A curious dynamic: A seller importing a container of cargo to Amazon (or other US warehouse) has to pay the tariffs up front while trusting that dear leader won't lower the tariff amount before they can sell them. A seller that ships directly from China has a committed purchase with cash in hand by the time the specific tariff needs to be paid. I can see this leading to drastically less selection from US warehouses of long tail items that would otherwise sit around.
Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if Aliexpress (/Choice) charges sellers a fixed fee based on the current tariff rates, but still covers whatever the tariff ends up being when the item arrives at the port, to make it really straightforward for sellers. The kind of eat-it investment you get in a society working to build up institutions rather than tear them down.
Certain goods are extremely high mark up. For example, clothing is typically 100-200% markup. So if you buy a $5 t-shirt and sell it for $15, the tariffed price is now ~$12. You may find retailers will sell that at $20, absorbing some of the cost on a temporary basis.
Also, many such retailers have already sought to diversify their supply chains (eg buying clothing from Vietnam and other places).
That's gotta be something historians will puzzle over for the next two hundred years. It's mind blowing that we did that.
Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?
It was corruption and ineptitude the entire way down. How could that have happened?
Pick one of two very different sides. If a third candidate tries to enter the race, they harm themselves and the person they are similar to, and they help the opposition.
Any form of ranked voting will rid us of this restriction and allow more candidates to run for an office, and allow citizens to vote their true preference.
Yesterday, HR 3040 was introduced by a GOP member from Arizona, which intends to ban ranked choice voting from federal elections. The GOP has already banned it in the state of Florida.
A radical party is terrified of a system that enables more electoral competition and throttles radicalism.
In an election, the addition of a candidate similar to an existing candidate should not adversely impact both candidates.
Some political analysts claim that Perot entered the race not really intending to win but rather as retribution against Bush. In 1979 the Iranian regime imprisoned two of Perot's EDS employees. Perot asked Bush, who was then Director of the CIA, to get them out. Bush refused to act and Perot held a grudge against him ever since.
Most interesting part of that story is that once the government failed to help he organized and trained his own operation and successfully extracted his employees.
edit: https://www.rossperot.com/life-story/iran-hostage-rescue
Oh ffs, Harris in charge would've been just fine. If we're talking about economy/stock market only, even Vance as president would've been fine as well, although he'd destroy American democracy way more efficiently than Trump.
Muslims in Michegan were convinced Harris is a genocidal maniac, while most everybody else heard she was in bed with hamas.
Liberal suburban housewives heard she was a merciless prosecutor while others learned she was soft on crime.
I guess you forgot about the corpse of Biden. Harris belongs in that "challengers" category except she had less support than DeSantis and Haley (from both Democrats and Republicans!). Harris has never received a vote in a presidential primary.
The Democratic party enabled Trump to win by not forcing a clearly incapable Biden out of the race earlier, allowing them to run an actual primary and then choosing a terrible candidate because they backed themselves into a corner with identity politics. Remember, the Democratic party was totally fine with Biden until he was forced in front of the American people and they got as good of a look at him as the party had.
That's how our system produces these horrible candidates. Each party acts in their own self-interest because they have a stranglehold over the electoral process.
I'm sure she's a wonderful person in real life, but she's one of the most unpopular people to ever run for office.
Obama actually is likeable, easily winning the primary and both elections.
The Dems, because deep down they'd rather have the GOP over real progressives. Decided to rig it for Hillary again in 2016. Sanders had an actual base, but the DNC didn't want him to win.
Biden was a rigged candidate too, but the pandemic swayed things in his direction.
With Harris, the Dems decide to skip the rigged primary, the little people (the actual voters) don't need to have a say. Here's your moderate Republican from the mid 90s.
At least the Republicans didn't rig every primary they've had since 2008. They don't play the super delegate dance.
Well... Time to try and establish residency elsewhere.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/republicans-cancel...
Sanders was a candidate in the Democratic primary (which is already a significant accommodation, with Sanders not even being a member of the Democratic party), and was strongly rejected by Democratic voters -- twice.
The constant whining from Sanders fans about the DNC is simply annoying, and is basically the same conspiratorial thinking that MAGA adherents display when they complain about the "deep state".
these are sad/scary times.
He said, "It's just not that hard to get these factories back to the states. We can get that done this month."
The amount of cognitive dissonance and just outright believing the lies is astounding.
Trump won't say that states need to build those factories. He'll tell governors that they're failures for not having done it already.
https://www.globalhighways.com/wh10/feature/building-replace...
tbh, as far as I'm concerned the hollowing out of the USG is why we can't do things fast. How many times has your boss had the entire team submit a proposal on how long it would take each member of the team to complete a JIRA ticket and then use that bidding as to who to assign the ticket? Like if you could build bridges and stuff in-house then you really speed things up.
Given that something like a factory is probably going to require eminent domain to get a large contiguous tract (or built in the middle of nowhere so no counter-lawsuit) it seems fine for the government to build the shell of a building and then sell it off to be customized.
I have a metal lathe in my shop, if I thought it was worth it I could turn it into a factory in 10 minutes - including the time to change my clothes. I could a factory to build simple toolboxes in about a month - not much space or equipment needed. Building a car assembly line - one month if you will accept a production rate of 1 every year. Want to turn out a new car every minute and it will take a lot longer.
In my local construction market everyone is already working. There’s no slack manpower, particularly in the skilled trades (mech, elec, plumbing)
The above also ignores the fact that nobody wants to lend capital for such projects, so the government will need to finance it.
No, he does not and would not want to work in a shoe factory, but he remembers when he was 16 and his first job was actually in a local shoe factory. He said it was a terrible job, but taught him how to keep a job. And he appreciated being able to buy shoes that were made by people he knew. . . . "I want that opportunity for my grandson."
It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to exist in quantity.
It doesn't sound like you like those jobs, shoe factory might not be better, so yay?
Better than being homeless isn't much of a selling point...
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
But retailers have studied that this trick isn't going to last because not everyone wants to buy candy bars in bulk, and they won't spend more than $3 for a single candy bar, which means if it goes any higher they won't by any candy bars at all.