that the "economy" as a whole does not need to know how good they are at producing everything. People just need to know if what they are producing now is more valuable than the next best alternative. Everything else will be sorted out with market forces.

In university lectures we were given the famous argument about olive oil from Greece and that it would never make sense to do our own olive oil because we both lack the natural resources (unique soil + sunshine) which allow olive trees to grow easily and we'd also have much better yields growing other things on the fields.

So to me, both opportunity cost and comparative advantage are really basic building blocks of economic understanding and I'm a bit dumbfounded that someone wouldn't understand these concepts.

Comparative advantage is an emergent property of trade that occurs naturally, it is the default state of being and can only be undermined by government policy.

You benefit from comparative advantage when you buy bread from the bakery instead of spending 2 hours a day baking your own bread.

Imagine how much poorer you'd be if the government put a large tax on you buying bread to force you to bake it yourself, in the name of self-sufficiency.

That's what's happening with these blanket tariffs, instead of targeting only critical defense manufacturing, Trump also wants t-shirt sweatshops to magically come back to the US despite only 4% unemployment. It's rank foolishness.

It's mostly not that complicated. Ecuador is better at bananas, the US is better at software so they trade. And similar stuff.

Maybe I'm not getting what you're saying, but I don't think so. The point of comparative advantage is that even if country A is better at making guns and butter than B, A is better off only making guns or butter and trading to B for the other.

A key assumption being: "Factors of production are fully employed in both the countries. ... The theory assumes full employment. However, every economy has an existence of underemployment."

Another key assumption is "The labor cost determines the price of the two commodities. ... The theory only considers labor costs and neglects all non-labor costs involved in the production of the commodities."

One assumption not listed there is an implicit assumption as in much of economics of infinite demand for anything and no law of diminishing-to-negative returns when considering the environmental and psychological costs of consumption.

So, if you have unemployment in the producer country like China (meaning, there is no reason for them to limit their production) along with a significant capital investment in production infrastructure (like in the Shenzhen region for electronics), and you have limited demand in the consumer country like the USA (meaning, only so much can be sold there at any specific time), then the country which can produce stuff more cheaply will just flood the market of the other country for all goods in question -- even if the consumer country could in theory produce one of the goods at higher costs (or lower quality). Of course, there may eventually be macroeconomic issues like balance of trade issues and countries unable to pay for more goods (which the USA has avoided to date because the US dollar is the refactor global currency backed by the USA's global policing role for decades as a defacto empire). But even if labor in the consumer country like the USA is free, given realistically a lot of cost related to equipment and energy (and increasingly AI and robotics) and more nebulous things like supply chain integration and a can-do attitude, the consumer country may not be able to compete on price and quality of finished products from the more materially productive economy.

Tangential, but "Humans Need Not Apply" makes a good argument when they suggest that horses are essentially obsolete in modern industry (in the same way people may be soon). It's not that you sometimes use horses to any great degree in modern manufacturing (whereas before they pulled carts and turned machines) -- it is that for almost any industrial task horses are more trouble than they are worth now in terms of cost and reliability compared to electric motors or diesel engines and so on.

An economic theory like "Comparative Advantage" that entirely emphasizes labor costs is increasingly obsolete if human labor is less and less a major factor of production. The theory assumes a country will always have people doing something productive, but that is like saying we should bring horses back into factories when robots are generally more reliable. If people are not skillful with access to tools and capital and don't have a can-do attitude, then they will just suffer economically (unless protected somehow) No doubt there are special cases where horses are still useful in production or transport like how mules were used recently to get supplies into hurricane damaged North Carolina, but they are rare as long as the modern industrial system and its surrounding infrastructure functions well. Similarly, there may still be human roles in production, but they will continue to diminish. In 2010, I put together some options for dealing with this situation, available here: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Tariffs are/can be effective, you're just not supposed to tariffs everything on a whim.

   - Trump

One that comes to mind is "a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip" — like all good quotes, attributed to a wide variety of famous people.

Competent governments send arse kissers to those who need pampering, and send blunt to those who need to see bluntness. But (in a competent government) these things are uncorrelated with the actual negotiation position — "speak softly and carry a big stick" etc.

Trump being bellicose to everyone at the same time is a sign of his own incompetence.

I wonder how many of his supporters bought at $70 ...

It's not even that it is pure evil and predatory, it's the aesthetics of it... It tainted civilization, at the very least America! It's so, so pathetic and cringe. Unbearably distasteful and undignified. Too much cringe.

The only thing topping this, was the president of the United States selling cars in front of the white house, a few weeks later. I can't.

Man, imagine an alien patrol passing that Tesla (a billionaire's fucking car in space as a beacon of Earth life's legacy, honestly makes wanna puke) and then learning about the state of things here. I feel embarrassed to the core living in this period of time. I'd rather shit my pants on live TV.

I crave the cleansing heat and certainty of thermonuclear warheads. Shoot these fucker with a bullet of frozen sewage and then sterilize this place for we all sinned collectively. Send some tardigrades to Mars and hope for something better, but turn off the lights on Earth.

Tainted.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

Every time I've looked at local manufacturing, whether machine shops or anything else, the prices are higher than Ali but not unreasonable.

> what the heck you wtite about. You suffer some memory loss?

> licking his ass and patiently waiting for him to die or

I can see why political threads on HN are flagged away so aggressively. It’s hard to want to even try to have a conversation when this is the level of discourse getting upvoted.

Look I don't want to be too harsh on Americans nobody took the Nazis seriously when they had already written a book about how they saw the world... But none of this is shocking.

There is an ideology behind what Trump is doing and he never hid it from the world.

No they weren't. They were changed to 10%. Prior to all of this the average was 2.5%. So that's not a removal at all, but a rather large average increase even if you exclude the omglol China rate.

Congress should be stepping in if the president is overstepping his legal authority, or if they wish to reduce his legal authority. The Republican party has control of Congress and our political system has devolved into a game of blind faith in your team, neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.

We need principled leaders who care to run an effective government based on our constitution. We have few, if any, of those people in charge.

Democracy cannot survive a political party that spends 50 years electing worse and worse criminals, and sacrificing everything to the alter of "More power for our party"

Voters did not punish republicans for Nixon. Voters did not punish republicans for Iran-Contra. Voters did not punish republicans for several market and economic failures. Voters did not punish republicans for multiple outright illegal wars waged on false pretenses that cost us tens of trillions of dollars, spent explicitly from debt.

So this is what you get. The bar will keep getting lower until republican voters finally decide they won't support literally any criminal with an R next to them.

So we are fucked basically.

The legislative branch already has a lot of power. I'd be very concerned giving them the direct control, or even shared control, over enforcement. They should be controlling enforcement through legislation.

That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there. That is a very good reason to otherwise limit the authority of the executive branch though, and why executive orders as used today shouldn't be legal (they effectively are a legislative branch with the enforcement agencies).

The executive power of our PM relative to the body politik is much higher. We don’t have a tradition of backbench rebellion, and the PMO often wields more power than the cabinet.

PMs in Canada wield a ton of power and AFAIK are rarely removed. I'm not sure what exactly you consider to be misinformation here. It's extremely rare for members of parliament to vote against their party.

Another example I can think of is Israel where the prime minister yields a ton of power.

I might be wrong but I think the use of the Emergencies Act was not approved in Parliament? How about the weapons embargo on Israel?

Counterpoint: About 1/3 of Australia's GDP is small business. We have very few tariffs. We have a high minimum wage (about USD$16/hr) and it's enforced, so slavery yada, yada isn't a factor.

What you said sounds like it might be true, but in reality it ain't so.

Consumers could always make this decision for themselves and pick domestic over foreign. It seems extremely unlikely, but I also see bringing back manufacturing without massive economic shock as extremely unlikely. If I want a pipe dream, it be for manufacturing to come back because consumers actually care that it comes back.

Thank you for bringing this up