I bought some 30 dollar beer glasses from Belgium. Got a 60 dollar tariff bill from FedEx after the fact. Edit: apparently fedex fees were most of this?
Sure, Fedex/UPS's brokerage fees are legendary for small shipments. The problem is better stated as the removal of the de minimis threshold.
So in this case an American is still paying for the misguided close-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-ran-out policy, just with most going directly to the corporate interests that helped install this corrupt administration.
(but the joke is on them - Aliexpress Choice doesn't charge brokerage fees)
Brokerage fees are a business decision. USPS only charges about $5 for dutiable international parcels - and with 15 years in logistics I can confidently say they often don't even charge that fee at all.
Tariffs are designed to change consumer spending habits, and force international businesses to create on-shore operations. To that end, they are effective - but it takes longer than 365 days for those patterns to shift.
I dare say your opinion, here, has nothing to do with the efficacy of tariffs. Tariffs have long been studied, and both major political parties have called for tariffs like we're seeing right now at various points in recent history. The only difference is nobody desired to rock the status quo, so the lopsided economic policies of the past persisted.
Nearly every other nation tariffs American goods in some way. American businesses attempting to sell products into Brazil, the UK, Germany and more are - and have been - at a significant disadvantage for decades due to high import taxes and duties. For the first time those international businesses are feeling the same consequences as their own nation's weaponized economic policies. Perhaps that will put pressure on their governments, achieving the ultimate goal of the USA's policy - reduce and/or remove tariffs across the board. ie. Fair Trade vs. Free Trade.
I didn't say they aren't, rather I focused on the higher-level context which seems more relevant.
> the efficacy of tariffs
I'm not arguing against tariffs in general. I'm taking issue with applying them twenty years too late (after entire industries have wholesale moved away), in an arbitrary, capricious, and illegal manner (dubious for encouraging long-term investment), while expecting them to create well-paying domestic jobs - the only ways to compete with Chinese labor prices are creating domestic "lights out" factories (which given the regime's continued rolling out the red carpet for cross-border capital, likely won't even be American owned), or devaluing our currency to turn our country into an impoverished manual-labor work camp of the type that China worked desperately to move beyond.
As I alluded to with my last parenthetical, I expect the main outcome to be further erosion of what domestic industry we have left (eg Amazon [0] is less competitive, but also any last-step value-add manufacturing / productization) in favor of an international just in time supply chain where this new national sales tax is only paid after a consumer has bought the product.
[0] I could see Amazon just moving most operations to customs-bonded warehouses though.
The best time to take action was yesterday. The second best time is today.
Tariffs are a long-term economic policy. It will take longer than 365 days to change consumer spending habits and onshore foreign businesses/production and rebuild domestic businesses/production.
Most countries have tariffed US goods for decades. The US tariffs on foreign goods will, over the long term, convince foreign nations to reduce or eliminate their tariffs on US goods (creating a more fair business climate for US businesses), and/or increase domestic production (creating jobs, salaries, taxes, etc).
We can't act like it's just too late to do anything about the lop-sided economic policies of decades-past, and we can't act like changing those policies today is nothing but doom. There will be a restructuring - a period of time to adjust - and then things will be fine over the long term. It just takes time and the political will-power to do so.
The best time to close the barn door was before the horses ran off. The second best time is today.
Does this make sense? Especially as a plan for getting the horses back?
Markets are not computationally smooth, rather they have structure. China recognized this, which is why they've been using government policy to keep their prices low to make industries get over the activation energy of moving there. Now that those industries are there, the structure then gives China leverage which "we" (ie our leadership class) are only now waking up to. Adding some tariff friction that would have kept industry here is nowhere near the level of incentive required to bring industry back.
> We can't act like it's just too late to do anything about the lop-sided economic policies of decades-past
I'm not. There is another comment of mine in this thread pointing out how Americans have been getting fleeced for decades by not spending the proceeds of having the world reserve currency on mitigating the problems of having the world reserve currency. What I am saying is that tariffs, especially as being championed right now, are more like hopium rather than actually confronting the problem.
> we can't act like changing those policies today is nothing but
The doom part comes from having an incompetent dictator-wannabe President who is at best applying a cookie-cutter approach that is decades out of date, but more seemingly just using these levers as threats to personally enrich himself as our country burns. Which is why he is also using tariffs against longstanding allies, thus prompting them to revisit why they are harming their own economies by tariffing China.
> the political will-power to do so.
What I see is the political willpower on this topic (and other longstanding problems) being abused to not actually address those problems, but rather just to facilitate the next con job on the American people.
I went to see hackers in 35MM at the Academy Museum and the director said when he saw the script his immediate thought was, computers are going to be the new electric guitars. He framed the whole movie around the crew as sort of a punk band where computers were their instrument and tool of creative expression and fun, and I thought that was awesome. Also btw, all of the visualizations of the gibson were practical effects. they actually built stacks of glass towers and projected the light on them and had a camera track flying through it in a warehouse.
That's why the people that would rather policy be based on their personal interests work so hard to discredit all data and the scientific method so that you can't even have that conversation.
I think this is pretty well established as far as neurologists are concerned and explains a lot of things. Like dreaming for instance.. just something like the model running without sensory input constraining it.
I'll also recommend Being You by Seth Anil. It makes a lot of sense of consciousness to me. It certainly doesn't answer the question but it's not just throw your hands up and "we have no idea why qualia", and it's also not just "here's a list of neural correlates of consciousness and we won't even discuss qualia".
It goes through how sensations fit into this highly constrained, highly functional hallucination that models the outside world as a sort of bayesian prediction about the world as they relate to your concerns and capabilities as a human, and then it has a very interesting discussion about emotions as they relate to inner bodily sensations.
Always wondered if dreaming is some kind of daily memory consolidation function. Logged short-term/episodic memory being filtered and the important bits baked by replaying in a limited simulacrum.
There was once a neural network that used dreaming phases for regularisation. It would run in reverse on random data and whatever activated was down–weighted.
I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.
One thing I found out from my years of commenting on the internet, is as long as what you say sounds plausible and you state it with absolute conviction and authority, you can get your 15 minutes of fame as the world's foremost expert on any given topic.
You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model.
I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project.
I agree with their take for the most part, but it's really nothing insightful or different than what people have been saying for a while now.
It’s in software too. Old guard leadership wanting “AI” as a badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data while engineers continue to make a mess of things.
Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to Jira ticket. They’re all ripe for automation.
(As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online.
Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility”
(or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)
I always thought I would kinda be immune to this issue, so I avoided social media for my entire adult life.
I think I am still in the emotional phase about it, as its really impacting me lately, but once my thoughts really settle i wanna write some sorta article about modern social media as an induced demand.
I still very much would prefer to not engage at all with any of the major platforms in the standard way. Ideally I'd just post an article I wrote, or some goofy project i made, and it wouldn't be subject to 0 views because I don't interact with social media correctly.
seems like it depends on what your goal is. i'm guessing if you want to be a musician that makes a living in your current life, a personal brand is extremely important. if you don't mind doing it for the sake of the art and soul fulfillment and the offchance you'll be discovered posthumously then i think it doesn't matter!
Thanks for the offer!
I don’t wanna dox myself on this account just yet - and I am slowly building an audience on IG/SC now, basically have admitted defeat of my previous strategy. Also have 2 gigs coming up in the summer _fingers-crossed_
I just was feeling some type of way seeing that comment and wanted to vent thx for listening
I routinely see this in biotech, I've seen hiring managers from our Clinical Science team blatantly discriminate against candidates not on linkedin, even if they come with a strong referral and have 15-page super thorough CVs with 150 credible publication references. "Oh, they're not on linkedin, this person is sketchy" - immediately disqualifies candidate.
I had a pretty slim linkedin and actually beefed it up after seeing how much weight the execs and higher ups I work with give it. It's really annoying, I actually hate linkedin but basically got forced into using it.
Agreed, but I'd add tech influencers and celebrities to the top of that list, especially those invested in the "AI" hype cycle. At least the perspective of a random engineer is less likely to be tainted by their brand and agenda, and more likely to have genuine insight.
I think I'm the opposite! The key is to ignore any language that sounds too determined and treat it as an opinion piece on what could happen. There's no way of knowing what will, but I find the theories very interesting.
To me the post reads more like “we couldn’t convince current engineers to adopt LLMs so we’re going to embed it into the curriculum so future engineers are made to believe it’s the way to do things”
Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out. Attack that, not the technology.
Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game).
The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but instead, the governments of the world got together and enacted policies which would suppress competition, at the highest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than doing nothing.
Now, the closest solution we can aim for (IMO) is UBI. It's a late solution because a lot of people's lives have already been ruined through no fault of their own. On the plus side it made other people much more resilient, but if we keep going down this path, there is nothing more to learn; only serves to reinforce the existing idea that everything is a scam. This is bound to affect people's behaviors in terrible ways.
Imagine a dystopian future where the system spends a huge amount of resources first financially oppressing people to the point of insanity, then monitoring and controlling them to try to get them to avoid doing harm... When the system could just have given them (less) money and avoided this downward spiral into insanity to begin with and then you wouldn't even need to monitor them because they would be allowed to survive whilst being their own sane, good-natured self. We have to course-correct and are approaching a point of no return when the resentment becomes severe and permanent. Nobody can survive in a world where the majority of people are insane.
I've encountered resistance to UBI from otherwise like-minded people because Musk and Thiel talk about it or something. When described as gradually lowering the social security age, it clicks. We already have this stuff. It's crazy.
The resistance seems to be the result of certain more privileged people being out of touch with the situation. They don't understand how hard some people are struggling now. This is bad because they won't notice it until it turns into violence... And by that point they'd have lost empathy for them and their struggles. History really does rhyme.
> Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already?
Phew, yes I'm with you...
> We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult.
Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
> The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out.
Do you mean that it has nothing to do with how the average person decides to spend their money?
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's where money saved by technology went to.
2 well identifiable classes in western societies are landlords vs renters, where the latter is paying a huge chunk of their income to be able to use an appreciating asset of the former.
This class thing is especially identifiable in Europe, where assets such as real estate generally are not cheaper than in the US (with the exception of a few super expensive places), yet salaries are much lower.
Taxes tend to be super high on wages but not on assets. One can very easily find themselves in a situation where even owning a modest amount of wealth, their asset appreciation outdoes what they can get as labor income.
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greedy. Runaway optimizers with no real goal state in mind except "more."
> How? What are you proposing exactly?
In a word, socialism. It's a social and political problem, not a technical one. These systems have fallen way behind technology and allowed crazy accumulations of wealth in the hands of very few. Push for legislation to redistribute the wealth to the people.
If someone invents a robot to do the work of McDonalds workers, that should liberate them from having to do that kind of work. This is the dream and the goal of technology. Instead, under our current system, one person gets a megayacht and thousands of people are "unemployed." With no change to the amount of important work being done.
The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
I appreciate the elaboration in the second half. That sounds a lot more constructive than "attack", but now I understand you meant it in the "attack the problem" sense not "attack the people" sense.
What I think we agree on is that society has resource redistribution problem, and it could work a lot better.
I think we might also agree that a well functioning economic engine should lift up the floor for everyone and not concentrate economic power into those who best weild leverage.
One way I think of this is, what is the actual optimal lorenz curve that allows for lifting the floor, such that the area under the curve increases at the fastest rate possible. (It must account for the reality of human psychology and resource scarcity)
Where we might disagree is that I think we also have some culture and education system problems as well, which relate to how each individual takes responsibility for figuring out how to ethically create value for others. When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
E.g. If mcdonald automates their restaurants, those workers also need to take some responsibility for finding new ways to provide value to others. A well functioning system would make that as painless as possible for them, so much so that the majority experiencing it would consider it a good thing.
> The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.
Anything specific?
> When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.
What types of behaviors are you referring to as zero and negative sum games?
I think at the very least we should move toward a state where the existence of dare-I-say freeloaders and welfare queens isn't too taxing, and with general social progress that "niche" may be naturally disincentivized and phased out. Some people just don't really have a purpose or a drive but they were born here and yes one would hope that under the right conditions they could blossom but if not I don't think it's worth worrying about too much.
I would say that education is essentially at the core of everything, it's the only mechanism we have to move the needle on any of it.
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