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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • That and there are second-order effects. If your business ordered a bunch of shit prior to all of this, and it’s now coming into port you may say “fuck it, send it back” or you may decide to accept it, eat the tariff, and preemptively increase your pricing on your future finished landed goods because you are now having to factor in pricing instability of the input components/materials.

    Likewise, during the several months period of fluctuation, many businesses likely made a reasoned decision to stop ordering for the future because they don’t know if the market will tolerate them having to increase their prices by that much and they can’t afford to sit on inventory they will never sell. So even if the government declares “ha just kidding” and completely abandons tariffs today, there could be a period of 2-5 months where many products aren’t available because industries paused proactive ordering based on projected demand.


  • This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: “But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends”.

    If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they’d finally decouple themselves from FB.


  • Russia isn’t negotiating in good faith. They find reasons to start/stop negotiations, they propose ceasefires while continuing to attack, etc. Basically they feel that time is on their side and they won’t have much to lose unless they are presented with real stakes. Difficult to do since neither the US or Europe wants a direct “hot” war with Russia, and meanwhile Putin doesn’t value human life. If he has to throw a couple hundred thousand more conscripts into the meatgrinder, that doesn’t bother him in the slightest.




  • The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

    The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

    1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

    2. manually generate CSRs,

    3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

    4. schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

    As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.





  • Even if the stated goal was to reshore large amounts of production of goods to the US, there are several problems with that.

    One, history shows that it is largely not possible, at least in any practical sense. US companies make t-shirts in Vietnam and Pakistan because they can sell them to consumers here for $10. Are US consumers magically going to decide they’re OK with an Old Navy (low quality) garment costing $35 instead of $10?

    Secondly, standing up manufacturing and distribution domestically isn’t an overnight thing. Funding, site selection, construction, supply chain integration etc. all take time. Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

    “Sorry little Johnny, not only can we not afford new Nikes for you anymore, but also you can forget about that Nintendo Switch 2 for Christmas because we can’t even order one. But at least we know your GED-educated uncle Jimbo in northern Michigan might be able to get a lower-middle class factory job assembling widgets again… maybe… in 2 years.”

    That isn’t a good economic pitch for most people.







  • I mean, people already know. A tariff is literally a tax that artificially bouys one domestic industry or class of product, at the expense of all others who participate in the market.

    I’ve never seen or heard of any point in history where the apparent “desired effect” is achieved and all manufacturing production is magically reshored resulting in prosperity. The actual result is Joe Consumer having fewer choices or buying a Chevy he didn’t want vs. a Toyota he did want.

    … and while we are at it, what is an “American” car these days? Any company that was started or Headquartered here? Anything that undergoes final assembly here? The Ford I used to drive had parts and assemblies from Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, and probably China.