It seems we’re now entering the “find out” stage, and it’s incredibly frustrating.
As a tinkerer who loves building things, this is heartbreaking stuff. I have projects in progress that may have to be put on hold.
I tend to order things as I need them, but it’s tempting to stockpile the basics. But I don’t think it will help much in the long run if this continues, and truly hope this madness will be seen for what it is and an appropriate backlash/correction will follow.
I'm not even completely anti-tariff. I just think the way we're going about doing these tariffs is pretty much the opposite way anyone who was trying to bring manufacturing back to the US would do them. Low, clear ratcheting up tariffs are tariffs that allow businesses time to change their strategy without disrupting their income streams. Instead, we're going to bankrupt basically anyone who isn't already a multi-national.
Maybe I'm an idiot and I'm missing something clear, but to me, the reason why the S&P500 and passive investing have been so successful since basically the 1940's is simply that we have had competent, technocratic administrations for the last hundred years. Other countries' markets have not fared so "efficiently."
Again, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm looking at this much more defensively than I did under the first administration. The one thing I can't figure out is the dollar. My brother is obsessed with the "dollar milkshake" theory, whereas it seems clear that we are messing with reserve status and are trying to intentionally weaken the dollar... I just don't know. It doesn't really make much sense what we're doing, and I haven't found anyone who can make an argument that makes sense to me.
The White House, evidently. After the 90-day pause was "leaked" on Twitter[1], the market gained trillions in value, which it promptly lost when the White House disavowed it, before gaining back after the president posted that "It [was] a good time to buy DJT" (paraphrasing), and then formally announcing the 90-day tariff pause a few hours later.
1. The jury is still out whether that was an actual leak, or a guess that later became policy.
Have you not been paying attention? Tariff announcements.
It’s not like WSB has any inside info, and we conspiracy theories are always “fun”.
Yes and, to your point, with an independent federal reserve. If that gets messed with, things could get much worse for the U.S..
Import-substitution is bad for econ 101 reasons that most people who have an axe to grind against Dems would've been absolutely capable of grasping only a few years ago. Now, it seems so many are willing to turn off a part of their brains for this short-sighted wishful thinking. "Well, the official narrative is that we're doing this to get manufacturing back, so let's wait and see" is something most people would immediately perceive as bs if a Dem was sitting in the Oval Office. Seeing a politician campaign on a stupid platform, and then getting surprised he actually shoots himself in the foot spending political capital pursuing is also very Latin American.
The good part is that the soon-to-be-coming recession the federal government just fabricated out of thin air is fully self-inflicted, and therefore somewhat easy to fix. The bad part is you have (at least) 4 more years of this lunacy, so it might take a while.
Many people in America seem to be convinced that their involvement in the democracy ended after voting in the elections, and cannot conceptualize how to deal with an adversarial government. The scale of the protests and pushback Trump administration has received is laughably small compared to the scale of America as a country. People are lacking a basic political immune system, or even a sense of self preservation.
And the most puzzling part is that the entire situation is 100% self-inflicted. It usually takes a major war or a sustained external campaign to inflict the kind of damage Trump administration has done to the country in such a short period of time.
The goal is to eliminate income taxes and replace it with tariffs. An added bonus (for the administration), is that tariffs can be changed if the party in question pays for access to make their case.
The stated reasoning of supporting domestic industry is a smoke screen for the above.
Maybe there is an equilibrium in there, but I don’t see it.
Taxes don't incentivise earning less, but tarriffs most definitely incentivises spending less!
This theory does not make sense.
The theory "makes sense" in that it's what he's stated as a goal. But as policy, it's nonsensical. This is our world now.
If Trump cared so much about America's allies, why has he also imposed tariffs on Canada and repeatedly threatened to annex it? Why has he repeatedly talked about annexing Greenland?
China has been moving the manufacturing to their allies for years, as their labour force climbs the value chain.
Here in Aotearoa I am looking forward to continued booming trade with China and it's allies, hoping our government (we have a particularly bad one too currently) do not try to suck up to Mr Trump.
But the insanity in USA is bad for everyone. Hopefully we will get used to it soon and adjust to living without USA trade, and dollars
That will be good for everyone but the USA
Tinkers are inventors, which are future entrepreneurs. This administration can't think as far ahead as its nose.
I don't see any evidence that they can't or don't think far ahead. These are people who think that "Competition is for losers". Past that, they're smart cookies.
It’s not just that I may not be able to continue some projects, but that I may not be able to continue pushing the boundaries of my knowledge and experience as I learn more.
Thinking about this in terms of younger aspiring builders, this will stagnate the technical growth of a generation.
We did it with air conditioner upgrades, among other things. Now? Five figures of previously-probable, but optional, spending for the rest of the year is on hold indefinitely. Prices on lots of things (construction materials, holy shit) are already way up, so we'll be sitting on as much cash as we can until that eases up. We don't need that much, really....
When covid hit, I def sold a lot of junk that I had sitting around for years
It seems that China has the upper hand for now, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Watching these people discover where the world's rare earths come from is equally amazing and terrifying.
There are reasons that the Chinese (government) want so many dollars, and the external funds are not easy to replace (or they would have done it already). This is not to support the current trade ‘war’, but just to point out that it’s a bit more complicated than you can describe in a pithy comment.
Yes, sounds like something that should be changed to increase the strength of the US. China has protectionist economic policy and trade barriers. If that equals strength why shouldn't we do it too?
Tall order to prove this. Does it actually equal strength? What is strength and does China actually have said strength? None of this is defined.
Additionally, China has economic policies that if the US followed would be very, like the games they play with their currency valuation for example. They also have stringent capital controls, many of their largest businesses are the government has a large slice of the ownership, they subsidize export corporations to a much broader degree etc.
Are you also arguing for those things as well? Because its not simply tariffs that mark the only difference in economic policy between the US and China
The other asinine thing is we implemented tariffs against all countries, without a plan, and without a definitive proven reason as to why. As many economists have pointed out, the trade deficit is very deceiving and does not equate to there being a problem for the US inherently.
profound, comprehensive stupidity
Actually righting the severe damage done to our industrial base would take constructive direction by the government to build it back - once again the complete opposite of what they're actually doing by attacking our still-existing educational/research institutions.
At best high tariff taxes are just closing the barn door long after the horse ran away. But really it's just the same old pattern of the same type of hollow politicians using pent up frustration about the last scam to drive support for their next scam.
It also needs a plan for mining rare earth minerals as well as a plan for processing them.
On the flip side the deal with Ukraine for rare earth minerals might just end the war, if not Russia see this as an opportunity to get all of the territory it currently occupies.
In all seriousness though, China is also not some young slick economic powerhouse. It's largely propped up facade with serious structural issues that the US doesn't have.
Also keep in mind that while countries are annoyed with the US, that doesn't mean they are going to welcome Chinese ships into their waters.
Yes, their housing market is messed up and that causes problems in the financial sector, but it's a real stretch to call everything else in the country "propped up".
Other countries simply don't have the same supply lines and trained workforce. There are no other countries with anything even remotely comparable to something like Shenzhen's electronics market, for example. Who wants to go to a different country when your product will take longer to ship, will have a worse quality, and will be more expensive to manufacture?
Besides, the US doesn't have a stable foreign policy. Moving your manufacturing to a different country takes years, why would anyone start that process when there is zero guarantee that the same tariffs will be in place a month from now, let alone a year or two from now?
And where would you move to? Any country which attracts a significant amount of manufacturing is pretty much guaranteed to be hit with the same kind of tariffs. The only safe option is the US itself - but it's often cheaper to just accept the tariffs!
I bet a lot of companies are just going to accept the revenue loss and wait for the US to stop acting crazy. The tariffs are only just starting to hit and people are already getting mad. This won't last forever.
This is tempered, isn't it?
1) the whole advantage of China that we exploited WAS a large untrained uneducated workforce. That wasn't worth it anymore and things like textiles have already largely moved.
Of course, this doesn't apply to a number of sectors like electronics. But:
2) anyone educated and/or with money is scrambling to leave China, and this is nothing new.
I think the answer fairly conclusively in the global south is that, yes, yes they will let Chinese ships in their waters.
It will be bizarro-land if we have people in Kenya, Colombia, South Africa, and Peru driving around in 10000 dollar Chinese EVs and using 5000 dollar Chinese robots to clean their homes. While we pay 5 to 10 times that for the same conveniences.
I seriously think there's a really good chance the world 25 years from now may have a fundamentally different structure than it has had for the past 100 years.
I was Peru last year and saw nothing but Chinese made electronics, especially phones, and a lot of cars. I see more and more Chinese electric cars in Mexico too. Talking to the locals they seem to like Chinese tourists just wish they spent as much as Americans.
Sounds like high IQ statesman's behavior.
> He just skull fucked Chinas economy.
There, we get high IQ commentary as well... seems like, we're lucky today.
The brightest people in the world want to come here and contribute to our economy and spend the money they earn here at your businesses. That’s a privilege, and it’s too bad we don’t value it more.
Not any more. Not the women, the queer, poc...
And in many cases, these products are neither cheap nor expensive, they’re simply the only option, because no one else in the world manufactures them. So, what exactly are we comparing them to? And if the assumption is that producing the same goods in Europe or the US would be more expensive then that’s likely true but only because we still expect to earn a living wage, even in factory jobs
This is exactly it. And even if an item can be US-supplied, it's components are only available from China.
Tariffs are how we get it to stop being built in the US.
They can't tell businesses "Look, we've dramatically increased your cost of doing business, made your products more expensive (which will likely lead to lower sales) and we're forcing you to spend extra capital by paying tariffs on your products... Now all you need to do is come up with billions of dollars to build the factories that build your product and eat the high costs for the 5 - 10 years it will take to build the factories. We don't care if you're a small business that only sells $1M of product a year, if you want to reduce your costs, you need to build the factories."
Of course, the question is whether Americans really want those factory jobs -- do parents aspire to have their children work in a factory assembling iPhones? There's only so many Robot Technician jobs to go around (despite the promise of unlimited high paid technician jobs, for the forseable future there will be plenty of menial factory jobs)
P.S. I love sherlock holmes, and from that have some fascination of Victorian England, I just never thought we would go back to it. It was great if you were a noble and/or rich, but most of the populous wasn't either and suffered. All from my understanding, so historians or just more historically knowledgeable people can correct me.
Perhaps you’re calling bullshit and proposing that something else is going on.
Calling that out specifically would be beneficial.
And indeed some of their actions don't even line up with bringing manufacturing back to the US as a goal; like the whole concept of 'reciprocal' tariffs being different country-by-country. And making a big deal out of 'making deals' with countries to lower tariffs.
Not to mention that if bringing manufacturing back to the US was really a primary goal, there are better ways to accomplish it than forcefully and recklessly driving the US into a deep economic contraction -- because it'll mean investing a lot of capital in building a lot of manufacturing capacity, and business doesn't like investing huge amounts of capital during a downturn, and we're on the cusp of the mother of all downturns because even if capital gets sank into rebuilding domestic manufacturing, it's going to take years before it can come online.
What I think is really going on is that a lot of wealthy people got wealthier by exploiting opportunities that arose from the 2008 crisis; and they want another bite at the apple, so one is being manufactured.
I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
Not only is there no coherent plan for how that reliance will be reduced, but we’ve now crippled ourselves in the meantime.
> I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
You're assuming the 'total reliance' argument and corresponding actions are being done in good faith. The original 'emergency' declarations justifying large initial tariffs in February were because of a 'fentanyl crisis'. Which then morphed in to 'well, we should be manufacturing here for defense purposes' and assorted other arguments along the way ("we're getting ripped off!", etc).
There's a danger in being cynical about this, but also danger in taking everything at face value. There's been no coherent communicated policy with justifications and expected outcomes or timelines ever put forward the same way twice from this administration.
To clarify, I’m not assuming the administration is acting in good faith.
But in casual conversation, I try to assume the person who worries about total reliance is acting in good faith, so my reply was primarily directed at the comment itself which I have to assume comes from someone who may believe the administration is actually attempting to address the issue.
I think there are numerous ways to split this:
- The reliance concern as a standalone consideration
- How the current administration sees/uses this concern
- How the public perceives this concern
- How the current administration claims they’re addressing it
- Whatever the current administration’s true goals are
And their approach is to cripple our own government.
The incentive for their companies is that they can access US markets. But their government is a bit different. That government has clearly been serious about 2 things for the past couple of decades, one is developing an internal market. (Which, prior to our imposition of tariffs, they were failing miserably at). The other is their pivot to the global south. (Which, prior to our imposition of tariffs, they were wildly successful at).
Now that we started a trade war, they will be more successful at both. Especially the pivot to the global south. I guess I just can't see why the government of China feels more urgency to talk with us, than it feels to accelerate their pivot to, and development of, markets in the global south for instance? Why is talking to us the better choice for their government strategically speaking?
I mean, if I were sitting in their shoes, I'd just be like, "Man, this is be the perfect illustration of why it was so important to pivot to the global south in the first place."
We can buy goods by printing money, which no other nation can lay claim to, because the U.S. Dollar is the default world currency. Everyone accepts USD, and wants USD. Every other nation on Earth in fact is always looking to buy dollars, because dollars are what everything is purchased in. Further, our standing in the globe and favorable geographic location means we can import anything from virtually anywhere, but most especially China, Korea, and Japan.
Yeah we don't "make things" here anymore, the pundits say, apart from dozens of product categories over hundreds of industries. "Everything comes from China!" Okay, and? I don't want a job in a factory and I suspect a shitload of other people here also don't, and my source for that is every factory and logistics center near me is constantly trying to hire people and seemingly being unable to.
If we assume China is an adversary, then I would say it logically follows that the vast majority of American executives are in fact collaborating with the enemy, because they played critical roles in getting China to where it is today.
Free markets don't care about moral concerns like that though, just what's most economically efficient. And in the absence of tariffs, trading with China is very economically efficient.
Fill in the blank with preferred major nation power of your choice.
As opposed to an authoritarian, Democratic regime making military threats against neighboring free, democratic nations (Canada)?
> If everything stayed exactly the way it is today, except the Communist party rulership were dissolved and replaced by a multi-party constitutional republic with representatives appointed through free, open elections I don't think the US would have nearly the same incentive to divest from China.
Why does the U.S. have the right to declare unilaterally what forms of government are acceptable and what aren't? And no I'm not saying we have to necessarily trade with them, obviously, apart from the fact that the CCP came into power in 1949. We're a bit late to suddenly have issues with their government NOW after nearly half a century spent working with them in the open, and giving them shit tons of money.
Our right to declare that rule apart from the consent of the governed is unacceptable comes from the fact that it is unacceptable, not because the US has any special rights to declare it so. We hold these truths to be self-evident, now just as we did then.
The US has always had that same fundamental issue with China's government; we've just chosen to react to that reality in different ways over the years. China being more of an economic powerhouse now makes it a larger threat to human freedom than it has been in the past, so there are valid reasons to re-consider the status quo.
They are different. In the same league
* Iraq
* Vietnam
* Cuba
* Panama
* Grenada
* Gaza
That is just recent times, and I missed quite a few
The USA is a big bully, destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world since the genocide of American Indians stopped in their own backyard
Trump is making plain what every body with any brain worked out in 1962: The USA is a rouge nation
I would include:
* Korea
* Japan (the use of the atomic bomb was controversial even then as it was after it was obvious the empire was finished and it was merely a matter of paperwork)
* Laos
* Cambodia
* Afghanistan
* Puerto Rico
* NEARLY Honduras, over fucking bananas of all things
> The USA is a big bully, destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world since the genocide of American Indians stopped in their own backyard
And even the notion that the genocide has stopped is dubious. We may no longer be openly killing them, and I guess that isn't nothing, but their cultures are irreparably damaged and most natives in the States live lives of poverty and suffering.
On that subject though, the US has generally been a force for good around the world. Iraq was briefly a liberal democracy until the US military pulled back out and a theocratic regime took over again by force. Vietnam was a well-intentioned but bungled attempt to stop the spread of communism. When the US lost and pulled out the country turned into a one-party dictatorship. Other political parties there are outlawed. That's who the US was fighting against. The fact that these interventions ultimately failed doesn't make the attempts any less noble, though you can certainly make the case they were foolhardy to even try. Or perhaps if you're a pacifist you could argue any military intervention, even in the defense of human freedom, is immoral. I have mixed feelings on that subject myself, but it's ridiculous to compare anything the US did in recent history to what China or Russia are currently attempting or threatening to attempt. We never tried to conquer Iraq or Vietnam, just free them.
The US is a bully to dictatorial regimes and a friend to liberal democracies around the world. Trump's cage rattling is a tiny blip in the grand scheme of that legacy.
Then why did you cite them as the reason for China's authoritarianism becoming a problem?
> Iraq was briefly a liberal democracy until the US military pulled back out and a theocratic regime took over again by force.
You know the CIA funded the Taliban, right? We also installed Saddam Hussein.
> Vietnam was a well-intentioned but bungled attempt to stop the spread of communism.
Why is this a good thing? See previous question about "Why does the US get to unilaterally decide which forms of government are acceptable?"
> When the US lost and pulled out the country turned into a one-party dictatorship.
Or, if you were not on the U.S.'s side in this, you might be phrasing that more like: "When the U.S. pulled out, their puppet government collapsed immediately."
> The fact that these interventions ultimately failed doesn't make the attempts any less noble, though you can certainly make the case they were foolhardy to even try.
I would say they were both foolhardy and ignoble personally.
> Or perhaps if you're a pacifist you could argue any military intervention, even in the defense of human freedom, is immoral.
No pacifist would argue that.
> I have mixed feelings on that subject myself, but it's ridiculous to compare anything the US did in recent history to what China or Russia are currently attempting or threatening to attempt.
You can quibble about numbers and equivalence all you like. I'm not saying China is unambiguously good. I'm saying they are not guilty of anything the United States is not also guilty of and so the moral condemnation from said United States rings incredibly hollow and hypocritical. It feels more like the United States is upset that another country is beating it at the game it designed.
If I had my personal way, Xi Jinping and every president still living would be tried for the war crimes they are most definitely guilty of, along with dozens of other leaders from the so called "developed" world. A man can dream.
China annexing Taiwan wouldn't merely be "intervening in foreign affairs". When an authoritarian regime conquers a liberal democracy, the people in the annexed area are no longer free. It's the same reason we couldn't just ignore Hitler taking over half of Europe. If he'd just stuck to oppressing the people in his own territory it's possible the rest of the world would have let him and Germany might still be an authoritarian dictatorship today.
> the CIA funded the Taliban
Iraqis were hardly free prior to that. Short of direct military intervention, you often have to choose between what you believe to be the lesser of several evils. I'd agree that was probably a misguided choice in this case.
> Why is this a good thing? See previous question about "Why does the US get to unilaterally decide which forms of government are acceptable?"
See my answer to that question. Human freedom is an inherent good.
> "When the U.S. pulled out, their puppet government collapsed immediately."
True democracies can't be puppets; they're controlled by the people they govern. And it wasn't voted out by the populace, it fell to a military attack by a theocratic regime.
Have not heard anything about 1,000 years fight for global supremacy
When this administration focuses solely on one side of that (Goods vs Services), they miss the forest for the trees. I'm not saying we shouldn't bring back manufacturing, because we should, but we can't pretend that we get the short end of the stick in this trade partnership.
China makes the cheap shit that isn't economical here, and the only way to make it economical here is to pay a tax on the cheap shit we want if it isn't made here, but the crazy thing is we could do a 400% tariff on Chinese imports, and it is still too expensive to buy American for most goods. Not even getting to the point that we don't have the infrastructure here because that also costs money, which would rise the price for American goods even higher.
Does Bill Gates mow his own lawn? No!
Does Donald Trump grill his own Big Mac? No!
Because when you hit a certain "wealth bracket" you stop doing things that are below that and hire them out. We hired China because we were too rich.
But if you do want to mow your own lawn, then do it, just expect that it will cost you more to mow your own lawn than to hire it out.
Replace "lawn mowing" with any other industry of your choice.
"Cheap foreign products are a necessity when so-called American companies don't love Americans enough to pay them what they're worth. It's the whole reason things went overseas in the first place. It's gonna be nice if we can finally get American companies to actually support America and pay citizens what they're worth."
The above sounds nice, but it's oversimplified, like a lot of political rhetoric recently. Now, if this does end up making real living wages for the American worker a commonplace thing, that's awesome, but I'm pessimistic given the history of things, how money can influence politics, and how corporate lawyers can find loopholes.
So will the American manufacturing wages actually translate to living wages or will you just be getting paid more on paper but you still feel poor because the things you want to buy are all more expensive now?
I'm not sure what the answer here is, but it does seem like this is something that has existed. Consumerism was pretty rampant in the 50s and 60s when a lot more was still made in the US.
If only some things are automated, then yes those places will have an advantage when it comes to labor costs, but they will use it to pad their profit margin.
Factory X employs humans ands sells widgets for $100, but their costs are $90, so profit is $10.
Factory Y is automated and they have costs of $10. Do they sell their widget at $30, thus earning a handsome profit of $20? No, they charge $90 and earn an obscene profit of $80. The worker gets screwed, the shareholders get richer.
This whole thing only works if workers have ownership in the corporation, but that's gasp socialism and we can't have that.
if the goods are made and exported from American factories the owners of those factories will be increasing the local, state and federal tax bases, how is that not an improvement over offshoring production?
workers are currently being screwed by globalist companies offshoring production and also using that as a way to offshore profits also, i doubt any workers will shed tears if that stops.
socialism as you described is fine, not sure how its relevant in this case, its perfectly legal to start coops and they exist even in the tech world, most people dont seek them out and it appears they underperform their peers, where are all the major coop tech companies?
Posters are skeptical because prices will raise across the board for these good. You ask:
> “what if they are largely automated”
If that’s the case, and they work where they work now as you say, then Americans will just get poorer as things become more expensive due to tariffs. The factory owner is keeps all the protectionist profits. Maybe some of that goes back into the tax base but we know these types are good at paying 0% taxes.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That’s why socialism is relevant, because that’s the system under which this idea at a national scale actually helps workers, whereas this idea under capitalism helps mainly capitalists. Which is why I’m so confused because you keep talking about workers in your post, but that’s not who this is for.
Do you think he's acting when he does things like keep preventing an interviewer from moving on because he wants to make extra sure everyone knows he entirely believes that obviously-photoshopped, not-trying-to-look-like-anything-but-an-overlay letters and numbers on a picture of someone's hand were in fact real tattoos?
I don't see what gets people to class as unlikely the notion that he might be a really stupid guy with some really dumb ideas who's being pulled multiple directions by other people who may or may not also be dumb but do have bad/evil ideas. To me that appears overwhelmingly to be the most likely explanation for... all of it, really. It may still be wrong! But why isn't it—at least—a top contender, explanation-wise?
James Comey wrote that he was moderately intelligent (I forget Comey's exact phrasing).
And I think that's true.
He's smart enough to know when to lie to escape legal jeopardy, so I think that's a mark of some amount of intelligence.
But he is also horriffically broken in some part of his personality, to the point where he lacks empathy, and constantly lies to obtain advantage.
I hate to break it to you, but George W. Bush isn't stupid. While GW Bush did cultivate that "dumb hick" persona, that's all it was -- a fake persona.
This gubernatorial debate[0] (from 1994) between then Governor Ann Richards and George W. Bush will give the lie to the idea that 'Dubya' is dumb. Definitely an amoral jerk, but not dumb.
[0] https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/texas-gu...
I ordered their Orion O6 Mini ITX board back in December, for $430.49 total ($85 shipping).
The email this morning said they had to cancel all un-shipped orders, and I could re-order and prepay the tariff through 4XL (they dropped DHL and FedEx due to tariff complications).
I put the board in my cart, and now the total is $1500.90 ($1,150 in shipping).
I'm happy to pay for the actual cost of shipping a single item across an entire ocean, but maybe that increase is a bit much...
The Import-ant thing (heh) is that the additional money you must pay is not going to the manufacturer or the shipper. It won't be improving working-conditions of foreign sweatshop laborers, or upgrading cargo ships to reduce pollution, etc.
Instead, it's going to a US government official that basically seizes goods crossing the border who won't give them back without a payment.,
Worse: These higher import-taxes all US companies and consumers are being made to pay will probably go towards the benefit of... lowering what rich Americans pay on their personal income taxes.
e.g. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/tax-rules-for-the-sup...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3532216/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
I don't think I should be able to order a little plastic trinket for $10 shipped direct from China, when just shipping the same thing inside the US costs $10+!
When shipping from China instead of the US, the first segment is cheaper, the middle distribution and last mile are the same, and there's a ship segment that splits a couple thousand dollar container cost across a massive pile of packages. I don't expect a particularly big difference.
FWIW, most of the packages I've bought from AliExpress over the last 6 months have been delivered by private couriers (like OnTrac for packages from China or UPS for packages from the US).
I have a hunch that AliExpress hasn't been using USPS shipping for a while now.
Skipping the reseller saves you money and pollutes the environnement less.
You think that makes sense?
A few possible factors off the top of my head:
1. Shipping is much cheaper in bulk.
2. A local delivery service has different markups for different kinds of delivery.
3. Local delivery services that pick up from you may have additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
4. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
These are small parcels. Its not really "bulk", as in shipping whole pallets from point A to B. Even then its still cheaper even if you look at commercial bulk account rates. You're ignoring UPU rules.
> 2. Sea-shipping is extremely cheap compared to over land--and has been for literally thousands of years.
And then once it gets to the port it goes on the same trucks that would be driving to drive it across town. It's still driving hundreds to thousands of miles compared to driving 300mi between Dallas and Houston. So its paying for sea shipping and then paying to put it on a truck and drive it even further. It still doesn't make sense it would be cheaper overall, and massively cheaper at that.
For example, say you lived in LA, even right on the water across the street from the port.. Lets say you have widget A shipped from China and widget B shipped from a warehouse at the docks. Cost to ship widget A from China, which includes the cost to get it to their port, on to the boat, across the ocean, off the boat, inspected by customs, resorted, put on a truck, and sent to your home is probably several times cheaper than from that warehouse, sorted, put on a truck, and delivered to your house. Delivered by the same truck, sorted at the same parcel sorting facility.
Once again, tell me how that makes sense or how that should obviously be cheaper.
> 3. A local delivery service charges more for one kind of delivery so that they can charge less for another kind.
> 4. The local delivery service charges more to cover additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
I didn't realize UPS and USPS and FedEx are bespoke local delivery services, news to me! In fact, the bespoke "local" delivery services that only offer specific services tend to be cheaper in those specific domains, such as overnighting documents between common city pairs (like DFW<->Austin, DFW<->Houston, etc). But they really only do documents and only do overnights between commercial buildings.
These orgs I'm talking about (USPS, for example) are the same people doing the delivery for those China Post parcels. It's not like China Post is driving through my neighborhood delivering these things. So any idea of that cost being a part of it is once again not based in reality, at least not in the way you're putting it.
> 5. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
Its shipping to the same people. This isn't a change of affluence at all. And once again, UPS, USPS, and FedEx aren't some local delivery companies at least to my knowledge.
The biggest factor are UPU rules.
> A few possible factors off the top of my head:
Try actually looking into the topics instead of just throwing out random ideas that aren't based in reality or facts and acting like I'm the one that has logical fallacies in my arguments. Yours is filled with logical fallacies such as an argument from ignorance and a hasty generalization. Maybe this doesn't make sense because it's an illogical state to be in outside of appeasing bullshit international laws.
Why do they choose to deliver it to me for so cheap while charging me a fortune to deliver my packages to my family the next town over? Because they're required to by international law. In fact, me paying a ton more to ship domestically subsidizes that cheap delivery from China.
What's "several times cheaper" in terms of dollars?
How does it change if both packages get sent to Chicago instead?
While I agree shipping from China shouldn't be cheaper, boats don't add much. Getting a 40 foot container to the port, across the ocean, and away from the port is several thousand dollars of costs. For small packages averaging 1 liter and .4kg, you can split that bill across 50 thousand of them. That leaves customs, but how many man-hours does it take to inspect a container of mail? Half the point of de minimis is that there's no detailed inspection per package.
As far as the price to ship cross-country versus cross-town, that's a whole different can of worms I don't want to open very far. Let's focus on "shipped from China" versus "shipped from a warehouse next to the US port".
Once again, tell me how that makes any goddamn sense.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c450
You should really research UPU rules.
Even just domestically, contrast the published retail UPS/Fedex rates with the prices of items with free shipping that ultimately go UPS/Fedex. Reasonable off-the-shelf retail rates that facilitate small businesses is also why it's important the USPS remain intact against the longstanding neofascist goal of gutting it.
You're right Chinese dumping through UPU got a bit better several years ago, but its still usually cheaper for a small parcel to get mailed from China through China Post than it would be for a US business to ship through USPS despite the trucks and sorting in the US is still all the same.
And yes, I agree the USPS does essential work. We need to have it work better for our businesses and quit having our domestic mail continue to subsidize cheap junk from China.
> contrast the published retail UPS/Fedex rates with the prices of items with free shipping that ultimately go UPS/Fedex
Look at sites that still break out the price for shipping. Then realize those sites with "free shipping" are just rolling that into their average margins, increasing the prices for everyone or reducing the quality of their products. Realize they pretty much have to subsidize the shipping on the cheap things or else they'll just continue to bleed customers to Amazon.
There's a high cost to "free" shipping.
My point about UPS/Fedex is I do not think large retailers are paying anywhere near the published UPS/Fedex rates. I assume that one of the reasons they can get such bulk discounts is from tightly integrating with UPS/Fedex operations such that UPS/Fedex receive whole trailers already sorted per-destination-distribution-center, etc. And I assume anywhere getting such a deal is contractually prohibited from making their actual rates known.
Why do I think this? From what I've seen businesses like Target/Walmart/HomeDepot/Amazon seem very unconcerned with shipping many small packages from different warehouses. This isn't them indulging the occasional shopper who makes a small order (hoping to make the cost up later), but them being actively content with shipping one or two items per package. If they were paying the steep per-package rates that retail and small businesses pay, we'd see a lot more pre-shipment consolidation.
What is the fundamental harm or injustice that needs to be fixed or reduced here?
I'm confident there are much better ways to tackle those things (e.g. pollution, consumer waste, moral failings) than a blanket import tax on an entire country-of-origin, even one done in a proper and legal way.
Free trade combined with cheap labor led to a massive loss of national capability. We outsourced 75% of the supply chain for electronics, and provided decades of free training to foreign companies. Then we pulled a surprised mug when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.
As a parent of young kids, I'm also keenly aware of how much random plastic garbage we import - just to throw it away after maybe one use. Party favors are a big one. Families are drowning in low-cost, low-quality products that wind up in a landfill. Free trade created this situation, and I don't think it's good for anybody except importers and factory owners.
I don't know what the solution is, and the current tariffs clearly aren't it. But free trade with China hasn't exactly been great for the US in a longterm sense, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise just because we're getting cheap consumer goods.
The situation in electronics manufacturing specifically I will concede is concerning.
Chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Average_...
Domestic manufacturing decreasing as tariffs decrease implies that increasing tariffs would increase domestic manufacturing. With their argument being that you needed to do it 50 years ago when the shift started because if you do it now it's really painful.
That's a misnomer if ever there was one. The current batch of tariffs will destroy enough American wealth to nosedive the economy before any long-term change. Manufacturing is not coming back, there's just not gonna be enough wealth in the US to warrant it. Plus there are counter-tariffs, so if you make it in America, you can't reliably export it.
This isn't 1971 where Nixon could tell the world "suck it. our dollar, your problem" because America was the sole hegemon.
Today, there is a rival player. China. Its a completely different game.
This would encourage people to buy only high-quality items that are longer-lasting and are not just discarded very quickly. If it costs $200 to discard your dishwasher, maybe you will buy a high-quality product that might have a higher sticker price upfront but it has better reliability and won't break down quickly requiring you to replace it and therefore pay the hefty landfill price. This in turn would encourage manufacturers to build products with better reliability.
As you mention, how long are the repair parts available ?
What do repair shops say about the repairability of the model ?
Where is it made ?
How would you solve it differently?
This is also why you pass the tariffs through the legislature and not via some literal "emergency" order, which means that the tariffs could disappear at literally any point, and probably will if things get bad. So what's the point of investment if you have a better than 50-50 chance and you're going to feel the pain either way?
It's just exactly the opposite way anyone who is seriously trying to shift manufacturing would go about doing it. There is also some strong dollar issues, but that's really complicated.
There is no overnight solve at this point. But a solution would be working to help countries with more friendly government to your own to build up their manufacturing with the promise of guaranteed business to help prop it up by moving away from the hostile government.
In other countries we are scared of, not friendly too, the USA
Of course as other comments in the thread have pointed out: a much smarter way to roll out tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing is by slowing ramping them up to give industry time to react.
My lathe was $3400. A week later the price is now $4000 thanks to tariffs. There are no domestic manufacturers left and banks/Wall Street aren't going to finance someone spinning up a machine tools company. The difference in price isn't enough to erase China's excessive subsidies to their industry combined with their lower labor pay rates so even if someone did try to compete they still couldn't match $4000. My best guess is more like $6-7k. In the end all the tariffs are doing is making it more difficult to get into machining.
If idiots and sycophants weren't steering the ship the US would have a state-run investment bank that partnered with private capital to offer investments to anyone who wanted to start a business. Frankly I think there is lots of opportunity in various spaces like machine tools to make innovative products at all scales from the small hobbyist to big industrial shops. It won't be a 1000x return though so no one cares.
In defense of the comment you're responding to: measures like making it impossible to compete by subsidizing their domestic competition. (I wasn't trying to suggest China and others do not use tariffs)
Not expecting a positive effect from that from this administration, but in theory there could be one. Like that investment bank. Or just lowered taxes.
Fwiw this sounds like an aspect of fascism. Just defining, not criticizing. It clearly works for China.
Can you explain that?
The US "dependence" on Chinese manufacturing is not a problem at all. It's mostly just a wedge/scapegoat/distraction issue to placate constituents who have faced decades of declining general welfare due mostly to domestic policy and not trade issues.
For example, trade policy with China didn't force the government to lower taxes on the wealthy to cut public college funding (college used to be free in California, where do y'all think Silicon Valley's innovations came from?), refuse to implement single-payer universal healthcare, or refuse to address the housing affordability crisis.
If we only tariffed China, this argument would hold water. Instead, we’re handing every country’s imports to China on a platter.
The resulting inflation has lowered the purchasing power of the vulnerable and increased the wealth gap.
No, free trade did not create this situation. People like you did. I'm not over here drowning in useless plastic and we've lived in the same globalised world together.
What does this mean?
The clearer wording is probably:
>Then we were surprised when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.
It's gotta be... bad, right? It seems like it'd be bad.
Is it a net good or bad thing to try riskier stuff? Maybe some moonshots pay off, maybe a ton of money gets wasted on stupid ideas.
This is pretty much what’s been happening since 2008.
Investment in anything that may move certain indicators a good direction (some of the money pays workers; GDP perhaps even goes up as a result of the activity) but worsens the economic position of "doers" across the overall population doesn't just fail to transfer money downward and stimulate consumer demand, but does the opposite. Investment in ways to more efficiently and effectively deny people healthcare coverage they're supposed to have, for instance. Lots of activity in weakly-competitive markets falls under this heading, and since we all but entirely stopped enforcing anti-trust in the '70s, that describes an increasingly large proportion of the economy with each passing year.
Real estate: demand for houses means demand for house building and maintenance.
Crypto: demand for chips and electricity (yes, this is super-dumb demand for dubious benefit, but demand nonetheless, just like paying people to dig holes and fill them in is also demand).
Stock: I almost agree with you, but 1) stockbroking is a whole industry funded by taking a percentage on stock purchases, 2) if you buy some stock for some cash, the counterparty now has cash, which they are either going to keep, spend, or invest in something else, so the transaction is neutral-to-positive in terms of demand generation.
Bonds: why do governments issue bonds? To get money to spend on stuff! Every penny of your bond purchase gets spent on government activities. Some of that is paying interest, but that interest is income for other bondholders (who then typically spend it)
With taxes and transaction fees skimming a little bit off the top of everything, it’s actually almost impossible to engage in any financial transaction without that transaction stimulating all kinds of additional activity. Not all of it is valuable or even ethical activity, but the point is that the scenario posited (“everyone is just investing and there’s no real demand underpinning it”) is very unlikely to happen.
I'd expect "more investment dollars chasing smaller returns" (because the demand-side doesn't have enough cash) to show up as a declining velocity of money, and from what I can tell that has been trending downward from a peak in the late '90s (M2) or around '08 (M1). I'd also expect this to cause some apparently-goofy valuations in the stock market, and... ditto. Increasing reliance on investments that rely on the price of the investment simply going up for returns, not on returns from productive activity, and... yep (real estate sure appears to be caught in a nasty trap of this sort, in particular). Or an enthusiastic boom in "investment vehicles" that permit near-zero-actual-economic-value speedrunning of the entire history of financial scams, and... yep, again.
You used to occasionally see bailouts of too-big-to-fail companies or industries, now the White House holds buy-a-Tesla day, presumably to boost TSLA. Just today the US Commerce Secretary announced that a UK airline would buy at least $10 billion of Boeing airplanes (Boeing stock is up ~4%).
Maybe it's just me paying more attention to stock market news these days, but my impression is that politicians have recently begun to care a lot more about the overall stock market going up because a lot more voters care about the overall stock market going up.
It's more like feudalism where those kings cut in the people below them so that they have a stake in the system and don't get any ideas about revolting.
What?
Index fund investors do not do that; they just buy the securities that are listed in the index, which are selected typically because they have large market capitalization or are old, not because they are underpriced. So, to whatever extent the market conforms to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, it's not doing so because of the index fund investors.
I don't disagree. I also don't believe this observation in isolation supports the assertion "too many index fund investors really inhibit price discovery." Remember, that statement was made in the context of today, not in a hypothetical world where only a few lone traders at home trade individual shares and high frequency traders, hedge funds, and pension plans are for some reason no longer willing to place their own bets.
I'd rather not let some of the anti-index investing tropes gain traction, since they're insanely stupid and, to the extent that index investing is good for people who aren't very skilled at investing, quite damaging.
One slight quibble, though: high frequency traders make their money by providing liquidity, not (as far as possible) betting on the future profits of companies.
I think the question of what percentage of the market could be invested in index funds before things got weird is an interesting one. It really is hypothetical, though. Independent investors have more sway, not less, as an increasing number of people put money in index funds. There will always be a lot of people who are very rationally (and also depending on the investor... less rationally) unwilling to give that up.
I'm not excited to see how an administration that seems to enjoy manipulating market swings pairs with investors that treat the labor force as a stock price lever.
This estimate was produced today (May 8), and represents increasing GDP growth vs. the previous estimate
The model is likely based on fundamental economic factors and rational decision making. The latter is why Q1 ended up with -0.3% growth. You could call this the Trump effect.
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow/archives
This wild of a swing makes me re-assess depending on this data for anything.
This is going to smash the cash flow of so many small businesses
I wonder how much stuff is going to be completely wasted by this process.
Very exciting that we can't predict how much extra we'll pay by the time our orders hit the shores.
None of this is by accident, of course, but it just seems predictably short-sighted, and I don't buy any of the 4d chess nonsense that some supporters are suggesting. And now the world has to bear the consequences of a misguided and overconfident policy.
Cyber City Circuits does small scale assembly in the US and seem like a cool company (ran into them from the Datasheet Digest podcast they put out). But yeah obviously they aren’t going to be able to match a $35 PCBA JLCPCB prototyping order.
Electronic manufacturing in the US definitely exists. It also is low quality and 5x to 10x the cost of China.
An assembled board that costed us $825/unit in the US (and frequently had errors) costs $130/unit from China and they nailed it every time (probably because they machine QC rather than human QC). It's really not even close. Same goes for machined parts - drastically cheaper and higher quality from China.
I was in Montana once and stopped in to see a small PCB line. They were doing F22 and F35 PCBs.
Small USA PCB is everywhere.
And that’s the ones I can think of within a couple hours of each other.
Not saying that is right or wrong but finish the sentence.
If you said -rely on Chinese products because MBAs and politicians spent decades shutting us out of manufacturing for the draw of cheap labor.
That would be correct.
It is an intentional lack of intention in their policies by the current administration causing this, not previous business decisions. You can agree with the current policy, but you can't disagree that it is the DIRECT cause of the situation (in an attempt to address the indirect issue that you mentioned).
We did the former a long time ago. You’re welcome to do the former.
That's something I hadn't though about in the context of tariffs with interesting implications.
Does following IP rules mean that any products and technologies that wont manufacturer in the US but holds IP protections become subject to a permanent tariff? Giving countries a permanent 125% advantage over US businesses when using that IP?
What's the plan here?
In the absence of IP protections, it would hurt the countries with the highest tariffs on their products because there would be an incentive to produce an equivalent product domestically or source it from another country whose products are taxed at a lower rate. In practice, it still doesn't work out to impose broad tariffs because no one has a fully domestic supply chain. It really only makes sense to tariff very specific items in new-ish markets where you have a foreign player whose government is subsidizing production, e.g. Chinese EV's, Chinese EV batteries, solar panels, etc.
What do you call necessary? What about non-necessary items? What about IP that improves manufacturing efficiency by 5% in some process? Better battery tech? Better UI? Better chips? Better sensors? In some cases the answer is yes, in some cases the answer is no. If the answer is yes then the US pays 125% more for that item, if the answer is no then the US has worse efficiency, worse prices, worse technologies.
You talk in absolute which makes me feel like you're missing all the nuances at play.
Based on what? They’re going up and down every day. And the Trump administration is clearly desperate enough for a deal with China to be caught lying about engaging in talks.
My assumption has been they're here for four years at most.
As far as the Trump administration goes, there doesn't seem to be a coherent plan. Among themselves they can't even decide if they were or were not already negotiating with China.
I've yet to see someone who is a part of the administration who is clearly educated about trade making an coherent argument about the tariffs.
"Jamison and I working together couldn't have put this deal together in 3 years, but President Trump was able to pull this off in less than 45 days!" (paraphrasing but IIRC it was pretty close).
Putin would love the US government destroying large portions of its economy for no discernible gain. I think Putin probably encouraged Trump by telling him all the idiotic things he keeps repeating like how the trade deficit shows the US is getting ripped off. Or that huge tariffs will bring manufacturing back to the US. Or that countries would be lining up to make a deal.
But no actual sane person can explain the end game because anyone with even a basic understanding of economics and trade knows that none of those things are or were ever true.
I think this because the right wing think tanks published that Project 2025 plan and it's clearly being followed even though Trump lied and said he wasn't aware of it
…
This makes zero sense.
If you're a business used to selling at a certain price point, and the value proposition is established with your customers .... do you bother risking shattering that expectation if the future is unknown?
Do you risk customers saying "Oh crap my hobby that I did with Adafruit is now untenable ... well I'm out." vs "Well they're low on stock, I'll check back when this is all over."
I don't know if it is all or nothing but it seems like there's a lot of risk either way.
But this is new for US consumers. My hope is that US companies will add temporary price increases if they can't eat the tariffs in their existing margins and then reduce when tariffs are reduced. But my guess is that most companies will increase prices, blame the tariffs (rightfully so), but then not fully reduce prices if/when the tariffs decrease.
It's similar to what happened with tipping for takeout food during Covid. It's now a permanent tax.
Only if you buy from a foreign store directly which is relatively niche. It's much more common for an importer to pay the duties and then put the product in local stores.
The reality, of course, which they reveal when interviewed, is that they know they're completely powerless. In the best case, all they can do is delay the inevitable and they know it. This approach exists purely to keep themselves from being made into the enemy. As you noted, some business owners admitted to considering if they should just shutter their business too.
It is fair, and the consumer deserves to know.
Consumers ... going to have to learn something new.
If you're small enough I guess you might get a way with it, if you're big enough you'll be threatened into compliance.
Either way the US customers and the rest of the world lose, everyone is a little poorer because of these tariffs.
Why doesn't Wal-Mart or whoever make a loud pronouncement that they'll fund primary campaigns against any congressperson who supports these tariffs? These companies got Citizens United passed so they can spend unlimited amounts of political money, so why don't they use this power when their business is threatened like this?
Like always, the morons who carry water for the fascists think they can "control" them, or radically underestimate the damage a moron with no accountability can do.
Amazon tried to barely show consumers the tariff hurt them, and Trump called Bezos directly, and that plan went away instantly.
Companies are rightly afraid of an administration that demonstrably has nobody stopping them from doing outright criminal and illegal things, and has a rabid fanbase ready to plan bombings of whoever is the target. They know the courts can't protect them. They know the law means nothing right now. They know an entire board can be murdered and the culprits pardoned if Trump feels like it.
Trump's entire shtick is that people who go against him in the Republican party already get primaried. He doesn't even need to ask his supporters, because loyalty is an expected and intrinsic part of the MAGA movement.
This is also assuming that future elections are free and fair, or at least follow previous US rules.
That's how autocracies work, my friend, you can't rules lawyer your way out of one, because the rules can always be changed to fuck you over some more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/business/scott-bessent-wa...
Also if there's a lot of "I'm out" you just bought a lot of stuff nobody wants to pay anything near the cost of.
Biggest tax hike in my lifetime.
From what I’ve seen the biggest impact is just the carriers requiring a huge fee (relative to my $40 worth of PCBs) just to deal with the tariffs at all. I almost wonder if there’s a profitable side gig for someone couriering PCBs from Canada -> US, mailing them, and then flying back. A single suitcase can carry a LOT of PCBs. Obviously declaring it all still but just structured as a single import so the fees as a percentage would go down.
I expect Mexico and Canadian warehouses will have a lot of business. Stocking a warehouse in USA would be insanely risky because of this upfront cost.
This will kill smaller and medium sized businesses and concentrate capital. Corporations with deep pockets must be elated. This kills their mid sized competitors.
Unlike sales taxes or income taxes they are paid up front, before the sale.
If they don't make a sale due to tariffs they still have to pay them and end up with unprofitable inventory.
Tariffs can change at any time, and order/shipping times are long, so they are very difficult to plan for. Products may have been ordered months before tariffs but end up liable.
Spoiler alert: There hasn’t been any noticeable reaction yet. You might expect to see price increases or higher order volumes when searching for items like the ESP32, but that hasn’t been the case so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the potential impact of removing the de minimis threshold on shipments. It’s hard to imagine how the postal system could efficiently handle tariffs on a dozen small $1 packages from AliExpress landing in the mailbox. I suspect we’re moving beyond that point, with private companies likely clearing these shipments in bulk before they reach USPS—if they even make it that far.
De minimis in Canada has been $20 (and sorta $40) for a loooong time. That's like US$14 these days.
Usually brokers and brokered shipments (like UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc) will charge any and every tax/duty absolutely correctly. Possibly charging you more than the cost of the item to calculate all that. And notoriously delivering the parcel and mailing you a bill 2 weeks later. Virtually every Canadian that shops online has some horror story about it.
For stuff coming by post and directly assessed by customs, they used to be sticklers and assess charges on everything worth >$20, even if it's $2.60 in taxes and a $8.95 fee for the privilege of calculating it. In the last ~15 years, they pick and choose.
They seem to ignore China stuff since it's mostly low value and have a sharp eye to spot stuff from, e.g. Japan that's probably higher value.
No idea how Aliexpress and others that use gig workers for last-mile delivery do it. Maybe they just pay the tariffs/taxes because the item value is still low once you exclude the final delivery costs from the valuation.
What was free shipping to the US is now $60 on this item: https://www.ebay.com/itm/388222776222 (a $200 shipping version at https://www.ebay.com/itm/405822192434).
Here’s a keyloading adapter for one of my radios at $600 shipping(!) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/146313261605
Absolute frustration.
That's a nice thing to do, but it might be more sustainable to increase the cost some now, so that you don't have to increase it as much to cover the tariffs in the future.
- Raise prices to account for tariffs.
- Not raise prices, therefore not make any profit, therefore not make it worth my time, therefore not make any hardware at all.
I'm not operating at big margins but I do make a profit because I want to balance supporting the community and keeping things at a sustainable level for my sanity. Those tariffs would have wiped those margins out completely.
> Since they are electronics products/components, there’s a chance we may be able to request reclassification on some items to avoid the 125% ‘reciprocal’ tariff, but there’s no assurance that it will succeed, and even if it does, it is many, many months until we could see a refund.
I did not realize exemptions were processed as refund requests. So even if they are granted, it still kills cash flow in the meantime.
That'd solve this problem.
Though there is no practical logic to that, it would be a politically logical tactic.
Timing is good for phone makers here honestly because phone innovation is slowing down so high prices for the same stuff can be blamed on tarriffs instead of lack of innovation.
The second most expensive electronics would be game systems, and that'll be painful, but I do wonder if e.g. Nintendo would pair with cellular companies and do installment plans like phones, and/or if PS/Xbox would try to do something similar with ISPs (e.g. AT&T Gamer Deal) or rent their consoles instead of selling them.
Gamer PCs are gonna take a serious hit though, and the price of individual games is certain to increase.
Historically, because I could throw one or two random ones into my aliexpress cart to hit a minimum order value for free shipping, but now it means I'll actually be able to get my hands on them without one or two sets of tariffs on top. If I could even get them at all otherwise.
Companies are really struggling to optimise their suppliers, it is pretty hard. If they start on bill of materials they can often sort by most common parts and then it becomes a graph problem finding “cheapest” paths between often traversing four tables bom <> parts <> suppliers <> tariffs.
The really hard part is mapping parts down to sku level to tariff codes. Specially at scale (think datasets with many million rows).
Either way we built https://www.searchtariff.com/?q=lights as an entry point and and have been getting more and more worried with the market as we help companies out. They are not ready for this at all and it is bitting deep. Let us know if you also need help mapping products to tariffs, we have a product for that!
Alternatively we also welcome feedback!
Even if it only caused a 20% drop in spending, a lot of powerful people would take notice.
In capitalism you vote with your wallet. If we continue buying stuff like nothing has happened, whatever happened must be fine. It’s not fine and the quickest and cleanest way to say that is to simply stop.
No new cars, no new appliances. No new anything. Don’t buy any foreign goods, go on a spending diet. If you absolutely must, buy used and buy local.
If some policy brings the economy to a screeching halt smart money pays attention real fast.
Perhaps it's by design if you read a chapter on Project 2025 on killing small businesses.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...
$252 million was collected from excise tariffs on May 6. You can look at this PDF day to day.
EDIT: adding on to this... most days are between $150m and $300m. There's been a few days north of $300m this calendar year. There was also one day - April 16? 17th? - with $11.5b coming in. Under 'excise taxes'. I have to assume that was something to do with early April tariff announcements? But haven't seen anything remotely similar since.
So this "billions of dollars are pouring in from tariffs!" is... simply not true. There's not been a huge shift one way or the other yet.
EDIT 2 - April 22 - https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report.... $11b in excise taxes deposited.
They are also insanely expensive if you are used to China prices. Boards with 10-15 components being $100+ each. Couple that with a domestic PCB manufacturing which is ~10x the cost of China, you are looking at something like an Arduino costing $250.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I haven't ever had to 'go over' the board with PCBWay. Maybe why they are so cheap, but I've only ever had one quality issue.
I send the gerbers and pick and place and take it from there. I approve photos If they have any question (which is rare) its over email. I don't even mind sourcing the parts/pcb/stencil myself. Its the components which make the tariff painful.
https://www.emeraldtechnologies.com
If I remember correctly they were just over $200 per smartwatch. We saved some costs by putting the assembled boards into 3D printed cases ourselves using student labor:
https://amulet-project.org/2018/08/02/assmebly-of-new-amulet...
There's a list of the major components (MCU, BT radio, sensors, display, battery) here:
https://github.com/AmuletGroup/amulet-project/tree/master/ha...
Not including the student labor (or my labor) I think the total we spent per smartwatch ended up being about $300.
To get an idea of the complexity of the boards here's the open source Github repo with the hardware and software files:
https://github.com/AmuletGroup/amulet-project
It was a double sided, 4 layer board with two small sub-PCB's (touch pads and a power board I think). My experience with Emerald Technologies (then called DataEd at their New Hampshire location, seems they've been bought out by a larger firm) was very positive. They were quite helpful in bringing the project to completion.
https://circuitsassembly.com/ca/editorial/menu-news/33794-da...
The cost per board would have been less if we had ordered more of them. Ours was a fairly large job for DataEd at the time, though they would have been happy to make a thousand of the devices. For tens of thousands or more they would have recommended another affiliated company. They were more of a prototyping company, though that may have changed since the merger. I see that part of Emerald is located in China now, though the DataEd facility is still part of the company, so they might be interested in some US work to carry them through the tariff chaos.
Edit: I should mention, I supplied some of the parts that I prebought to lock in a supply, the MSP430's and touch sensor IC's for example, and they supplied the rest. We had them do minimal QA on the boards, without firmware loaded and we did final QA after programming the boards ourselves. They would have been willing to do those tasks also though.
Long story incoming (blog post candidate? Hmm...)
Pimoroni is a fantastic supplier of hobby electronics stuff -- they're like Adafruit, but in the UK. Adafruit actually sells a fair amount of their stuff, but not everything. So I occasionally order directly from them (often adding in some items that are frequently out of stock at Adafruit, such as Pi 5 chargers).
I placed a big order right after the first tariffs were announced but before they went into effect. Pimoroni was having a big sale at the time, so I loaded up, thinking it'd be the last pre-tariff order I made. I elected to pay extra (not much) for UPS, since I generally trust them the most out of the shipping carriers who deliver to me (in Southern NH, right by the freight hub of MHT).
After my package arrived from overseas, it was "stuck" in a warehouse in a port city for several days. The UPS website claimed "your package is being cleared, but we have all the info we need so just sit tight"... After a few days of this, I tried calling up. After fighting with the phone tree robot (one of the few for which swearing didn't seem to get me a human, strangely), the front-line support finally told me that it was actually held up in customs awaiting more information. The support rep just told me to send an invoice and hung up.
That was the first strange flag -- sellers always include invoices on their packages, so why do they need me to send one? I hunted around for a more effective phone number -- a difficult task -- and eventually found the UPS small business customs office line (had to involve ChatGPT to help find the number, Google being useless now). After calling up, I was redirected a few times and finally got ahold of someone who actually was able to investigate for me. He found out that it was being held because US customs had classified some items (incorrectly) as needing additional forms (more on that below), and that I also would have to pay serious tariffs but only after the additional forms were filed.
The helpful UPS guy (who, it turns out, doesn't even work in that department, but had been pulled in to help because the tariff changes were causing a lot of strife) was able to link me to a website with more information and a place to upload forms and track info. The forms needed were: a vehicle import form -- apparently the US government thinks any pump being imported must be a vehicle part, even a tiny fountain pump for plant watering -- and a pesticide import form -- apparently RGB LED matrices are considered pesticides, because they seem similar to UV lamps I guess... And there was no way to reclassify the items (not sure if that's because I'm just a lowly consumer or what).
I sent this stuff over to Pimoroni, and the folks there were equally confused. But they eventually figured out how to fill out the forms and sent them back, and I uploaded them. UPS sent them along and satisfied the government, and my package was released to UPS. But by this time, the tariffs were in effect. And even though I had ordered from the UK, most of the electronics had been manufactured in China, and some contained steel made in Mexico, so the tariffs apparently applied.
On top of the tariffs, UPS was going to charge me excessive warehousing fees for the package being held up! Fortunately, my helpful UPS contact was able to get approval to get those reversed, since I was never informed that the package needed more info.
However, the story doesn't end here! The package was finally sent on its way and my friendly UPS driver showed up at my door with it a few days later, along with the bill. Unfortunately, it was the full bill including the warehousing fees! I had to call up a different UPS line (invoicing) and have them make sure the warehousing fees were taken off, then specifically have them call the local UPS distribution center to have them update it. This happened, and the next day the driver showed up...with the same bill.
Turns out UPS systems are poorly set up. The driver called up the distribution center and verbally confirmed the updated price, but his device would NOT accept anything other than the full amount listed, with no overrides possible. We worked it out, though: I gave him a check for the correct amount, and he gave me the package but did not mark it delivered. He returned to the distribution center, and from there they must have figured out how to override it, because finally it was marked as paid and delivered and everything was solved.
So I got my electronics. But the cost was $700 in tariffs due to manufacturing country (not even final manufacturing country, nor shipper country) and including vehicle and pesticide taxes for items that were not vehicles or pesticides. On a $1900 order. Plus nearly a month of time and countless hours wasted on the phone.
Suffice to say the next time I went looking for a part and saw that it was shipping from outside the US, I didn't buy it. So, intended effect of the tariffs, I guess? Though I couldn't just order from the US instead, because it wasn't available, so I just didn't order anything. Hooray.
It was shocking to see just how little information pretty much everyone had in this process (myself included), the complete lack of ability to correct blatant errors, and the "delay and rack up more $" strategies that seemed to be occurring.
Wrt the post here: I'm sad to see Adafruit get hit by this bill, and I'm sure their prices are going to go up as a result, but I'm definitely going to continue purchasing from them, and I hope they continue to stock items from elsewhere (including Pimoroni). And I hope to one day feel comfortable ordering directly from Pimoroni again...
will check back here later & we are pt at adafruit dot com & limor at adafruit dot com ...
Like cmon you're running a shop and a blog, not a missile launch facility
Tariffs are working as intended: if somebody can manufacture similar things here they will be in advantage.
This isn’t an endorsement of tariffs, just an observation: their goal is to give domestic manufacturers an edge when similar goods can be made locally. In that sense, they’re functioning exactly as intended.
I’m doing what most people who can are - freezing capital spend, unwinding positions and contracts that will be hit and planning for the inevitable crash in the fall. The companies that rely on advertising for revenue are going to be purging workforce — there nothing to sell.
Ironically the idiots rallying for the clown will be hardest hit when the farms loans are due and the cotton and soybeans are rotting in the fields.
They can't and it's not worth the multi-year effort to start up a factory to do so. That's why these tariffs are so dumb, they aren't protecting US manufacturers, they are just hurting consumers needlessly.
Gotta pay tariffs on the machines to manufacture the stuff first.
So just a few steps and we'll be good.
I suspect that's wrong, and that they didn't even try to calculate those price points, which will vary per kind of good, not per country. If the per-country tariffs happen to match those unknown numbers they didn't even try to calculate, that can't be due to intention, it can only be dumb luck.
If the 'intent' was to spur manufacturing, you'd enact laws with long term financial stability planned in. Few are going to commit to spending millions equipping factories when the 'tariff moat' that might make those factories sustainable will go away if Trump sees a movie in six weeks that says tariffs are bad.
The 'intent' seems to be to create financial instability and chaos, to allow Trump to position himself as the financial savior, and we are concentrating huge amounts of economic power in the hands of a single person.
They are temporary emergency powers with a limited timeframe. The emergency is fake, Congress has declared the calendar is suspended for purposes of the clock running on these temporary "emergency" powers.
The tariff could disappear any day if Congress grows even the flimsiest spine.
