Voroxpete @ Voroxpete @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Judging by how Americans vote, this guy will be president within the next twenty years.

Pro-tip: If you marry said friend, they have to seat you together anyway.

It depends on the seller. Generally if they're set up to do business properly in the US, yes, they'll take off things like tariffs and fees, because if they don't it just tends to result in pissed off customers who refuse to pay the tariffs and then charge back on their credit card when they don't receive their goods. It just makes more sense to handle all that on the customer's behalf. Happy customers buy more things. When in doubt you need to contact their customer service and ask.

So the way this works is the importer of record pays the tariff when it gets to the US port.

So, scenario 1, you buy a product from an American company that imports either the whole product or some part of it from China. The American company pays the tariff and then decides how much of that to add to their costs.

Scenario 2, you buy from a Chinese seller that ships to the US like Temu. In these cases generally the seller is the importer of record, so they pay all applicable tariffs on your behalf, but in order to do so they'll add it to your bill along with the shipping.

Scenario 3, you buy from a company in China that ships directly to you without acting as an importer. There are a bunch of options for this where you basically order stuff direct from manufacturers, and it seems like it's going to be way cheaper because there are no tariffs or other import fees. But in reality what happens here is you are now the importer of record. There's two ways this will play out; the government will either hold the item at the port of entry until you pay the fees, or it'll arrive and then you'll get a bill for the fees later. This can be really dangerous because you can end paying a whole lot more than you expected to.

1. As others have said, you're not likely to find Trump stans on Lemmy.
2. There's really very little to debate. The tariffs are patently absurd, and every serious person agrees on this. Anyone capable of actually formulating a structured debate is incapable of defending them. It's a paradoxical request.

The thing is, there are individual aspects of the tariff situation that could, theoretically, be defended, but the sum collective cannot because each aspect undercuts the others.

The simplest way to see this is to examine the three contradictory explanations that the administration has offered for why the tariffs are being applied:

1. They are intended to repatriate manufacturing back to the US
2. They are intended to be a bargaining tool to force other countries to treat the US more fairly in trade matters (presumably resulting the elimination of these "tariffs and unfair practices" that they claim other countries are applying to the US).
3. They are intended to be a new source of revenue, funding tax cuts in perpetuity.

Suppose 1 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to return manufacturing to the US, they have to be permanent, or at least very long term. No company is going to spend 4 years building a factory just to avoid a tariff that won't be around in 4 years time. But if the tariffs are permanent, then they cannot be used as a bargaining tool, because the bargaining process has to conclude with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced in order to win concessions from the other side. And if the tariffs are supposed to move manufacturing back to the US and address the trade imbalance, they cannot serve as a long-term source of revenue, because eventually (the theory goes) those companies will produce everything in the US, meaning they won't be paying tariffs.

Now suppose 2 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to be a bargaining tool then the bargaining has to end with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced. In this scenario, the tariffs will not result in repatriating manufacturing, and they will not serve as a source of long-term income for the reasons we just discussed.

And of course, if 3 is true, the same problems apply. If the tariffs are to be a source of long-term income then the current trade imbalances have to remain. If manufacturing repatriates, the income dries up. If deals are struck in return for removing the tariffs, the income dries up.

Tariffs can, when applied thoughtfully and with care, serve as a tool to help achieve any one of those three goals. They cannot solve any of those problems on their own;

• You cannot fund a government entirely on tariffs, the US tried that for a long time and it proved to be a bad idea because international trade is worth so much more to your economy
• You cannot move manufacturing home with tariffs alone, you need to also invest in supporting the infrastructure, training and other supports needed (which is exactly what Biden was doing with the CHIPS act that Trump shit-canned)
• You cannot use tariffs effectively as a tool for negotiation when you apply them to the entire planet at the same time, thus pitting yourself alone against everyone else.

And they certainly cannot solve all three of them together.

Bernie Sanders has long been an advocate against unrestricted free trade. There are many progressive economists who favour the careful use of tariffs as a way of preventing corporations from exploiting cheap international labour for profit while driving down domestic wages. Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay on this subject; https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/

There's also Bessent's plan to repatriate manufacturing by strong-arming the rest of the world into accepting deals where they peg their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing the US to devalue the dollar while maintaining it's privileged position as the global reserve currency, which would in turn tend to shift the US trade balance more towards exports. But Bessent himself isn't really a fan of using tariffs to achieve this, and any sane person would plan to go after a few countries at a time, not the whole planet. It's also a bad plan anyway because once people see that you're planning to devalue the currency you just pegged them to, they'll probably just tear up those deals, because if you weren't acting in good faith why should they? Also, devaluing the dollar, on its own, would likely do little to increase domestic manufacturing in the US. It would make existing US exports more attractive, but it wouldn't create any kind of a serious case for investing in more manufacturing in the US. The US standard of living is still much, much higher than most of the places where companies can build these goods, which means its simply more expensive to do anything in the US. That only changes is you massively reduce the US standard of living, which isn't exactly the big win anyone in MAGA wants, now is it?

The point being, yes, there are plenty of arguments for the use of tariffs, just like there are plenty of situations where a reasonable person might want a gun. That doesn't then imply that it's a good idea to shoot yourself in the foot. What Trump and his administration are doing with tariffs cannot be defended, because it simply does not make sense as a plan. It's an incoherent, self-defeating hodge-podge of ideas that could only have resulted from many different warring factions trying to enact their own preferred plan while a mad-king at the centre of it all listens to anyone who salves his ego while having absolutely no comprehension of the realities of what he, or anyone around him, is trying to achieve.

Yes, but also please understand that registering to vote directly at the polling station is ridiculously easy. Even if you forgot to update your registration, go vote anyway, it'll only take an extra few minutes.

Either way you do need ID to vote but what qualifies as ID is anything from an absolutely enormous list of options, including, if need be, just having someone else vouch for you.

See the full list here: https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=id&document=index&lang=e

Also of note;

• Polling places open several days ahead of the election.
• You can already - as in right now - go vote early at any elections Canada office.
• Your place of work is legally required to give you time off to vote if none of those other options work for you.

Please, please, please, do not get caught up in the Americanification of all online discourse. Voting in Canada is unbelievably easy.

Ah yes. It's not that these idiots invested serious money into something called a "meme coin." No, it's all the other red flags they ignored that were the problem.

Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that's specifically for running games.

It's Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there's a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.

This is a neighbour to the "Shirley Exception". Let's call it the "Shirley Prerequisite."

People will hear an idea they broadly like, and rather than actually examine how its going to be implemented, they'll simply assume that it will be the way that they would implement it, because to them that's obviously the only logical way to do it. Sometimes their way is the logical way, sometimes it isn't, but the point is that they can't get out of their head enough to consider any other possibility.

In this case, the possibility left unconsidered is that Trump is a fucking moron.

For the Chinese, this is an incredibly sensible way to respond, no question.

As a Canadian, I'm worried. This is only going to strengthen Trump's case for giving the US direct access rate earth minerals through one sided deals in Ukraine, and by coercing or dominating Canada.

Granted, I assumed yearly, because this is apparently supposed to replace a yearly benefit that Greenland receives from Denmark.

Even if it is only one time, that's still a lot of money that Trump seems to want to throw at something completely frivolous, rather than making a difference to the lives of Americans. Can't see how that feels good for anyone who is struggling with the price of eggs.

Not even remotely. LLMs have failed to find any viable market fit.

The problem continues to be hallucinations and limited utility. This is compounded by the fact that LLMs are very expensive to run. The latter problem wouldn't really be a problem if LLMs were truly capable of replacing a human employee, but they're not. They're just too unreliable for any serious enterprise grade application, and they're too expensive for any low severity application.

For example, as a coding assistant, a lot of people quite like them. But as a replacement for a human coder, they're a disaster. That means you still have to employ the expensive human, and you also have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for what amounts to a very cool search engine.

There are tonnes of frivolous applications where they work really well. The AI girlfriend stuff, for example. A chatbot that sexts you is a very sellable product, regardless of how icky it might seem to some people. But no one is going to pay over $200 / month for it (as an example, ChatGPT still doesn't make a profit at their $200/month tier).

LLMs are too unreliable to make anything better than toys, but too expensive to sell as toys.

For anyone who voted for Trump because your cost of living is too high... How y'all feeling about this?

Trump wants to give everyone in Greenland $10k. Where's your $10k? What the actual fuck has this guy done to help you out so far?

How is it that DOGE has to force your grandma to walk to an office for her social security because a phone line was too expensive, but Trump has money to throw $600m a year at this?

Interesting theory. Total absence of proof.

Does the theory fit the available facts? Yes.

Do the available facts prove the theory? Absolutely not.

Agreed. This is a mistake. Canada made the right choice in going ahead with all counter-tariffs even when Trump was offering pauses.

The best way out of this is through. The US cannot be allowed to dictate the pace and timing. If they want a trade war, they need to get a trade war, good and hard. No timeouts, no breathers. A global united front needs to pummel them until they promise not to do this shit again.

OK, listen, I am always 1000% down for laughing at the stupid, self defeating damage being caused by Trump... But this ain't it.

Microsoft has been backing off of new data centre buildouts for a while now, long before Trump started getting serious about this tariff bullshit. They were doing this quietly, mostly allowing letters of intent to expire and doing other stuff that makes it very clear that they have lost all confidence in this mythical AI revolution that they were piling money into. Of course, admitting that the tech rapture isn't coming will be disastrous for their stock price, so they're trying to avoid actually saying what they're doing.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, research by TD Cowen picked up what was happening, and it was recently verified by reporting from Bloomberg. So Microsoft have lost the ability to make these pullbacks quietly, and they're desperate for any kind of cover. The tariffs are exactly what they need; instead of admitting that they set billions of dollars on fire trying to make magic beans real, they can blame the government.

Trump's idiotic tariffs are doing massive damage to the global economy, but this particular wound is very much self-inflicted on Microsoft's part.

Exactly. He's been holding onto this notion for decades, and no one has ever disabused him of it. Now he's a mentally declining old idiot and it's too late to teach him that he's wrong.

This is why Bessent is trying to bail. He's never been a fan of this "tariff everyone" approach, and it's now finally occurred to him that he's going to get the blame to cover Trump's ass.

Trump's aides love tariffs because Trump loves tariffs. He's been obsessed with them his entire life.

Rafael isn't criticizing Trump, he's giving him an escape hatch, trying to pretend that this is all "bad advice".

I can't stress to you enough how little this distinction matters to the rest of the world.

America elected Trump. Again. Knowing exactly who he was, and what he would do, because it's just more of what he did the first time.

We don't really care which specific Americans are to blame for that. The existence of good Americans is as meaningful to us as the existence of good cops.

This is why the relationship between America and its allies is never going to be the same again. We can't trust you. Sure, maybe in four years Trump will be gone. Maybe he won't. But, to paraphrase a French senator, we can't put our security in the hands of a bunch of voters in Wisconsin every four years.

America held a trusted place in the world. That can't happen anymore, because the American people have proven themselves incapable of living up to that trust.

Doesn't need to be more. Most of what China imports from the US is relatively easy to source from elsewhere. For example the biggest category of imports is fuel, and the third biggest category is plant based oils, grains, seeds, fruits, etc. The US doesn't have a particular monopoly on those kinds of products. Last time this shit happened, China started sourcing all their soy bean imports from Brazil, for example. So China only has to make the US products uncompetitive in their market. And of course, China isn't in a trade war with the entirety of the rest of the planet, so it's a choice between an 84% tariff, or something in the region of no tariffs, so it doesn't really take all that much to make the US product more expensive than any other option. If anything, these additional tariffs are largely performative; just at the 34% percent level they were at, most US producers were probably already completely shut out of Chinese markets just by cost differences alone.

The US, on the other hand, largely imports things that China is highly specialised at making. Electronics, injection molded plastics, that sort of thing. Stuff that you can't just magically source from somewhere else, because even if another factory could make the product, they have to set up production runs, create specific tooling, run prototype batches, etc, etc. So even at a 100% markup, a lot of companies will have no choice but to continue to source those parts from China, especially since anywhere else they might have them built is probably also subject to an exorbitant tariff. The cost of importing from China isn't actually 104%, it's 104% minus the tariff one whatever other country you might get that part from. Trump's deranged theory is that they're going to choose between 104% vs 0% for making it in the US, but there simply aren't any production facilities in the US that are set up to make the stuff that China makes, so that choice doesn't exist.

(in case you're wondering about the second biggest category, since I obviously skipped it, it's machinery, including engines, turbines, nuclear reactors, boilers, taps, valves, etc. That's the sort of thing that's harder to source elsewhere, but in the long run China is much better equipped to start producing it domestically because they at least have the kind of broad manufacturing base needed. It'll hurt them, but not nearly as much as this stuff is hurting the US, and they can also issue specific exemptions if needed).