I buy stuff -- small circuit boards, electronic components, unusual milling cutters, bearings, etc. The existence of these things as commodities lets me do a lot of deep EE and ME work with high school students.
The US will not build a supply chain for these at any reasonable price. And shouldn't. These should be commodities and US labor should focus on higher value things.
(Not to mention that US suppliers don't really like selling at low quantities and most don't really love selling to education or hobbyists).
Tariffs just directly make my programs less feasible.
Note that de minimis-- which we're talking about here-- has something to do with what's at Amazon because of drop shippers, but basically nothing that is sold somewhere like Walmart.
Well we were also talking about artisan products too and not electronics.
I don't buy the general consensus that the US can't or won't build supply chains for these products - we can and will if the tariffs are high enough, it'll just be highly automated which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In your specific case yea you are probably just looking at higher prices, but I don't think that your general argument is necessarily applicable across the entire economy. That's not to say in your specific case yea maybe the tariffs are just a net negative.
> Note that de minimis-- which we're talking about here-- has something to do with what's at Amazon because of drop shippers, but basically nothing that is sold somewhere like Walmart.
Well yes and no. The availability of drop-shipped products en masse, whether it's through Amazon or Wal-Mart's own drop-ship marketplaces still enable cheap consumerism and generate lots of waste and poor quality products at cheap prices (along with some good products at cheap prices to be fair). But I think the point about Amazon just strengthens my argument (for the sake of argument) which is you get these artificially cheap products shipped in, sometimes with stolen designs, and we can't spin up mom-and-pop shops or cottage industries because everybody just looks at the price of the cheapest bullshit thing they find on Amazon and they don't care about any number of issues that factor in to that price.
These people make insane statements like supposed "pollution" and "slave labor" of China. What pollution man? The item needs to be produced and the factory will have same level of energy use here or anywhere else, so how does that make China a pollutant. I don't understand his obsession with forcefully jacking up prices of inferior shit, how exactly does that help anyone at all? Does he not know what happens with that minuscule extra profit? The worker will have to spend it on, wait for it, another such overpriced expensive junk completely nullifying it. And local industries get coddled and cozy and lose what tiny remaining incentive they had to compete. I am repeatedly asking him to see how high tariff countries like Brazil are. Just ask a Brazilian how they buy an iphone for example. I have never seen this blatant level of economic illiteracy from supposed educated people.
And I don't even know whats his deal with "artisan" bs, technology is technology. It doesn't stop being tech just because it was invented ten thousand years ago. Artisan crap is a luxury for financially comfortable people. Automation is somehow this weird magical "magitech" to this guy I don't know what. Automation isn't a nice to have, its the essence to have something available and affordable to the masses at all. I seriously don't understand this hunger for economic regression.
Making higher quality items cheaper is literally the fundamental basis of capitalism, or even technological progress in the first place. I really don't understand these bizarre economic theories at all.
The US will not build a supply chain for these at any reasonable price. And shouldn't. These should be commodities and US labor should focus on higher value things.
(Not to mention that US suppliers don't really like selling at low quantities and most don't really love selling to education or hobbyists).
Tariffs just directly make my programs less feasible.
Note that de minimis-- which we're talking about here-- has something to do with what's at Amazon because of drop shippers, but basically nothing that is sold somewhere like Walmart.