• 0 Posts
  • 96 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • The things that are cheaper to make in the US were already made in the US.
    Because of the high cost of labor here, we tend to specialize in things where the unit cost is so high that the labor cost doesn’t matter as much and spending extra for educated and skilled workers becomes a cheaper upgrade. Things like jet engine parts, engines, and machine tools.
    Also things where you make a lot of them in an automated fashion, like precision screws and nuts or refined petroleum products. We’re probably not making the plastic bags or chairs, but we would be making the giant tub of plastic beads used for the injection moulding, which is then shipped to Malaysia to be moulded, and then back to the US to be a deck chair.

    The set of industries that are close enough to the line to make sense to move to the US and can be moved quickly enough for it to matter is vanishingly small.
    It’s why most of our exports have been intangible for so long.


  • I believe it’s paid as part of clearing customs. Since everything is in some capacity inspected (even if that just means checking the weight, container seals, and serial numbers in the freight container), that means there’s some record of what’s coming in and from where. At that point the importer pays customs the various fees and taxes before customs let’s them take the goods out of the port of entry.

    The importer would mark it down as part of the taxes that they paid on their purchase, but it would largely only matter so that they can appropriately indicate what portion of the purchase price was taxes that have already been paid so they don’t double pay later.


  • If not having it doesn’t lose you anything can I have yours?

    You’re focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn’t have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

    Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.



  • It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
    They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

    My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.





  • It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

    The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
    The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

    Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
    We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

    Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

    As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.


  • There was a time when I was a student that I spent a lot of time near a particular coffee shop, and more than you would typically expect for just studying and the like, since it turned into the place where my friend group basically hung out most of the time.
    In any case, it was a decently high traffic area and since I was there a lot I found two wallets and a cellphone over the time I was there a lot.

    One wallet had an emergency contact I was able to call, think it was their mother, and that I’d be at the coffee shop for a bit. They brought me cookies, and I was thrilled.
    Next person just had their phone number, and they acted like I was a creep for saying I had their wallet and would like to give it back to them, so I told them I was leaving it with the cashier and left it at that and was a bit sad, since being told off for trying to be nice is a bummer.
    Cellphone was the worst. I called their most recent number and told them what was up (this was clearly before ubiquitous lock screens). Owner called me back in the same number and threatened to call the cops on me so I hung up, powered off the phone and put it back where I found it. Felt sad.

    Given how it seems like everyone has lost their minds now, I’m not sure I would risk letting someone know I found their stuff. I’d still try to return it because that’s the right thing to do, but I’m not sure if I’d be willing to use my own phone number or anything.
    If people will shoot you for using their driveway to turn around I can only imagine what they’d do for a bus pass, student ID and a loyalty punch card for a bakery.


  • The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

    It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
    Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

    Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.





  • So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
    You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
    If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

    The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

    In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.


  • This is how they start meaningfully erroding abortion rights at the federal level, as well a gay rights.
    They’ve long held that preventing a Christian from interfering in someone else’s life is an infringement on religious freedom.
    They’re going to find ways to end Christian persecution by removing rules that say Christians have to fill prescriptions they think might be related to abortion, aren’t bound by anti discrimination laws, are institutionally allowed to break rules governing the behavior of hospitals, orphanages and adoption agencies, or any number of other charities.




  • I literally linked you to a large collection of their statements on the matter, backed by data. “Appeal to authority” isn’t a magic phrase that lets you dismiss expertise entirely. “Appeal to authority” is a fallacy, but “deferring to expertise” is not. I’m not saying these tariffs are wrong because economists say they are, but that it’s reasonable to accept consensus opinion of regarded experts without walking through every step of their argument.

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/informal-logic/appeals-to-authority/F455E1D4279677917F379D9464A76060

    In general, the use of argument from expert opinion is a reasonable, if inherently defeasible, type of argument. Appeals to expert opinion can be a legitimate form of obtaining advice or guidance for drawing tentative conclusions on an issue or problem where objective knowledge is unavailable or inconclusive. It is well recognized in law, for example, where expert testimony is treated as an important kind of evidence in a trial, even though it often leads to conflicting testimony, in a “battle of the experts.”

    I specifically mentioned that they can be wrong, and that it’s maybe worth reconsidering when you’re disagreeing with the experts. Of course engineers can make mistakes. But if a group of them say “that bridge is unsafe, we can show you our calculations”, and a non-engineer says that they have an “intuitive feeling” that it is, I know who I’m listening to.

    Are you going to keep shifting to different topics? As far as economic arguments go “there’s a theoretical economist who thinks this is a good idea that I haven’t cited and that agrees with my intuition” is… Not very interesting.


  • I do ultimately think tariffs will be good for the US.

    Can you see how maybe it would be easy for a person to think that you thought tariffs would be good for the US? If that wasn’t your point, then I have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Why don’t you care what economists say? They’re people who have actually spent time looking at and thinking about these things. They have numbers to back up their claims and, while fallible, they’re likely the most qualified people to make assessments about the economic impact of policy changes.
    It’s like saying you don’t care what engineers say when what you’re doing is building a bridge. At the very least it should raise a red flag when nearly all of them say something is a bad idea.