Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from ‘reciprocal’ tariffs

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

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

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

   - Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tainted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we are fucked basically.

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

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

Thank you for bringing this up

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

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

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

What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?

Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?

> That and failed to protect our democracy.

I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.

No amount of 3D printed FPVs is going to bring down a modern warship - they're unlikely to even get near it (conversely the sea drone threat is enormous - but those aren't civilian assets in anyway, but can be as cheap as "brick on a speed boat throttle").

This is the problem with these assumptions: they're all rooted in the industrial warfare the US won in WW2 but are not contextually accurate to today. WW2 wasn't fought with satellite targeting and precision cruise missiles which could be fired from half the planet away. Ukraine is currently hitting targets on the other side of Russia - "behind the lines" doesn't really exist for strategic assets anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

Thanks, man, I am now in the rabbit hole of reading up.

In that same context, did you read the article about how diplomats were "convincing" the Mexican government to not use open source over Microsoft?

It sure sounds like the same strategy.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/

Which is still corruption.

As other commenter says, it’s interesting that there are also exceptions within the exceptions.

(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)

The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).

1 is wrong because if he wanted to decouple us from China he'd lower tarrifs on other countries especially close allies

I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.

There are some failures in there but also some wins, like buying air rights for. Heap and making effective use of them.

How well known is Murphy? I’d never heard of him until I saw this video but he seems very impressive and much more electable than Biden or harris.

You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

It's all blunt-force checkers that any simpleton with power can easily understand.

At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...

For all the accusations of fascism, nobody seems to remember that a key feature of fascism is a corporate-cabal shadow government that legitimizes its activities/policies by puppeteering the "real" government to both execute and justify them.

At best, he's using these tariffs as a temporary means to exert pressure and watching how others respond to them, almost like acting like the crazy man with a gun to make people a little more willing to negotiate terms more favorable for the gunman. At least as a matter of intent, anyway. The actual effect is another matter.

"In 2020, Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape. After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) decided not to charge him. In December 2024, the House Ethics Committee released a report which found evidence that Gaetz paid for sex—including with a 17-year-old—and abused illegal drugs during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives."

He knows exactly what he is doing[0], and the rest is designed to distract voters from noticing

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661680

[0] https://www.dataandpolitics.net/70-million-in-60-seconds-how...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

lol

Even the San Francisco city council is bullying American tech companies and tech executives.

The power of US tech companies is vastly overstated.

How?

Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.

Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.

The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.

[0]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWM/

https://www.barrons.com/articles/small-business-owners-voted...

They are getting exactly what they voted for. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for anyone who is being hurt by Trump who voted for him.

The effects are so bad that nearly everyone who remembers the disaster must have died off for anyone to think it is a good idea.

At this point, it is obvious that there is no geo-political or geo-strategic plan of any type. The administration is just winging it, and Sen Murphy's explanation is the only one available.

It was also noted that the person occupying the president's chair said "they must be forced to negotiate". When someone is forced to negotiate, that is not a negotiation, that is extortion. Welcome to another nation run like a mob office.

Just about anything useful and high quality has been tariffed out of existence in India. It is done in the name of protecting our industry while they catch up with rest of the world.

Exactly backwards has happened. The cars we get here are so bad they are sometimes called tin cans on wheels. Without competitors from across the world Indian auto makers have absolutely no motivation to build world class cars. And it shows on the road.

I mean… Europe isn’t particularly well-known for being particularly business friendly. There’s a lot of good there for sure but there’s also a lot of barriers. And I say this as a Canadian who is also disappointed by the overall business environment at home.

"Tariffs apply to imports, so produce locally instead".

The argument unfortunately has 2 flaws;

A) local production is expensive (which is why manufacturers fled decades ago.) If it is reintroduced here those goods remain expensive.

B) most things are not made in one place. Steel comes from here, electronics from there, energy from somewhere else, and so on. Even farmers use imported fertilizer, machinery and so on. Since the Tariffs are on "everything" (not just finished goods) they drive up the cost of local manufacturing even more.

A long-term strategy to increase local production makes sense. But it has to be done in a targeted way so as not to harm everything else. Typically it starts with finished goods, then slowly working down the food chain to improve the supply of parts making up those goods.

Exemptions on finished goods (like electronics) kills any gain. He might have, for example, exempted electronic parts. Which would then incentivize assembly to be local. Once you have local assembly you could look at say packaging, and so on.

The approach taken though doesn't lead to the outcomes being touted. Tariffs at country level are dumb. Excempting finished goods is dumb. Tariffs on things that can't be made locally (like coffee) is dumb.

That's before we talk about stability and certainty. For Tariffs to work you need both, and neither are in play here.

It's like saying "if it's white, fluffy and has four legs, never assume it is anything but a sheep". If the wolf knows you're applying that logic, what happens next?

Building a factory takes years, and a big chunk of that happens long before you actually start work on site.

You gotta find a site, work with local govt to negotiate servicing, environmental report (there's a couple years, and potentially a couple go-arounds right there.)

So there can be lots of activity, lots of progress reports, lots of optimism, for a decade or more before any real money has to be spent.

Ultimately Apple et al can "agree" to anything, the president can have his "big win" and things can carry on just as before.

The $500b was announced more than a month ago

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...

Annoyingly, "assume the worst about people, especially those on the opposite side of the political spectrum" seems to be the norm these days.

It’s a sop to Trump just like when Cook did the dog and pony show and bragged about making the 10 Mac Pros that they ship in a year in the US.

The $500b investment is going towards a bunch of things, including a factory to build servers for their AI services.

I recall the Foxconn Wisconsin situation, and I have no doubt Apple et al are well aware of it. String out a pretense of building factories in the US for the next three and a half years? Easy peasy. President Trump will soon get bored of this game anyway and move on to the next one; he already looks like he's bored of it and it didn't bring him universal acclaim and admiration.

You can be sure some crony owns the company that screws the display and puts stickers on the laptop with minimum wage workers.

Cause this talks of a gradual implementation of tariff to avoid scaring the markets, which is as far from what happened as it's possible.

What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.

This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.

This is 100% false and naive. History is profoundly reversible. There is no such thing as guaranteed progress.

So-called "acceptance" of homosexuality is a very recent phenomenon but in no way mainstream. Even in the liberal progressive Bay Area you can get gay bashed quite easily (including in the Castro!).

Voting rights for women? Basically just turned 100 years old in the United States and already in the process of getting rolled back via the SAVE act.

Don't assume that any of the liberal trends we've seen in the last 150 years are here to stay. America is an interesting historical exception and anomaly -- by no means how humanity has done business for the majority of its existence.

They have 100% bought into a totally controlled media ecosystem. How do you get your marketing material on Fox, or Truth Social?

So it’s actually an incentive to build in China.

It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.

Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.

That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.

Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.

To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.

I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.

If they’re following the law they’d have to declare the purchase when they come home.

Better than putting that money in the military, isn't it?

Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten

The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.

And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.

US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.

The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.

Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.

“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”

“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”

TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.