this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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On the one hand, fostering local production of these goods is positive for national resilience, and also has a chance to reduce shipping around the world, which is bad for the environment.
On the other hand, good fucking luck, lol.
No way we're making chips stateside with the Department of Education on the chopping block.
So many schools will close and you sure as shit ain't training people who can make top of the line chips with no fucking schools.
They plan to import workers with visas and then hold those visas over their heads to force them to work for peanuts.
I mean, they do this small-scale already.
As the standard of living and pay in the USA quickly tanks and becomes less desirable than where they're from, those people will stop applying for those positions.
They can't force foreigners to sign up for H-1B visas. The whole point is the salary is currently and the USA is currently a desirable place to live. Won't stay that way long. They're literally tearing down all the things that made it desirable to begin with.
Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.
Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.
Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.
I've been saying this for years now. The wealthy here are now international wealthy. They don't care about borders. Musk hops his private jet and goes wherever the fuck he wants whenever he wants and no governments seem to be in his way.
They are done with the high standard of living in the US. They think we're coddled and don't deserve it. They're done trying to bring up international living standards to match America and are all-in on bringing American living standards down to match the rest of the planet.
This is the strip-mining stage of American capitalism. They've turned all the economic tools that they used to subjugate South America (Chile for example), using Milton Friedman's Economic Shock Treatment here at home in the US.
They really don't give a damn, they're done with us. We're being dropped like a jilted lover.
Why would anyone want to come over here right now? I don’t even want to be here.
A lot of immigrants are paid more highly in the US than they are in their home countries.
The Indian Rupee, for example, has a poor exchange rate with the US dollar and they have higher salaries in the US.
So they take an H-1B job and they make enough to take care of themselves in the US and usually have US dollars they can send home to their family which can be exchanged for large amounts of rupees.
Current exchange is rougly $1 USD to about ₹80 rupees.
This will change as the US economy tanks and people stop using the US dollar as a reserve currency.
Especially as foreigners learn how much we seem to want to exploit them. Whether in agriculture, housekeeping, or nuclear physics, the common denominator is taking advantage of foreigners who we constantly profess our hatred for.
That’s how Twitter is run
The factory TSMC opened in the USA was mostly staffed with workers from Taiwan, because Americans won't work 996.
It also only makes dies (the functional part of the IC), that still have to be exported to Taiwan for packaging.
Do they have 996 in Taiwan? I thought that was just the PRC?
all of asia works stupid long hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_hours_in_South_Korea
Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China are not all of Asia. All of East Asia perhaps.
correct that's what I meant to say thank you
India does too. Not sure about the rest of Asia.
996? PRC?
You mean 007?
Ohh computer chips.
Freedom fries.
When a quarter of the most qualified engineers to make the stuff and a lot of the cheap manual labor are immigrants and you do a campaign against immigrants so they leave, maybe you don't have enough people left to to create local production.
That's covered in "lol"
Illegal immigrants went to America because their home countries are fucking miserable. They're not going back because they don't feel welcome. And they're definitely not engineers, much less the "most qualified" engineers.
I said immigrants, not illegal immigrants. But in the end, legal immigrants get deported too.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-born-stem-workers-united-states
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/migrants-legal-status-trump-biden/index.html
You have evidence of this?
A search turns up some hits legal migrants are put in detention centers. But you can also wait a few weeks and evidence should be on the news.
Ah yes, the classic "look into it" argument. When evidence finds itself in the news I will consider this a threat. Until then, your claims are unfounded.
https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citizens/
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_the_United_States
I want to point out that this list is INCOMPLETE and you should go to the bottom of the Wikipedia page you will see numerous articles depicting the stories of the people above.
We don't manufacture cars in the United States we assemble them. Most of the parts for cars are made outside of the states. Mainly in China.
No country manufactures cars 100% locally. We live in a global economy. All cars are made from components sourced from countries all over the world, in varying degrees.
If that's the goal, you announce tariffs are coming in a few years so that people scale up local production to avoid the higher costs.
In this case, there was like 4 months notice where all of it was undefined, so of course nobody did anything and now we still don't have local production. Now, prices will go up and local producers (if they even build up) will match the new prices instead of keeping them low.
Congrats, worst of both worlds! We still have no local production and prices have gone up! Yay!
Even then, as a democracy, you can only do really mild tariffs as companies won't trust the tariffs to stay high come the next government. You instead subsidise, in whatever form, including things like long-term supply contracts. If you want to push domestic ball point pen production, just order your administration to prefer buying domestic ball point pens if they're within what 20% of the import price, then slowly reduce that rate but keep the preference to make sure your ballpoint pen industry is productive, efficient, and competitive. Make it a 10-year supply contracts the next government can't just cancel. If you're the US, give them to teachers to give children.
Shipping over water is actually pretty green, since they have huge ships carrying a bunch of containers with relatively little energy.
Building new factories in the States will create a lot more pollution. Concrete is the opposite of green.
Yet he supports oil.. Which accounts for a sizeable share of international shipping. This is while the US doesn't have enough refining capacity for the type of oil we produce.
I agree, tariffs will be a net positive for the country. Problem is, the people taking the brunt of that impact will, as always, be the poorest and most vulnerable. There are many ways we could solve that problem but of course authoritarians have no interest in that.
That being said, anyone who voted for Trump thinking he would fix the economy is a fucking moron. Tariffs make shit worse before they get better. It will probably be a decade before we start to see any positive impact from them.
Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we'd already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.
There's no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.
[citation needed]
Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff
Oh well, you have a single sentence from a Wikipedia article, I guess I was wrong!
The citations are all concerning the concept of "free trade" which is an incredibly generic phrase.