Posted by Aloisius 4 days ago
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Omit internet tropes.
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
nickff: I agree it was borderline. My sentiment was closer to suggesting we look past tone to how shocking the content is. The human brain tries to normalize things, but a statement like this would have been unprecedented before 2016. People would have resigned or been fired, it would have been a scandal.
[1] right now. It is possible it was in an earlier version of the article.
Downvote as you choose and move on. Maybe I ought to take my own advice.
The problem with shallow dismissals in general is that it is a low bar for a comment. The problem with shallow dismissals in the context of someone else's work is that it's invalidating something which should be celebrated. They're both problems for different reasons. A comment explaining why one thinks the quote is ridiculous is more substantive than simply laughing at it.
The problem is if you do the work of analyzing the overt liars' statements, people will then pick on that for being too inflammatory. Never mind the downvotes from the true believers that are still gulping down the Kool-aid.
if you treat all this information as equally deserving of respect, then you spend all your time with a flood of intentional nonsense
I remember back in the age of dinosaurs, when HN made it a point of turning usernames lighter grey so comments would stand on their own. It made sense at the time for all of us coming up on the early Internet where humans were scarce and if someone was speaking you could assume not just that they were doing so in good faith (modulo mental illness), but that they were somewhere between higher intelligence and a bona fide leader in their field. This is laughably naive today, even more so with the rise of LLM slop.
Of course the major immediate problem here is the propagandists have set up shop in one of the key authorities of our society, and are still fueled by a crowd that still thinks they're supporting some kind of "independent thinking" revolution rather than totalitarian Party-allegiance-first regime akin to the Soviet Union, to a larger degree than "the woke" ever was. Navarro's bizzarro-universe economics and "anti-woke" applied to research/academics are basically our modern Lysenkoism. Same shit, different time period.
But I already know you’re going to shit on those. People like you who ask that question aren’t asking in good faith.
But a better question might be. "Why is apnews an unreliable source for this information."
General distrust of a news outlet doesn't mean that the given article is false. I've seen some questionable shit from the BBC, though I generally trust them.
> Noone in their right mind will start building factories in USA because of temporary tariffs that all might go away with an executive order and a stroke of a pen comes January 2029.
(I checked because the story just smells weird...)
Even if you assumed that, you started at step 1 and didn't think past that.
Let's assume China pays the tariff. Is China going to eat that? They will probably pass it onto the seller.
OK now what? Let's say before the tariffs, their total unit cost is $5, and they sell it to you for $10 (I'm just making stuff up here).
Tariffs were 145% at some point. So China pays $14.50. China passes it onto the seller, now the total unit cost is $19.50. They lost $9.50.
Are they in the business to lose money with every sale? No.
However, that presents a problem. The tariff they paid? It's higher than the price they sold it to you. That will remain the same regardless of the price you have to pay. Even if they charged you $1mil, they could not make a profit, because the tariff would be $1.45mil.
So, yeah, you were very much wrong. The idea is not only unrealistic, it is mathematically impossible if the goal is to actually make money when tariffs are 100% or more.
“Man on the street” doesn’t know how tariffs work (or at least believes the bullshit), and I’m not surprised. But I’m truly surprised that someone running a business fell for this, especially given the person saying it.
How do you run a business that relies on imports and not know how tariffs work?
You have been importing parts from China, yet you didn't know how tariffs work? I have a hard time believing this.
Like all the other sibling comments, just... sigh.
I did not assume any such thing.
My current home remodeling project with new siding and windows and so on, I've had to pay ~$2K extra in tariffs on just the materials for my soffits (planks of Canadian cedar). Boils my blood in anger.
If you are traveling or sell in Europe: in Europe, it is generally expected (or even mandatory) that customers are displayed the price all taxes included.
Companies selling to other companies normally use an ex VAT price and then VAT is added on top
It's mandatory to include VAT in displayed consumer prices, yeah. In some countries there are _other_ point of sale fees which may not have to be displayed, though; in particular deposit return fees for cans and bottles often aren't displayed.
Why would they pay a tax that's levied by the US government? In both the most literal sense, and in the sense of keeping their prices the same.
... Wait, why did you assume that? Like, you looked at, in one corner, essentially every economist in the world, and on the other corner ol' Minihands, with his background in failing to sell steak and run casinos, and thought "yeah, this guy's probably right"?
I'm genuinely kind of fascinated; was this a kind of active "expertise is bad, people who don't know anything are more likely to be right about things than experts in those things" thing?
> and even with 24% VAT (local tax) it is way cheaper to produce your merch and then send it to USA
If you are paying VAT on product which you are then exporting to the US, then you need to urgently talk to an accountant. You should likely not be paying this, and depending on the country you may have a limited window to reclaim such overpayment.
If you are buying your finished goods from Europe you shouldn't be paying VAT.
That's sad for those employees in Texas, but relatedly, why were you manufacturing in Texas before? Was it just quick delivery or were labor rates lower in Texas?
Based on your description, your product sounds like it requires highly skilled assembly labor.
How much would labor rates have to fall in Texas for you to move manufacturing back despite the tariffs?
Folks were screaming it from the rooftops for months prior to the election. So many folks, yourself included, refused to accept reality and now we all suffer the pain.
I would say "Maybe folks will learn!" But I know they won't. US voters as a bloc seem to have an incredibly short memory. They'll forget about all of this pain and stupidity within moments of Trump leaving office.
> The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.
I spend a lot of time (too much, apparently) chatting with MAGA folks and this is a stunningly accurate description. It really is just pre-programmed slogans. You see it now even in Congressional hearings of cabinet members, which is fucking horrifying.
I understand from your post that you are a business person, buying product, performing value added services and selling for profit. Although I know little about business, I would guess that if one of your suppliers raised the prices on one of the inputs to your finished goods, you would likely increase the price of your product to preserve your profits and continue your business as a venture. I would guess that you would not pay the additional cost out of your own pocket.
My question is; why did you not expect the same logic to play out in the tariffs situation? That any country would pay the additional cost of doing business out of their own pocket and not pass it on to the consumer?
What this administration's model of tariffs completely misses is how fungible labor and manufacturing are in the world now. Business is as much about strength of information as strength of arm or strength of steel. It's hard to believe they had any professionals in the room when they came up with this "protectionist" scheme.
A good analogy a friend once gave me was that there are two ways to build a car in the US. You can tool up an industry ecosystem where you can gather (or produce) base materials and then shape and combine them into small parts, make the small parts into larger parts, do final assembly, and roll them off an assembly line. Or, you can take about as much land as you'd use for that, maybe a bit less, and grow corn. Lots of corn. Lots and lots of corn. Then you put that corn on a boat. Ten months later, that boat comes back with cars on it.
When the world is that varied a place, one country trying to jam its finger in the dkye via tariffs is a fool's errand. The economy will interpret artificial cost as damage and route around it.