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Comment by valzam | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely no one was seriously considering building a factory in the US based on the insansity of last week

The market is huge. Absolutely someone was considering it. Whether they had time to put plans in motion is a separate matter altogether.

Why would a company go through the trouble of building a factory when the next administration could just reverse the decision four years from now? Building factories will take years

How confident are we that there is a "next administration... four years from now"? I don't know what the number is, but it ain't 100% like it used to be.

I would put it at less than 50% at this point. It entirely depends on whether or not he's alive.

The market is huge but the actual capital is held (or at least controlled) by relatively few (probably more rational than average) people, no?

The market is huge enough that the fact that something is being considered somewhere doesn’t mean much, right? If I consider building a factory in the woods, but I don’t have two pennies to clack together, does anybody hear it?

Cost differences by everyone's gut estimate is like >10^3 or however many digits. Tariffs are cheaper until it starts T2D3ing.

The costs are huge too which makes the margin small

That was part of the entire purported purpose of this lunacy. They went on TV and everything about having people operating robots screwing in iphone screws and stuff.

Whether anyone bought into it is another matter, but opening factories is part of what they said they wanted.

Thailand is a good example. They have about $40b (USD) in balance of trade going the wrong way. Their initial ideas were simply to import more american petroleum, vehicles and aircraft. This likely could have accounted for more than half the difference and significantly reduced their tariff rate by just changing suppliers of already imported products.

The US news is pretty useless here. It's more nuanced than they would like to admit. Foreign sources of news are the most instructive as they're actually covering the options realistically.

There are more consequences if you change the supplier because different supplier often means different product

Which way is "going the wrong way"?

> Foreign sources of news are the most instructive as they're actually covering the options realistically.

Curious about what your go-to sources are?

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