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Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
by JSR_FDED 1y ago
Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
- oarla 1y agoTrue, but does not help in this case with vintage parts.
- glitchc 1y agoI believe the OP was attempting humour.
- oarla 1y agoYes. Pitfall of not reading the entire comment before responding.
- robrain 1y agoPlease engage sarcasm-awareness mode.
- dullcrisp 1y agoNeither humans nor LLMs are currently equipped with separate sarcasm-awareness modes so telling someone to engage theirs can only be…ohh
- xxs 1y agothat's so beyond obviously a sarcastic remark. In that regard I'd consider a vast majority of the humans totally capable of detecting dead pan sarcasm both in spoken and written speech.
- nandomrumber 1y agoIsn’t there a well known internet adage that speaks to this? Do you remember what it is?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoCunningham's law
- mindcrime 1y agoWhat? No it's not, it's ... Hang on a sec... you sly devil, you! Not falling for that one. Hmmmpphhh.
- nandomrumber 1y agoCunningham himself even claims it was a misquote, and that he never suggested such a thing.
- gopher_space 1y ago“Shouting incorrect directions in Ironforge” predates Cunningham by several years in any case.
- oarla 1y agoNoted.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 1y agoI know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover. Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.
- epistasis 1y agoGood thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
- Gibbon1 1y agoReminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.
- seg_lol 1y agoSociopaths. It breaks me to see the Fed use interest rates to cause unemployment as the lever against inflation. It all seems so cruel.
- zahlman 1y agoThey use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever. Zoom out; recent levels are actually quite impressive in the USA. Yes, they've climbed since 2023, but they're only just reaching the pre-GFC minimum (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...). Zoom out further: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/ Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.
- tho1342834y9234 1y agoQuite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
- jalapenos 1y agoSince it came from India shouldn't they be paying a tariff on that model
- Freedom2 1y ago[flagged]
- charcircuit 1y agoIf the seller from the country doesn't pay the tariff then it gets passed to the consumer. Someone has to pay the tarrif to import a tariffed good.
- m463 1y agoWe need to get industry to step up production of the AST 6 pack plus, or Plus hardcard. maybe even s-100 bus cards.
- xnx 1y ago[flagged]
- all2 1y agoSpecifically thin sliced potatoes fried in industrial lubricants.
- reactordev 1y agoWith chemical compounds spread on them for flavor. In a package made of PFAS.
- lanna 1y agoNaCl is a chemical compound
- reactordev 1y agoCorrect…
- khannn 1y agoWHOA! I prefer my po-tay-toes sliced and fried in duck fat.
- bathtub365 1y agoSince ducks are migratory shouldn’t duck products be tariffed?
- like_any_other 1y agoToo bad all the competent politicians were dead set against preventing the "free market" from hollowing out American manufacturing.
- bruce511 1y agoI understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated. First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again. However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor. A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.) So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor. Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard. Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.) So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.) Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.) You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
- mindslight 1y ago... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoWe need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen. But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
- mindslight 1y agoOr targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
- bruce511 1y agoNo sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct. Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place. Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption. A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production. Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
- rootusrootus 1y ago> The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee Well, Hawaii does, but your point is good, thank you.
- bruce511 1y agoI knew that would come up :). Yes, Hawaii produces about 1% of the coffee consumed in the US. I'm guessing a chunk of that is consumed in Hawaii... But I'm glad you got the point. :).
- Terr_ 1y agoThe best time to manufacture vintage computer parts is 28 years ago, but the second-best time is today! :p
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> The best time to manufacture vintage computer parts is 28 years ago, but the second-best time is today! :p What was so special about 1997?
- rootusrootus 1y agoNot GP, but I would just like to say that while every time period has good and bad, 1997 was pretty damn great in the grand scheme of things. Not just that year, but the 90s in general. If I could pick a decade to live in and never leave...
- oliwary 1y agoInteresting that the Matrix picked the 90s as it's world to lock humanity into as well... Prescient?
- Terr_ 1y agoThe author mentions needing the parts for Apple Network Servers, so I went and checked when those stopped being sold, which was ~1997.
- yibg 1y agoWhen there is enough demand for vintage parts, it'll motivate someone to create a time machine to manufacture them in larger volume in the past and bring them to the present. Win win.
- tanepiper 1y agoThis explains why John Titor needed to come back for those IBM parts
- amypetrik8 1y agoJohn Titor COULD have purchased those IBM parts from the empires of Eastasia or Eurasia, but the tariffs would, 10 years from now, become so vicious and brutal that it was preferable to simply say "to hell with it, I'm taking my dual singularity 1976 corvette back in time to get that part, then maybe I'll do some online trolling on the trip back home"
- forinti 1y agoMake 8 bits great again!
- fcoury 1y agoIt's interesting. I grew up in Brazil and if you don't know, we are very famous for having one of the most exorbitant importing tariffs in the world. I thought that with time Brazil would modernize and get closer to the US in that regard. It's really sad to see the opposite happening.
- shaky-carrousel 1y agoAuthor must be European, as Trump said tariffs would be paid by foreign countries.