Price elasticity of demand (=sensitivity to price changes). If the seller is afraid that higher prices will significantly impact sales (people won't buy the product or buy alternatives), it might accept a lower margin in order to maintain the volume.
Also market competition can be a factor: if competitors are not raising prices (or by smaller amounts), you might lose market share.
The drop in demand for staples you're talking about is quite literally the poorest people eating less, using fewer basics, lowering their quality of life further.
As of 2016 (first search result) 90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs. [1] The big goal with the tariffs, outside of gaining leverage on other countries, is to motivate domestic production and alternatives. Without tariffs it simply isn't realistically possible to compete in many industries because other countries have cheaper labor and less costly regulations.
Of course the practical problem with this playing out in increased domestic production is that it's reasonably likely that in 2028 the tariffs will get rolled back, and any company that was depending on them to survive will die. That's a large amount of uncertainty for any industry where there's a significant income investment required to get going.
Domestic food supply is still subject to tariffs because many of the inputs are. Agricultural machinery, parts, chemical feedstocks.
Not to mention that tariffs on directly imported goods reduce the lowest earners' ability to pay for domestic products.
If the goal was onshoring too benefit the population, it would be coupled with a strong wealth redistribution to the least wealthy to allow them to buy domestic goods. But that's not the goal.
>90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs
That's not true, even for items which undergo relatively little processing like milk:
1. Cows need feed, and in the US this is mostly corn. This corn is mechanically harvested, shucked, and transported.
2. Cows are milked by machine.
3. This milk is then transported to a larger processing facility where it gets filtered, clarified (fat removal for 2%, skim, etc), pasteurized, homogenized (fat is evenly dispersed), and bottled in a blown plastic jug.
4. After bottling, the milk gets palletized and trucked to grocery distribution centers, which will re-palletize it for shipment to individual stores.
At every step of the way, we use machines that require frequent maintenance and whose supply chains rely extensively on imported parts. On-shoring all of this would be expensive and risky both because Trump flip-flops so often and because our next administration may just reverse the tariffs.
I think the point is that PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China, and this move makes that statement less likely to be taken seriously. Which is good.
Xi's views are of limited relevance to you and me, perhaps, but they are not of limited relevance to how PRC operates. Of course they're relevant, and then by extension that makes them relevant for how global politics plays out.
>Taiwan is a sovereign country boasting a military alliance with America.
Yep, this is certainly true, and part of maintaining that military alliance will be further entangling things like high tech manufacturing.
>But safeguarding global assets in Taiwan from Beijing pulling a Falklands is also savvy.
I actually don't know as much as I should about the Falkland Islands War, other than the UK took a decent amount of losses surprisingly. I think PRC actually invading Taiwan is extremely unlikely, given the terrain and weather aspects of how that war would go, but doing something like launching some missiles is definitely within the realm of possibility.
> I actually don't know as much as I should about the Falkland Islands War, other than the UK took a decent amount of losses surprisingly.
Good summary, actually! :)
Argentina and Britain lost about the same number of ships, with Britain having an edge on the air war. British troops marched into Port Stanley with dysentery from drinking bog water, but defeated the Argentine conscripts.
Ignoring Argentine military and etiquette lapses, the modern war lessons were:
1) Although subsonic, Harriers were ok ish for defending the fleet against an inferior force.
2) Argentine pilots used terrain masking (fly in on the deck at the bow, similar to "crossing the T") to sink some ships, so good tactics are always in style:
3) Without first-rate satellite intelligence, the British tried and failed to find and sink Argentine's aircraft carrier using subs. (Argentina withdrew their carrier to preserve it, after the traumatic sinking of the Belgrano. So tactically the British achieved the same result, but there's always uncertainty with a ship that's still floating.)
4) A British troop carrier was bombed at anchor with the soldiers ordered to remain onboard. That was a command mistake on par with US amphibious landing mistakes in the WW2 Italy campaign. Anzio, anybody?
5) Aluminum ships burn, like the Sheffield.
Having said that, the result could have been very different considering how few Harriers Britain had, or if Argentina had 10 more Exocet missiles.
(Little-known fact: An Exocet destroyed one British ship without the warhead even detonating, just the rocket fuel. The watch saw it coming, and couldn't do anything about it.)
You can watch a few videos on Youtube and piece things together.
The most fascinating interviews are with the Argentine mechanics, who because of the French embargo, mounted the Exocets on hand-made launch rails, and the Argentine pilots who used them to devastating effect.
Some subjects:
0. The failed diplomatic effort to avoid war (the Argentine diplomats were too busy drinking cocktails to negotiate with the British diplomats. Very macho!)
> Xi's views are of limited relevance to you and me, perhaps, but they are not of limited relevance to how PRC operates
Fair enough. I amend my earlier statement to Xi’s messaging on Taiwan is of limited relevance to American economic, foreign and military policy. He’s playing to a domestic audience.
It could become more relevant in the future. But for day to day policymaking, it can usually be ignored.
> China's government can't be so easily be dismissed as illegitimate
I believe the U.S. government is legitimate. That doesn’t mean I believe its every view is so.
Xi’s government’s legitimacy can exist alongside his statements on Taiwan being ridiculous. (I’ll note, too, that Xi and the CPC are outsiderS to Taiwan’s affairs.)
My point isn't on whether or not all his views are legitimate—that's a pointless argument to make. My point is that quite a lot of people (probably the majority of Chinese) are on his side regarding his viewpoints on that.
> I think the point is that PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China, and this move makes that statement less likely to be taken seriously. Which is good.
Well, you should tell that to the US government, who believes there's One China and the capital is Beijing.
When Trump got elected he actually took a congratulatory call from Tsai Ing-wen (president of Taiwan) which utterly incensed the PRC. That aside, it's been the position of America since 1972.
For what it's worth Taiwan also believes there's One China, including all territory claimed by the PRC and that the capital is in fact Taipei.
With that all in mind, any major world power has been paying lip service to One China and practically ignoring it, but the PRC exerts its influence over smaller/weaker countries such as recently flipping Sao Tome and Principe in violation of the no-poaching agreement in the One China accords. In reality, no big power believes they're one country, and operates accordingly. No small power does either, but substantially all back the PRC because the West has largely ceded its influence over smaller nations to the PRC.
Someone should really say something to the US military. They’ve been selling top tier military equipment to and coordinating with illegitimate rebels for decades!
Politically yes, Taiwan is de facto independent, but economically they are deeply intertwined; although they have their own currency, stock exchange etc., a lot of major companies operating in China are under Taiwanese ownership (Foxconn and Pegatron for example) and the commerce between China and Taiwan is significant; China is Taiwan's largest trading partner at 30% of Taiwan's total trade.
By contrast, China is the US' third largest trading partner (after Canada and Mexico) at 10% of US trade. Taiwan is much more intertwined with China economically. Which makes sense given the geographic proximity and linguistic and cultural ties.
Look at hotels.com, which in many ways is comparable. It has around 1000 employees (one thousand). From wikipedia:
Hotels.com has 85 websites in 34 languages, and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations.
Going back to your comments, you could rephrase some of the earlier comments as: why on earth would you need millisecond performance improvements for a website/product listing rentals?
Hotels.com is part of Expedia group. Expedia has 25k employees.
Millisecond improvement is needed because travel is commodity and bounce rate is very high. If website doesn't load in time, visitors bounce off to other providers
Had the some doubts for our first hire - he wanted to work 4 days a week. He seemed committed and enthusiastic about our mission, so we went ahead.
Best choice we ever made: any doubt about commitment, passion, etc were blown away after a few weeks. He is now a cornerstone of our team. He still works 4 days a week. Now several key team members work 2.5 to 4 days a week, and we're doing great.
Looking back: I should have asked myself: what is better, working 1 day a week more or passion and a good technical fit?
Other European countries are moving in the same direction.
The Netherlands is the one in which such a law seems likelier to be passed, also because of significantly less lobbying from the car industry (no major manufacturers, as opposed to Germany with Volkswagen, the second largest in the world).
It's high-level assembly language. Thus, it allows you to write code with a very small barrier between you and the machine instructions, but with enough of a barrier that you can reuse and organize your code logically. At the same time, it gives you most of the speed and raw bit manipulation of machine code.
The negatives about C:
You're almost as likely to introduce completely silent catastrophic memory corruption with every operation than you are to actually accomplish the task you're trying to do. Most of the things which would normally be bugs are also now major security breaches. C's structure also makes it extremely difficult to do static analysis, making it difficult to find bugs, security vulnerabilities, and make performance optimizations.
How ATS helps:
ATS addresses a lot of these issues by emitting efficient C code. However, at a higher level ATS combines C with an extremely strong type system (dependent typing) which allows you to do things like verify statically that there are no out-of-bound memory accesses through typing. It can do even stronger things like prove your code correct.
ATS provides all the low level hackery that C can do but allows more information to be encoded in types to ensure that is safe. It also provides high level features from functional programming languages like higher order functions, pattern matching, etc.
He is spot on, but I find (and always found) his wording way too aggressive. Makes it kind of hard to have a constructive discussion on the topic, which by the way really needs such discussion.
It's also kind of hard to have a constructive discussion on the topic if nobody takes notice. Without the invectives, it probably wouldn't have been noteworthy enough to spread like wildfire across the hacker sphere.
Also market competition can be a factor: if competitors are not raising prices (or by smaller amounts), you might lose market share.