Framework Stops Selling Some of Its Laptops in the US Due To Tariffs (404media.co) 157
Framework -- a company that makes upgradeable and repairable laptops -- will pause sales on several versions of one of its models in America thanks to Trump's tariffs, it said. From a report: "Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we're temporarily pausing US sales on a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U). For now, these models will be removed from our US site. We will continue to provide updates as we have them," Framework said in a post on X.
A spokesperson for Framework told 404 Media in an email that the company was pausing sales on their six lowest priced units in the U.S. They clarified that those models are still available to customers that are ordering the machines outside of America.
A spokesperson for Framework told 404 Media in an email that the company was pausing sales on their six lowest priced units in the U.S. They clarified that those models are still available to customers that are ordering the machines outside of America.
Rule by Chaos (Score:2)
The big difference for Framework from the other laptops is that most Frameworks are *pre-sold*. Framework can't plan a laptop price 2 months in advance when the person in charge of Tarrif policy changes his mind every 3 days with 0 notice, and suddenly, all those laptops for which you negotiated prices and sold will now cost you an extra, 10, 20, or 30% on the day they ship!
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I do not think you understood correctly.
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Now we know you are a blowhard.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would expect you rather to applaud Framework's move to stop importing certain laptops. Isn't that the goal of the tariffs, to influence American companies to make goods here?
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame that Trump didn't think to develop the domestic supply chains and manufacturing first. It's not like they can just switch to American made AMD CPUs, or American made flash, or American made RAM, because America doesn't make those things.
If the plan actually worked it would take years for those things to come to the US. How long can Americans afford to wait?
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the plan actually worked it would take years for those things to come to the US. How long can Americans afford to wait
You may also have missed the small detail that Trump just cancelled all support for the US industry to create these products.
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Re:So.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Care to pay attention? Last month Trump called on congress to repeal the CHIPS act. That for one has already resulted in several projects being put on hold due to political uncertainty. Only a few days ago he's killed off MEP which was a program to support the development of small / medium business manufacturing, incidentally Trump himself only signed that law in a month ago.
The USA is currently not a place anyone can invest in. It's not a country where it is possible to calculate ROI.
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Yes that's why they are built all over America ... wait no, that's not right, they are being built elsewhere. But in any case that's beside the point. Programs designed directly to promote American manufacturing are being shut down.
Famously Intel was GIFTED $10BN in the CHIPS Act, and Intel responded saying they weren't going to change their plans for building-out foundries as a result of the $10B gift.
Actually they were gifted $7.8bn. But whether Intel used it wisely or not is irrelevant. The reality is that many companies where planning expansions, TI, Bosch, and Micron have all announced some projects put on hold in the past couple of months due to the political uncertainty
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would expect you rather to applaud Framework's move to stop importing certain laptops. Isn't that the goal of the tariffs, to influence American companies to make goods here?
Nope,
This is the effect of tariffs, less gets imported but no replacements are forthcoming. There are fewer products on the market, less choice, less competition means lower quality and higher prices.
Just ask Australia how well high import duties worked for the domestic car market.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, good on them. Stop selling Americans cheap goods made in places that circumvent our notions of fairness like minimum wages and environmental protections.
America the land of fair minimum wages and environmental protections? You are being sarcastic, right?
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Just as well Trump imposed tariffs on only Asian countries then.
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Have you ever bought a framework laptop? Probably not.
Did they stop selling a product that was potentially unprofitable? Yep!
Did your post make you look foolish? Yep!
Are you MAGA? Judging by your sig? Yep!
Do fascists violate constitutional rights? Yep!
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They could raise the prices on their lower margin machines, but pricing of SKUs is far more complicated than that. Simply shifting all the price points upwards completely alters the revenue model.
Where Framework is located doesn't really matter- what matters is that they need to sell things made outside of the US, in the US.
So in short, no, you didn't understand correctly.
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They arent trying to understand, they are paid trolls attacking anything negative to the US right now - reactions to Trumps tariffs are high on Russia agenda right now as a follow up to the tariffs themselves, because getting people het up about American companies not toeing the line increases confrontation.
See how quickly several other people chimed in with supporting comments talking negatively about the company? Its a coordinated effort.
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Did anyone think tariffs lead to cheaper goods? lol
I mean sure, hypothetically, in a long enough time scale, domestic production can lead back to normally priced goods with the added benefit of economic isolation from foreign factors... but if you think someone implemented tariffs for the goal of making things cheaper, you're nuts.
Re:So.... (Score:4, Funny)
Did anyone think tariffs lead to cheaper goods? lol
About 80 million Americans thought they would and voted for Trump.
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I think that's a meme you've emotionally invested in to try to feel superior about it all.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As you raise prices, the demand will fall depending on the intended consumer.
At the high end, you can afford to pump these pretty hard, because those fuckers will pay anything.
At the mid range, you can pump a little, but less, because there is a threshold where these people will look for something else.
At the low end, people are looking for the cheapest thing they can find. Touch that price, and people will flock away from you.
This is why the low margin devices were dropped- because they didn't perceive people being willing to pay the tariff-adjusted price for them, and ending up with extra inventory that you have to sell at a loss is how small businesses die.
Are you saying their different models have parts sourced from different places, so costs have not gone up uniformly across their product-line?
Nope. I mean that might be true- but the base effect isn't because of that. It's simply because people react to prices- demand isn't price invariant.
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I'm no econ major, so I wasn't familiar with the correct terminology, but I've been working high enough up in a business for long enough to have understood the basics of the effect.
I guess if I were to rephrase using what I've learned from the curriculum you gave me, then price elasticity of demand is relatively elastic for the low-margin low-end SKUs, but less elastic the closer you get to the halo SKUs.
Thanks for the info.
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Not really, because the SKU MSR doesn't need to change, and would be far better not to.
Moving it to a different line-item on the invoice isn't going to change the elasticity of the demand.
Shipping has almost always cost more the further the distance. Shipping is and always has been a differing amount based on where you want it delivered. Import taxes and/or local sales taxes are added on under the same S&H section.
lol- and when shipping costs 50% the total value of the device, people tend to let it influence their purchasing decisions. This isn't a $29.99 S&H charge.
This is the very information needed to determine any tariffs in place and can trivially be added in with the rest of shipping, where there are already allocations to do that.
And in this weird hypothetical universe of yours where moving line items changes how people perceive price... ok?
I'm not saying this will have no effect on sales, it certainly will, but it is highly unlikely this alone would put units sold down to zero. Terminating a line of income is exactly that, even a sale of one unit would still generate income, so they are choosing to stop selling to the US.
This is flatly untrue. The nature of manufacturing is that you cannot manufacture individual devices.
They must balance the cost of a produ
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You're right- we're not a major commercial ship builder, lol.
The US shipbuilding industry is only 100% dedicated to US Government contracts- Naval, Coast Guard.
More MRI machines are manufactured in Florence, SC than all of China combined.
What the fuck was your point, again?
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No they are simply doing what Trump wants them to do. They are no longer importing certain laptops because the tariff would make them too expensive to sell. Isn't that the goal of the tariffs, to get Framework to stop importing foreign-made laptops and start making them here at home?
Re:So.... (Score:4, Insightful)
No they are simply doing what Trump wants them to do. They are no longer importing certain laptops because the tariff would make them too expensive to sell. Isn't that the goal of the tariffs, to get Framework to stop importing foreign-made laptops and start making them here at home?
What????? Not being able to sell these models profitably doesn’t equate to “and we can make them here.” How would they start making them here? Stop importing foreign components? Spin up a factory? Hire already trained Americans who know how to do this work? No. They just have to stop selling lower margin devices, and are hurt, officially, by the tariffs. This persistent belief that we can just magically make shit here, and make it affordably.
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Guilty as charged
Re: So.... (Score:2)
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Either way, you lose, prices go up and the economy will go down.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Informative)
For a company like Framework the answer is simply too hard to make them here at any real scale, we don't have the infrastructure or skill to do mass consumer electronic production.
An interesting thread here from an industrial engineer theory crafting what Nintendo would have to do to produce the Switch 2 in the USA today via contract (assuming they don't have the time to build a new factory as I assume Framework also does not have that capacity or money for).
Okay lets game this out: You are a Nintendo employee given unlimited funds and authority to move Switch 2 production to the US. No new factories, that's going to take way too long, you need to work with existing American Contract Manufacturing capacity. How fast can you do it? [bsky.app]
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For a company like Framework the answer is simply too hard to make them here at any real scale, we don't have the infrastructure or skill to do mass consumer electronic production.
That's just not true. We don't have the economics for it.
We manufacture a lot of electronics- but only the really fucking expensive kinds.
An interesting thread here from an industrial engineer theory crafting what Nintendo would have to do to produce the Switch 2 in the USA today via contract (assuming they don't have the time to build a new factory as I assume Framework also does not have that capacity or money for).
Read it again. They don't cite a lack of skill, they cite a lack of capacity- and that's very true.
When you're only focusing on the high end, the demand is much lower.
The US could spin up capacity in a heartbeat- if someone wanted to pay for it. And Americans do not.
Like their cited example of screens- yes, those would have to be imported.
You know why? Because the 3
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Read it again. They don't cite a lack of skill, they cite a lack of capacity- and that's very true.
The two go hand in hand. It's a specialised skill to quickly spin up and pivot around production lines to mass produce low quality goods. The USA is not geared up for this with many production lines being for a singular purpose. Skill is a thing, the kinds of factories being discussed employ teams of engineers which we don't have because that work doesn't exist here.
Skill and capacity go hand in hand. You create capacity in the type of field that doesn't exist in a country you need to also train people.
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The two go hand in hand.
No.
It's a specialised skill to quickly spin up and pivot around production lines to mass produce low quality goods.
Many US factories pivot (re-tool) all over the place, and all the time. It's not a difficult skill. It's part of running a factory. When it comes to factories, the US is top of the world in terms of output per capita. Don't mistake the offloading of microscopic-margin shit for a lack of manufacturing skill.
The USA is not geared up for this with many production lines being for a singular purpose.
The manufacturing capacity of the United States, second in the world in raw output, first in per-capita output, is not some monolithic stone that just produces a fixed set of things. It simply aims for
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So, where is the motherboard production being done ANYWHERE in the USA? Power supplies, SSDs, etc? Oh, they are all made in China in the same region where everything is available.
We do not have all of the sub-component production in place needed to make electronic devices in the USA in large quantities, and it will take at least 20 years to get it to where it would need to be before the production of the final products can be done here. By that time, this country will be in a full scale depression due
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So, where is the motherboard production being done ANYWHERE in the USA? Power supplies, SSDs, etc? Oh, they are all made in China in the same region where everything is available.
It's almost like you can't read.
Here, let's try.
"So, where is the MRI machine, the CT machine, the water jet portioner manufacturing done ANYWHERE in China?"
We do not have all of the sub-component production in place needed to make electronic devices in the USA in large quantities, and it will take at least 20 years to get it to where it would need to be before the production of the final products can be done here. By that time, this country will be in a full scale depression due to these tariffs.
Correct- we don't manufacture low-margin things. Our costs are too high.
The median income for a factory worker in the US is around $102k. There isn't room there to be building capacitors. or PCBs.
You're trying to amplify some weird dystopian vision about the crumbling state of US manufacturing in order to amplify your anti-Trump message, and I find
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So, motherboards are low margin things...the sub-components are made in China, which is why...all of these electronic components are made in China. Make the sub-components in other countries, then don't expect the components themselves to be made here, because it's easier and less expensive to make things when the entire supply chain is local.
You want things to be made in the USA, without thinking about the logistics needed for these things to be made in the USA.
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Don't confuse me for a Trump supporter, lol.
US manufacturing wages are too damn high to afford to make shit like motherboards and capacitors.
In no way do I want to change that. Let the developing economies with $8k/yr median incomes build that shit.
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2) The US will never make motherboards here. Why the fuck would it? There's not enough money in it.
Motherboards are a high volume industry that's only worth ~$12B.
It makes no sense to make them here, where the median factory worker wage is over 12x that of the median C
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You sound like a candidate to buy the Liberty phone. https://puri.sm/products/liber... [puri.sm]
That's what it costs to make in the US. (+ privacy premiums)
Re: So.... (Score:2)
You're not understanding supply chain, manufacturing or pretty much anything a business has to deal with. American company or not most of their components still come from overseas. Actually a quick seach show they are assembled in Taiwan as well. Since you have no knowledge about business I'll explain; the most likely reason for discontinuing some models while still providing others comes down to economics as most business decisions are.
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So, if I'm understanding correctly, they stopped selling out of vengeance? They're an American company located in San Fransisco.
They didn't stop selling. They stopped selling several versions of one of its models.
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So good on you Trump! You've killed yet another American business!
Their post on X. [x.com]
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So, if I'm understanding correctly, they stopped selling out of vengeance? They're an American company located in San Fransisco
You don't understand correctly.
They use parts from China, and all these parts will have a 54% tariff added to them, which means Framework has to pay 54% more to get the parts into the country. It doesn't work the way how many people supporting Trump (currently) think, that the Chinese manufacturer gets 54% less money, but the US importer has to pay.
So Framework has three choices: If they sold a laptop for $1,000 and now have to pay say $400 in tariffs, they can sell for $1,000 to the end user and make
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You are wrong on many counts. Since these machines are assembled in China, they are subject to the full impact of the tariffs. Now, for higher end models, there is a high enough price to somewhat mitigate the impact of the tariffs, but honestly, would you pay $1800+ for a 6 core laptop when you can get non-Frameworks laptops with the same or newer chips with 6 cores for $1200? Going to the top end of the CPU stack, then sure, there's a big price premium, so it's not going to seem quite as drastic.
Ther
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So, if I'm understanding correctly, they stopped selling out of vengeance? They're an American company located in San Fransisco.
Supply chains exist and are impacted by the tariffs. Since they're cutting their lower priced offerings, my best business oriented guess is that they already had some pretty thin margins on those lower cost models, and the things they need to import to make them are no longer available at a cost that makes it practical to sell them inside the US. They may have distribution centers elsewhere that can still ship the same materials to non-US residents without being impacted by US tarriffs, thus it's still prac
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Whose products are manufactured in Taiwan.
They are an American company, and they're doing high-value work in the US - hardware and software development. They farm out the low value work to other countries - manufacturing. The high value work are high paying jobs doing work valuable to the future economy. Manufacturing work is not high value - sticking parts together is a low-skill job with very thin margins.
It's why in the US that work is highly automate
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I'm not American. So I don't have that obsession that my car must be the biggest, heaviest and so on. My lightest car ever was somewhere between 700-800 kg or about 1600 to 1800 pounds, and it drove me and my friends to places without any problems.
Such a car can be built cheaply. Unlike a Tesla which even Chinese companies couldn/t build for anything near $15,000 dollars. But we would all be better off if lightweight cars were built and sold for little money.
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I would expect they're going to fill what orders they have with inventory on hand. This is normal business.
If the item won't sell at the expected markup then its time to shut down that product line. Its going to take a while for the market to adjust to the new prices and its a foolish person who sits on stock that *might* sell at a later date.
What vengeance are you trying to
Re: So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well if the laptops would be too expensive to sell with the tariff tacked on, why bother importing them in the first place? You expect them to simply eat the tariff and sell their laptop at the same price they do now? I am genuinely curious.
Further, theoretically the point of the tariffs are to push Americans towards American-made goods. So stopping the sale of imported Framework laptops would seem to be something that the folks who have posted here so far should applaud.
But it's obvious from the posts on this story so far that Americans still don't understand that the American consumer pays the tariffs.
Re: So.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yes that's one way thing they could have done. But I suspect in the end the result is the same. Demand will be gone for these low-end, low-margin laptops at a 20% price hike. Makes business sense to not even bother with them.
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A $250 cheap laptop becomes, at worst, a $275 laptop.
Since Trump has just announced that he doesn't like China putting import tariffs on US goods, and therefore set tariffs to up to 104%, a $250 cheap laptop completely made in China would become a $510 laptop.
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How does that make things cheaper? If you're paying American wages, you've probably at least doubled the cost of labor that goes into making the product, so in the end, the price would go up. In reality, if items had to be made in the US, they would automate as much as possible to keep labor costs low, and the overall job gain would be minimal.
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Bernie is on board with targeted strategic tariffs, not what Trump is doing. AOC's comments about tariffs seem to be entirely being against Trump's implementation and I haven't found any general statements. She seems most concerned about increased costs to consumers from what I can tell.
Generally from what I know - any manufacturing in the US is going to be as automated as possible, and I somewhat doubt we're going to see masses of manufacturing jobs reappear even if more things are made here. I also tend t
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The real effect of the tariffs will be basically dead demand for anything we *do* end up manufacturing. The western democracies aren't coming back to US made goods anytime soon.
Massive changes to global trade is already happening, and the US is (hopefully) going to learn why "It's good to be the top dog/world policeman" and why it sucks to be told "get in line and we'll get to you later".
"We don't want your beef/chicken/widget" is going to be a serious problem for US producers.
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And a laptop made in the USA with American made parts? A laptop where the workers are paid American wages, which go up with more demand for local labor
Name one. Seriously.
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Framework is about modular laptops where you can swap out pretty much every component, even to upgrade the motherboard/CPU. They aren't cheap, but it ends up being less expensive than buying a whole new laptop every five years.
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Been around since 2021 so not all that long, but dozens of stories just here on /. as well as other sites.
I'll be looking at them almost exclusively for my next laptop. All the innards - main board, processor and discrete CPU - designed to be upgradeable in a laptop is basically unheard of. All for relatively normal prices. 6 or 8 'port' bays you can swap from USB A to C to any normal port you'd want with each port module costing $25 ish I think.
Imagine being able to swap out the USB A ports for USB C
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A company doesn't make decisions on the macroeconomic effects. They look at the cost of goods and the price that they can sell their product at (and quantities at a given price point) and decide whether to offer it or not.
These tariffs are huge. 10-50% extra cost (depending on where it is sourced) is going to change a lot of company's calculations. Lots of times, they will just decide not to sell a product.
Re: So.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't know that they don't need to take that risk. I know nothing about Framework and the specifics of their business, so this will be generic (and in many ways it is much better that it be generic - these are things every single importer will be facing and will be making their own calculations).
A smaller company that ships smaller volumes is going to have a larger fraction of the sales price in general overhead (i.e. the opposite of economies of scale - not everybody can be the biggest). One way to reduce overhead is to ship in bulk (i.e. not make a shipment per sale). The requires planning of demand before a sale is made. A huge company might be able to ship in bulk every single day as the volumes are sufficiently large - and only ship what was sold the day before. A smaller company needs to group those bulk shipments or risk having unacceptable delays on shipping (which will reduce sales - people are impatient).
Company's also have a reputation to uphold. So if they have to reorganize to have long lead times, people will start looking elsewhere and possibly not consider the company in the future. (Obviously from the comments in this thread - assuming they are not 100% trolls - they risk their reputation by abandoning a product as well - business is never an easy thing).
The bottom line on these tariffs, for goods that are not easily sourced in the US, the demand for those goods will go down as the price has to go up. In addition to higher prices, this will mean fewer choices for the consumer as the less popular products will be removed as they go from being marginally profitable to unprofitable. This is probably an example of such a product.
Re: So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
the CEO just gave a talk and addressed some of this. https://youtu.be/os_fHy1mB_M?t... [youtu.be] They'd planned for tariffs....sane tariffs that wouldn't be applied via a random number generator.
the "We're going to pause" seems a sound strategy even without insane tariffs. Trump is volatile and what the rules are now might not be what they are in a month. Let him flail and wait for things to settle out.
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You don't seem to understand what Framework is all about. It allows customers to buy a laptop, then swap the motherboard with a new generation, replace this or that component. In laptops, that is unheard of. To be able to convert a laptop from being based on Intel to being based on an AMD processor by swapping the motherboard isn't available from any other vendor(short of the true do it yourself crowd that will figure out a way to throw a Dell laptop motherboard into the housing for a HP).
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That's not a formula that is going to beat secondary market or trash-tier construction among the really squeezed customers; and they aren't a huge seller to corporate/institutional types who can always go with service contracts roughly
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You're implying people *need* to buy a product. That is rarely a case. People usually *want* to buy a product, and that product being out of their price range goes in conflict with that want.
This is literally how supply and demand works. A tariff being an external factor applied on the cost of production is shown on a supply and demand graph as a vertical line intersecting both the supply and demand lines at a distance left of the ideal market point. When the product is unnaturally more expensive, the deman
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I would expect them to sell the laptop at the current price plus the tariff and see if people still buy them. Since all other laptops which I assume are imported will also go up in price by the same amount (well maybe not the same amount trumps tariff are just random). Not just give up trying to sell them.
Re: So.... (Score:2)
They pay the tariff when they import the goods, not when the customer buys them. Unless they ship to the customer from the source, which would cost more and take longer
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They pay the tariff when they import the goods, not when the customer buys them. Unless they ship to the customer from the source, which would cost more and take longer
They shipped my order from source.
I wasn't in the USA though, so Framework may have a different process there.
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And pass along that cost to the customer. They're not going to eat that cost increase. The consumer does.
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The tariffs keep changing, and they don't want to play that game of changing the price the customer pays based on which way the wind is blowing Donald Trumps hair on a given day.
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chasing Trump's fevered bullshit trying to make it work isn't a great idea either nor cheap if you're constantly replanning. Pausing to let things shake out seems a good and rare method to deal with Trump.
Re: So.... (Score:2)
You expect them to simply eat the tariff and sell their laptop at the same price they do now? I am genuinely curious.
It's not an unreasonable position - presumably all their products originate from overseas, but they only are 'suspending sales' of certain lower-priced models, and not mentioning raising prices on the more expensive models, presumably they are either 'eating' the tariffs on the more expensive offerings, or they are waiting to see how tariffs play out/wind up and then raise prices.
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Cheaper items have smaller margins.
Eating a cost increase is easy on a more expensive thing than a cheaper thing. That's why in times of cost pressure, companies get rid of their cheaper SKUs.
So yes, it's an unreasonable position in this context.
Now if they had decided to stop selling everything, then I'd say that was an ideological position. This is just normal business behavior.
As costs go up, cheaper stuff becomes harder to make, because people don't like s
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Further, theoretically the point of the tariffs are to push Americans towards American-made goods. So stopping the sale of imported Framework laptops would seem to be something that the folks who have posted here so far should applaud.
The effect of the tariffs is to highlight goods that are American-made only on paper but not in reality. And I think this is intended.
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Framework isn't a massive vendor, so it's unlikely they sell tens of thousands of these low end machines in the USA. I haven't seen any numbers, but it may be that they only sell hundreds a year - and if that were to drop into tens per year, it's probably not worth the hassle factor if doing the inventory, selling, shipping and support for them. Instead, Americans can buy a higher grade model, at higher prices made slightly higher by tariffs. Then at least Framework makes some money.
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Re:Being dependent on cheap shit is a weakness (Score:4, Informative)
Those virtues are not in demand these day. Outsourcing is a direct result of the american consumer demanding cheaper and cheaper goods, and being okay with lower and lower quality (just buy three). American and Chinese companies oblige, although I agree American corporate greed is strong. In short, China has learned from the best and they only produce what we ask them to. There's no real demand for high-quality chinese goods, although people always talk like there is and then balk at the higher price.
American-made products can be just as poorly made as overseas products. I did some home wiring not that long ago, and found the Eaton electrical panel was made so cheaply I don't think they could have saved another penny. I kind of regret changing out the old 60 year old panel for this one, but the old panel was too small. Light sockets made domestically now have almost no metal in them at all, and don't make that good of contact with the bulb's screw base. And electrical breakers just smash the end of screw into the wire now, instead of having a little plate to keep the screw from trying to twist the wire. All for a penny's profit. It's true they don't make things like they used to, even in the US. I don't see tariffs changing this fact.
China does enjoy the fruits of their labors, and the fact that they build just about everything that they need. And for those willing to pay a bit more, there are very high-quality goods being made there. But we rarely get them over here. Just no market for it, apparently. For example, LED bulbs. Importers don't want to sell us LED bulbs that are not over-driven and designed to burn out quickly so they don't import good ones. In the UAE you can buy LED bulbs that will last indefinitely because they run cooler and use more LED chips at lower power. Can't have those here, though! No profit in it.
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The UAE also got those bulbs because the King (As in literal king) effectively decreed the bulbs be efficient and contracted Philips to develop them in exchange for an exclusive contract.
So we could have even more efficient bulbs if we wanted to regulate as such but considering there are people still mad about losing incandescents so much that the President has spoken of bringing them back I don't expect that very soon.
Re:It Will be Over Soon (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah there is a way you do that, multilaterial and multinational trade agreements. That's what NAFTA was, that's what the former Trump crown jewel of master negotiation the USMCA was, that's what the TPP was set to be before it got shitcanned. Nations negotiate trade terms that everyone can agree to to prevent escalations like this from happening since it just makes everyone worse off.
Are these agreements perfect and nobody is left behind in their wake? Absolutely not but those consequences are our own, I would say the failure to take the amount of wealth these agreements generate and use some of that to take of the people who get the short end is a problem the USA has itself moreso then the other nations but that would require introspection and some actual legislative hard work, things the admin is allergic to.
Bullshit Re:It Will be Over Soon (Score:3)
The tariffs are based on trade deficit, not the taxes in the countries. That's ingrained into free trade, and that's what the Trump administration is fighting. Trump is completely against free trade.
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This time around, it is either free trade of bye bye bye.
In many cases Trump doesn't understand the difference between tariffs and not meeting local standards. The world is not interested in American trash flooding in, so they'll say bye bye bye instead. Just got a great shipment of premium beef from Canada. America is more than welcome to sell their stuff here as well once you stop medicating your cows and drowning your chickens in chemicals used to treat swimming pools kids piss into.
But in any case I wonder what tariffs the poor penguins on Hunter island were
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The MacDonald Islands have neither tariffs nor subsidies and yet they are still tariffed at 10%.
Fortunately penguins are quite chill.
Sarcasm aside this is absolutely typical of a Trump supporter. You've no idea what he's done or what the consequences are, but you are sure it's right. He didn't put tariffs on countries with tariffs and subsidies, he put it on countries with a trade surplus in goods with the US. In other words he is specifically trying to suppress free trade.
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Are we saying outsourced like they were once produced in American factories? How many laptops are domestically produced as in even assembly, much less components. Is there a consumer scale LCD factory in the US? Is it even possible to build any laptop with 100% USA made parts at all?
The U3 rate last month was 4.2, Americans have jobs right now, they seem to be competing with $5 a day workers just fine. If my company could replace me with a $5 person overseas I would start to think about my future differen
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Believe me, I've seen many coworkers go. The
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There was no way to compete with someone working for less that $5 a day, a long day.
Yeah, and still lots of US IT workers insist that their jobs can be 100% done from home... That in itself proves they're not that smart. They should say their job can be 99% done from home, with a 1% that can't (they probably shouldn't say that 1% includes attending office parties etc).
On a related note:
https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
And it turns out that the job done in China was above par - the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building,"
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In reality - I do think this is often true - 99% can be done remotely, but 1% still seems to need you on site. However, I'm also rather sure that with proper management (heh, like that's likely) you could have "smart hands" and eventually some sort of robot do that 1%.
I think a major part of needing people in the US is more around timezones matching up and culture / accents matching up. There are still people who want to pay for "white glove" treatment. I think that's always shrinking, but for whatever reas
Re: (Score:2)