I built an art practice after volunteering on Burning Man projects for a few years. I’m now a competent art fabricator and engineer in carpentry, lighting, electronics, and power systems. It’s fun, and it keeps me connected to lots of different communities. You meet a lot of people who like to get together and nerd out, host parties, and make cool things.
When people talk about the loneliness epidemic, I realize how lucky I am to be in community with people who want to get together to do cool things just for fun. I know these kinds of art communities also exist in places outside the Bay Area, and it seems like a good model for creating excuses for people to gather anywhere.
“Get a hobby and find the others” seems like its too simple to be the answer here, but that’s what it is for me.
It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Following those potential changes, the breach of trust created by the previous chaos may mean that trade never returns to normal. I don't envy anyone trying to make long-term business decisions, like hiring, in such an environment.
One of my clients is a midsized logistics brokerage based in LA. Right now is RFP season, where they bid on freight contracts with various existing and potential customers. These contracts are typically one year long. A bid you submit now might be for a contract that goes Sept-Sept.
This is difficult even under normal circumstances because you have to predict what carrier (trucker) rates will be in the future. You also have to predict fuel costs, because even though these are usually variable, when fuel costs go up so does your margin (so if you expect higher fuel prices you can lower your bid price). And you have to game out what your competitors are going to bid too. You can’t be too conservative (expensive) or you won’t get the bid. But if you lock in a contract with a certain expectation of rates and it swings the other way, you’re on the hook for millions in losses.
Now imagine doing that normally difficult task in this environment. Who knows what will happen. Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless. Big tech companies are doing great, everyone else is getting absolutely destroyed.
Related, yes. US DoT wants non-dom CDLs revoked[1]:
> The decision comes amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in November 2025 that it would compel California to revoke thousands of what it calls “illegally issued” non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.
There's been a big up about undocumented Sikh commercial drivers with CDL licenses, primarily because there have been some spectacular fatal crashes on video.
Typically companies use things like futures, options, and forward contracts to fix or cap their input costs for commodities like oil. This lets them bid on projects without needing to know the future price of oil.
Uncertainty has a cost which exists no matter where you move it around. Yes, investment banks might sell you some kind of exotic derivative which moves the risk onto them, but they'll charge a risk premium for this (probably a very high one since the risk factors here are pretty unusual and hard to model), and that makes it harder to stay afloat as a business. There is no handwaving away the damage that uncertainty does to commerce.
Even if you can find someone to write you a weird, bespoke (and therefore expensive) derivative to hedge against the Trump DoT revoking thousands of CDLs, you've still only succeeded in moving all these calculations and risks to that counterparty. Somebody somewhere still has to have the headache of pricing this risk.
Seriously? What hedge contract you going to use for: 1) Wars, 2) a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), 3)deportations, 4)tariffs, 5) the collapse of USMCA
War-risk insurance is a thing [1]. You could probably buy a business-interruption policy with a line item for revocations. Adding a tariff contingency to customer contracts and/or engaging with vendors on a fixed-price tariff-notwithstanding basis transfers tariff risk.
Deportatios and the collapse of a free-trade zone are not mitigatable. De-leveraging from products that don't have a strong domestic alternative would be the only options there.
All costs. None easy. But all doable. (Not saying it's good business.)
Right, and then you lose the contract to someone who decided, rather than pricing in the risks, to have their hedge be "Idk guess I'll go bankrupt lmao" and bid as usual.
> Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless.
So, uh, did business owners actually take any of these things, which very much were promised during campaign season, into account when voting? Or did they walk into the ballot box thinking, "no-one wants to work anymore!" and pull the lever for the guy promising to make applicants a bit more motivated to work at lower wages?
I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.
A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.
To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.
Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.
In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.
Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
> Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
Indeed, imagine you're part of the wealthy elite. What you want is to be able to move your cash around the world, chasing cash growth. You also want yourself to be able to travel wherever you wish with your Gulfstream.
Why would they care about local midwest job growth ?
You don't have to be communist, you just have to be selective about the capitalists you engage with.
An business mentor of mine bootstrapped a highly profitable enterprise software company, growing it to 400 employees. When it was time to sell/retire, he vetted buyers not just for the money they could offer, but for the impact they would have on his team and community. He accepted an offer from a conservatively-run competitor and proudly told me that 5 years later, 90% of the original staff were still happily employed with the new owner.
These arrangements are simply not an option if you're beholden to VC, or entertain offers from Private Equity. You cannot preserve what you do not own.
Packaging. Boxes, shippers, pallets, parts transports for use within automotive and other factories, etc. Very little direct to consumer or display stuff.
Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.
Interesting! I am familiar with this space as we developed a software tool [0] to optimize packaging based on 3D packing technology we developed. If it is relevant to you, happy to chat!
We currently use ArtiosCAD and TOPS pro for load and pallet optimization. I'll check out your software and forward over to the people-that-sign-the-checks.
I mean that's a big part of why so many people want the USA dollar to go even lower. The administration has been very explicit that they want a cheaper dollar but unlike a lot of their other polices that goal has a lot of support among economists.
It sadly doesn't work that well with tariffs in play again anything done outside the USA has to pay and frankly other nation just don't spend like American's.
US would lose out significantly if this were applied by everyone worldwide. The whole of Europe + Anglosphere have surrendered their whole tech related sectors to US companies, an enormous wealth transfer.
You want to tax foreign businesses that sell stuff to you?
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
You may not like tariffs but it's not as straightforward as "customer pays".
Customers and businesses will part of it. Businesses will most likely give up some part of the margin and customers will pay a higher price.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
I’m not sure why this logic isn’t more mainstream. Half the country is clamoring for tariffs, bans on H1Bs, offshoring taxes, etc. They’re not connecting the dots on how this affects innovation, the economy, debt, taxation, etc. Is it a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it?
For the US, it's not too out of the norm historically speaking. Up until relatively recently tariffs were very popular in the US despite the clear understanding by academics that they were incredibly damaging to the economy. Political movements based around protectionist economic arguments have a long history in the US.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Serious question, if tariffs are so terrible, why did so many countries have tariffs on US (and other country's) goods?
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
There's definitely debate over which specific scenarios tariffs could be beneficial, as I understand it, but the general theme is that any benefits are highly concentrated (one or two companies or industries will benefit) and the negatives are felt in a diffuse fashion(every consumer pays the tax). They are broadly protectionist and the ones that do exist usually are implemented for pretty specific reasons like the following:
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
The EU caved because they didn't want to agitate Trump too much due to Ukraine. This becomes less and less important as the EU ramps up arms production.
Anyone will tell you I'm not a regulations guy, but there's definitely a problem. When you watch these rounds of seemingly coordinated, sweeping layoffs, followed by H-1B hiring sprees, it's hard to pretend.
This is a real eye-opener. Do you know how to fix how stupid I am? Tell me what's wrong with my analysis.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
It's hard to see how H-1B hiring could move meaningfully either up or down, given that the number of H-1Bs is capped at 65,000 [1] (+ 20,000 for advanced degrees), no company is going to pay for the process of getting an H-1B visa and not actually hire into it, and if a person on an H-1B loses their job they lose their visa in 60 days. You know exactly how many H-1Bs there are in the country: it's mandated by Congress.
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
These are the companies that receive the most H1B approvals because they have large numbers of high skill employees, so it isn’t surprising that they have thousands of visas approved. But the total number of visas across the country is capped annually per the law (by Congress). All H1B workers combined are still only a fraction of a percent of the total jobs in America.
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
The thing about all of these responses, factual as they may be, is that they don't address the issue we're discussing. Regardless of whether the number is fixed or how much the employees are paid, thousand of people lost their jobs. I'm sure a few are active on the board here. It looks bad when you request visas and do mass firings.
Your fellow Americans disagree, they will buy their stuff from whoever is the cheapest.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Trump has made the idea of mafioso politics popular -- where you hold everyone hostage until they do what you want -- but that doesn't actually mean that it's good policy.
He has also shown that it isn't a functional policy either. Much of what he's done has backfired almost immediately after it was implemented, but much like a gremlin in a wiring loom by the time the sparks appear he's already moved on to tear out something else important. Mafioso politics only work when your concentrated power is wielded against fragmented power that will move too slowly to mitigate you. Even if there are a multitude of small groups if they turn against you even without unanimous action you're spending too much time and effort jumping from thing to thing to ever actually achieve your intended goals. The end result is a parade of violent whack-a-mole as force is used against the myriad number of small revolts that happen, exhausting the resources of the enforcement infrastructure and normalizing the expectation of violence.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
Nor is it popular once actually realized. It's mostly for dumbasses to go "rah rah" thinking they'll be at the top of the pyramid. The problem with this form of governance is it puts the most vicious, selfish, and brutal people at the top. Those are rarely the most intelligent and (obviously) never the most magnanimous.
Yes, I do want to pay more to bolster my country's domestic workforce vs subsidizing corporate shareholders and offshore workers, while also having that come out of corporate profits. shrug
What’s funny about this is that I actually can’t. 2 examples:
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
Sure there is a (growing set) of product categories you can’t buy in the US. What I typically find though is all these “we should force people to buy US” folks don’t actually own American-made goods even in categories where it’s relatively easy.
Not imaginary, I have been sharing info with Congressional reps on this topic who are working on policy, as well as the data on H-1B fraud and use for wage suppression. I haven't even had to pay a bribe ("campaign contribution") to get their ear, which is nice.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
> You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Could you please name one non-food product in America that a typical consumer could buy that doesn't subsidize corporate shareholders? Name one thing the average American can buy that contributes to gainful employment at the expense of corporate profit.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.
Yup. And the whole "Oh, we're not releasing the numbers because they're not right/misleading but trust us, the economy is the best its ever been!" is getting older and (even) less convincing.
There's another factor: Due to the unpredictable and unreliable nature of the current US administration, the rest of the west is "America-proofing" itself.
Expect cash flows to dry up as Europe, Latam, Canada and Korea/Japan diversify away to more reliable suppliers. It's already happening.
The theory makes sense, but it doesn't match with the graphics in the article.
We can see that job openings have been declining since before the 2024 election and that hiring actually increased briefly around the time the tarrifs were implemented. This seems to suggest there are other factors at play, including macro trends.
Investment monies have been tightened across the board, mainly due to high interest rates and the fact that investments in anything other than Tech/AI don’t match expectations of growth.
Understand something, though: many of those people making those decisions thought that the current administration would be a way to fix regulation.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.
> engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI
If they're centralizing economic planning on that, then there's probably at least some economic planning that they would be doing to keep a relatively stable regulatory regime in place.
Which, y'know, isn't the case.
Ultimately the world has reached a point where social systems in both business and government are run the same way. Probably because they're run by the same kind of person. Sometimes even the same people.
There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
- A non-independent monetary authority
- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment
- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling
back unprofitable regulations
- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
> There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
If it were calcified, you'd probably have a lot more willingness to bet on a business decision being profitable. There'd be a very obvious, solid understanding of market rules and there would be little likelihood of them changing.
The problem with Trump - well, in this regard; there are plenty of others - is that he is used to operating as an absolute monarch, with his previous "kingdom" being the Trump Organization. That kingdom existed purely for his benefit and there wasn't really any consideration of peers like you'd have with actual kings who rule over countries with societies and borders. The only decisions he had to make right were the ones benefitting him, and whether or not they did that was quite evident.
Now he's a leader of a country that does have borders and a society. There are parties with interests that he must satisfy. You can tell he's never had to do that before and part of how he handles that is to just bully those parties into submission, but the other way is to use his status to make proclamations that supposedly have some sort of force to them to placate the other interests.
An example would be the proclamation that institutional investors will be banned from buying single-family homes. That's meant to placate his working-class base, most of whom can't afford a home. Do we know how far he'll go in enforcing that proclamation? No. It directly contradicts some of the other positions he's been identified as supporting, and is unlikely to be enforceable on a mass scale, but if he does sign some sort of order telling the DoJ or SEC or whoever to investigate purchases of that sort of real estate by institutional investors, well, you could end up at the wrong end of a government investigation, particularly if you have somehow pissed him off. Which isn't particularly hard to do, either.
Thus, you can say the regulatory regime over single-family residential real estate market is now less stable than it was before. We don't know what will happen. And that makes it hard to make a business decision around it.
The people who I work with who support the current administration don't really value a good economy.
They actually are smug about a worsening standard of living. What makes them happy is "tough talk" on immigration, to them the brutality against suspected undocumented immigrants is a good deterrent.
It's not surprising but it's important to understand how important the brutality is and how unimportant economic growth is. It helps that they Silicon Valley tech workers who are already rich.
US companies have long been reliant on free flowing investment monies subsidized by the USG. Tightening those purse strings has reduced the level of jobs openings, including tightening of SBIRs and other non-research grant programs that small to medium sized companies use. Small business loans are also tight or non-existent. So, of course jobs will be limited.
The macro-level economic policies really only affect large corporations, unless a business is impacted by the tariffs. In general, hiring is fucked by immigration visas in large companies, which are still going strong and sneaking around the anti-immigration barriers. In some way, hiring non-U.S. workers for work funded by the USG is unacceptable, and economic theft.
If USG opens up funding more, then things will normalize, including for immigrant or non-U.S. contract workers in other places. As always, it’s the economy that’s the problem, but which part of it is always hard to pin down when other parts of it make up for it.
This is just Trump, not the USG as a whole. Congress approved a budget and Trump refuses to give the money out. People have to fight in court to get the money they're owed.
Data shows jobs have been in decline before Trump, likely related to reduced investments from high inflation and high interest rates. I guess I should add that part of opening up more funding includes managing other aspects so we don’t end up in the same economic environment post-2020.
we had a much larger disruption to logistics just a few years ago if you recall =) and hiring really took off then. so i don't think this argument really holds any water
Money was free then, and hiring took off in software, which people were relying on a lot more during the pandemic. All of my friends who are performers or work in events were wrecked financially. The industry still hasn’t really recovered.
more likely, higher interest rates and and oversupply of hiring from previous quantitative easing have left number of roles open limited, not to mention with AI - many companies feel there is a deflation in the market, that is to say, if we wait till next year our programmer may accomplish twice as much, why hire a second person now?
It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.
> A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.
Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.
That's what I thought after the first Trump administration. But the fact that we re-elected him proves that it wasn’t a one-off, we will always be four years away from the possibility of a wild regime change.
That’s why it would jar to be Vance and this reigime, Kay without Trump. 10 more years of both red and blue and enough change to undo and prevent this in the future could get it out.
Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time
But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.
No, not even close. The basis for most of these actions requires novel legal re-interpretations to claim power from Congress for the executive, ignore time or scope limits, and remove expert judgement from what are often supposed to be consensus decisions. The courts cases over tariffs are highlighting the unprecedented claims for both the nature of the purported emergency and the scope of the response, but this shows up in many other areas such as inventing a “power emergency” to force coal plants to stay open over the wishes of the owners, communities, and state governments. We’ve never had anything like this level of direct economic interference in the modern economy - even things like WWII policies were at least targeted and based on a real threat.
No, every President does not declare tariffs by fiat using specious emergency powers that change day to day depending on who kissed their ass most recently.
Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.
Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events…
- the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable
- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)
- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can
- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.
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The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
Would have been thousands of jobs, Canada wanted it too, it's safer than trucking/transporting by train. All just cancelled on a whim.
Then there's EO 14008 that put a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. (fed land is 25% of oil production)
Regardless of your position on oil (I'm sure you have one), the point is those are two examples of disruption of an industry by EO from a previous president.
> The first that comes to mind was the Keystone XL Pipeline.
> Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
I'll admit to not being an expert on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but at least according to the timeline on wikipedia[1], the reason Biden was able to cancel it with an executive order was because Trump had approved it with an executive order, after people had tried and failed for years to get it approved the proper way (through the legislative and executive branches).
And even when Trump personally tried to make it happen, there were still years of court battles stopping construction, so when Biden came into office and ended it, it was in fact not "pretty much done" but apparently 8% done[2]
Seems like it again comes back to Trump just doing what he wants, and it was in fact him trying to unilaterally make it happen that caused that last four years or so of disruptions?
And never this sweeping: like when Japanese car manufacturers were threatening Detroit, the president negotiated with Congress and the response was targeted, not a random shotgun on other countries and industries.
True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.
Haha, but every coffee, tea, snd chocolate provider I buy from has announced their prices going up and it’s not like there’s an American industry those taxes are supporting. Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to grow even a fraction of our domestic coffee consumption.
Yes: that’s kind of a textbook example of using tariffs strategically — there’s a valid argument that automobiles are a strategic industry worth protecting (just for military capacity alone) but they didn’t threaten to heavily tax coffee and chocolate from other continents at the same time or under the pretense that it would make those crops viable in the United States at scale.
Technologies: full stack web applications (JavaScript, Python, some Java, React, Svelte, AWS), embedded systems (C++ via Arduino for motor control, sensors, lighting applications), advanced manufacturing/fabrication (Rhino, 3D printing, CNC), power systems (low power DC electronics, solar/battery systems, AC power distribution)
Resume/CV: matthewgerring.com/resume
Email: gerring.matthew@gmail.com
I have ten years of experience in the energy industry, and I am a subject matter expert in utility tariff modeling and design and large scale off-grid clean energy systems. I have prototyped or implemented AI-based tariff modeling solutions at 2 different companies. I’m looking for high-impact roles in clean energy deployment, as close to the metal as possible. Also open to work in enterprise B2B software in a clean energy or climate tech adjacent role.
Technologies: Python, JavaScript, DC power systems (solar, batteries, charge control, inverters, system design), embedded systems (lighting, sensors, motor control)
10 years of experience in climate tech, in utility industry software and clean energy hardware deployment.
I have deep domain expertise in electricity price modeling, financing for distributed energy resources, and grid-independent system design and deployment. I have designed and built AI systems for extracting tariff document data, and if your company is pursuing this particular white whale, I’d be happy to help you.
Seeking a high-impact role in climate tech, as close as possible to direct clean energy deployment.
It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale.
Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.
The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!
I work in the energy industry. Any future containing widespread use of AI will require a hard electrical infrastructure upgrade equivalent to the initial deployment of electricity and phone lines. The intersection of AI and the electrical grid is a hard and as-yet-unsolved problem. Either way, power infrastructure will drive our destiny as much or more than AI.
Why? The transmission system is used to span distance to bring energy from large producers to large concentrations of consumers. Traditionally power consumption was concentrated in and around cities while power generation happened away from cities.
Datacenters require relatively few people to operate so do not need to be located in or near population centers. Sites are chosen on this basis - DCs are sited close to generation or significant transmission system nodes
Every professional conference and publication in the energy industry is starting to look at this, because the sheer amount of power required for these data centers is already putting stress on grid capacity.
Also, AI data centers aren’t just sited for proximity to power generation. They're often sited for access to water for cooling. Not all of those sites already have appropriate power infrastructure.
So basically China has the infrastructure & raw materials for properly utilizing AI & America doesn't.
I really wonder if America will wake up because China crushes us under their feet. I kind of doubt it.
We beat the USSR due to their style of government being absolutely terrible. China's form of authoritarianism has proven far more adaptable. Not to mention that America's governance is showing risks of sliding towards corrupt authoritarianism as well. If both forms of government suck from an idealistic perspective, then China's manufacturing, rare earth metals, growing naval capacity, experience in stealing IP, & energy infrastructure seem to give it the advantage.
The only thing that I think that America has going for it right now is possibly control of space through SpaceX.
Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and processing these resources is becoming more and more complex. Especially when you consider we would need these resources not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to improve it.
Projections of PV cell improvement and deployment by large energy forecasting agencies have been so wrong for so long that it’s a well known running joke in the energy industry.
Solar beats projections constantly and has been the cheapest available power source for many (if not all) applications for years already. Cheap, abundant, performant batteries already expand the possible surface area for solar deployment, and we can expect this to continue.
I have a hard time understanding what you mean by “proven insufficient.”
"Proven insufficient" when scoped to the sweeping social changes proposed by the author. PV cells are obviously effective and increasingly so over time, but further efficiency gains will not on their own topple dictatorships or cure diseases.
To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.
It's a nice notion (and totally inline with the existing technocratic sentiment (eg, "more compute!")) that a single lever can just be pulled harder and problems will be magically solved. However, the world is much more complex than that; the complexity cannot be hand-waived away.
> To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.
What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds the pace of innovation in PV cells.
Let's use our imagination to overcome some naivety. Imagine for a moment that you just instantly 10x'ed the presence of PVs and tell me what will change. Do you truly believe that you will never encounter a bottleneck? Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.
I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications. Long before utopia, however, we will encounter other bottlenecks: electrolysis, carbon policy, resource distribution (and other problems/opportunities worthy of attention).
No one here is claiming that PV cells play an insignificant role, or that emergent peripheral challenges will not be met with skill. The claim I am making is that the simple model (more PVs!) is insufficient to address the complex problems human society faces, and that it is naive to believe otherwise. You would never just put your foot on the pedal to drive to your destination; you'll also grasp the steering wheel, reckon with obstacles and roadway laws, etc; but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.
> but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.
This is not a fair comparison. Installing a PV system with battery storage on my residential or commercial property has minimal societal impact, especially when compared to something like owning a car. I generate and consume my own electricity in a largely self-contained system.
The primary benefit to society is indirect but meaningful: I reduce my reliance on fossil fuels and draw less power from the grid. This eases demand on shared infrastructure and contributes (modestly) to lower emissions.
Importantly, I continue to pay all applicable taxes and fees, so public services and infrastructure investments (like grid upgrades or transmission lines) remain unaffected. My pursuit of energy self-sufficiency doesn’t impose new burdens on society; if anything, it lightens the collective load.
I don't think you understand my argument. The point is not whether or not solar electricity generation is good or bad (it is obviously very favorable). The point I am making is that it is unhelpful to collapse complexity into a simplistic model.
Your discussion on owning battery + PV is illustrative. You are not in a vacuum and certainly are in relationship with the broader world: you paid for the system, you maintain it, you stopped buying something, you inspired your neighbors, you lowered the costs for your neighbors to implement a similar system, you reduced your and your countrymen's geopolitical dependencies, you may have saved some money you can spend elsewhere, you probably developed a working understanding of electricity in homes, your neighbors probably developed a better working understanding of electricity in homes, you are now less liable to extortion/persuasion from fossil fuel companies, you're now more likely to own an EV and reduce urban pollution. The entire point is that you exist in relationship; that is what makes it powerful. Had you simply implemented the PV system + battery without these second order effects (and only gained access to more/cheaper energy) you would have considerably less positive impact. The complex model is the correct working model that describes far more of the dynamics than the simplistic model.
My original point: belief in a single fulcrum when describing societal evolution is flatly misleading.
The metaphor of driving a car is not in opposition to solar; you misunderstood it. The point is, again, that the simple model is insufficient for effectively operating in the world.
Now, why would you have to make this point, as it's close to a tautology? It's likely because we have a lever and don't use it. In that framing your point gets lost, because it doesn't address any issue. So there is a superfluousness at play that suggests this is disinformation, intended to derail the impetus for change. So I guess you need to elaborate and present a synthesis, perhaps mention alternate levers, instead of downplaying the one that's obvious? I don't see any other significant levers, RethinkX says PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world. Grid demands should lessen over time as local generation comes online. The grid becomes a overnight backup charging method.
Let’s upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you sincerely believe that “PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world” even when it comes to viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs, social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?
You might be only considering the energy transition, but it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for humanity on earth.
“I don’t see any other significant levers,” you say? Read from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down filial kin networks and paved the way for markets, universities, and democracies by way of fostering impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How about the incredible rise in population and economic activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible geopolitical twist and – yes – reduction in atmospheric carbon introduced by the development of fracking (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the civil rights movement in the United States? The invention of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping container? Large language models? Look around and you will see fulcrums everywhere.
Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now, and just consider the vast number of twists and turns that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as foolish as, “we just need more movable-type printing, yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders, that will completely solve deforestation, that will protect us from famine… Hey you farmer over there, stop farming! We have movable-type printing! We’re good, we just need more of it!”
The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But it is not a working model. It is just too simple and incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my imagination above all worked because the world was complex. The people who invented and developed those fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it upon them.
> I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications
> Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.
While true, I think it's fair to make certain guesses about other tech also being developed (such as, as you mentioned, batteries).
Even if they did not exist, constraints lead to conflicts, and conflicts can lead to exchanges of power.
(Different topic but same idea, constraint and conflict: when it comes to the never-ending battle of encryption, I do not see how to square the unstoppable force of "unbreakable encryption is very easy to make and vitally important to the use of the internet" with the immovable object that is "no state can survive when conspiracies are opaque to investigations and prosecutions").
You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).
When people talk about the loneliness epidemic, I realize how lucky I am to be in community with people who want to get together to do cool things just for fun. I know these kinds of art communities also exist in places outside the Bay Area, and it seems like a good model for creating excuses for people to gather anywhere.
“Get a hobby and find the others” seems like its too simple to be the answer here, but that’s what it is for me.
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