In light of so many things going on in the world, I thought this was a rather interesting article and wanted to point out a couple of quotes that are humorous to me.

Before I do, I want to mention that part of the equation for why cars cost so much money in the United States is that there is no competition for most Americans. It's not that there are not a lot of different automakers, it's that if you want to forgo a car because of the cost, say $30,000 or $50,000 or more, you cannot function very well in society including in all major US metro areas save a few select locations (NYC, Chicago, parts of other cities).

So what this results in is that automakers can basically get away with anything in terms of pricing or features, and citizens can't say "nah I'm not paying for that" like we can with so many other products and services in our daily life, even if sometimes it's painful to do so.

Now there's certainly a lot to be said for labor cost and such as well. I'm not claiming that the lack of sidewalks, bike lanes, trams, trains, and more are the sole reason for higher costs in the United States, but when you take into account the total costs we're paying across the board to maintain our car-centric method of transportation it's quite a bit. Many may be happy to pay that, but it would be nice if they'd stop complaining about it too (gas prices, new car prices, etc.).

Now, there were a few select quotes that I cherry-picked from the article that I thought were amusing in light of tariffs and such.

  Most Chinese buyers these days are buying a local brand. Some, such as BYD, have begun to gain international recognition, but the malls are filled with dealers that offer brands virtually unknown abroad—Zeekr, Lynk & Co, Aion, Aito and many more.

Is it ok that other countries buy products native to their country and enact protectionist policies that make that more economically feasible? Hmm.

  Because of customer demand, even the low-end models come with advanced driver-assistance software.

Competition, not just between car makers, but also competition with transportation alternatives enables this to the benefit of citizens.

  Tesla is better-positioned than other American automakers to compete in China, since its models have always been all-electric and it makes the vehicles in Shanghai with Chinese batteries.

Made in China. Wonder why Tesla had to open its factories in China?

  Toyota said its bZ3X—the recently introduced model that starts at $15,000—was designed in China by the company’s engineers in the country, who worked with a local joint-venture partner. It is made in Guangzhou with Chinese batteries and driver-assistance software from Momenta, a Chinese leader in that field.

  “This couldn’t happen without a Chinese supply chain,” said Masahiko Maeda, head of Toyota’s Asia business. “Unless you localize, it’s out of the question.”

Interesting. So vehicles made in China, by Chinese people, with a localized supply chain that makes it possible.

  Like other foreign automakers, Toyota needed a jolt in its China business after local rivals surged in recent years. Still, it retains a market share near 10%.  

This is an interesting protectionist and mercantilist style policy.

Your "protectionist" comments come across to me as either parochial or ironic - perhaps Poe's Law in action (if you're trying to do parody, it failed on me).

You could choose to balance comments on Chinese actions against equivalent comments on US protectionism (Chicken Laws, import tariffs and non-tariff market protectionism).

Cars are status symbols. Very noticeable here in New Zealand where new cars are mostly only purchased by a small minority of wealthy people. The majority of kiwis can buy second hand because we import a lot of second hand cars from Japan. As a percentage of income I suspect we're lucky to be able to spend less in NZ.

No, it wasn't parody. I was just pointing out that those who are freaking out about U.S. protectionist policy and how it's "unfair" with respect to China don't seem to understand that they have their own protectionist policies, and similar arguments used as negatives about the U.S. market are used as positives when describing the Chinese market, such as the references about local supply chains, or how Tesla had to set up its factory in China or else not be able to ship cars to China (among other, economic factors to bring costs down which again just prove the need for the US to tariff imported automobiles too in order to lower costs).

This is really rather obvious and simple in the public sphere, though certainly trade policy is extremely complex.

Liberals and the Democratic Party are continuing to lose economic arguments and elections because they fail to understand these double standards that many millions of Americans clearly understand, even if they don't understand the complexities of trade policy that underpin these arguments.

China needs to fully open its markets, or perhaps we should do what we can to stop trading with them and influence others to do the same.

Protectionist policies like these matter a little less with small countries, but with a country with the economic power of China they matter quite a bit. If China doesn't open its markets, and they won't, that will be the precise cause of the demise of bulk of the world's free trade schemes. It's untenable for other nations to lose their manufacturing capacity while also not being able to compete fairly in Chinese markets. This ranges from their forcing of joint ventures, to banning of American social media and technology companies, to measures they take to depress their currency to keep their exports artificially cheap. Certainly other countries engage in these practices, but the scale of China's economy doing so is again untenable. I'd argue that it would be great if we could all lower trade barriers, but unless China does there's no reason for the United States to do so any longer either except where it can negotiate specific deals that are hopefully mutually beneficial.

To put it simply, yes absolutely the United States, as does the European Union, have tariffs, various rules on imports, and other mechanisms that restrict free trade. China does too. If we aren't going to have "free trade" or head toward more free trade together, I'm not interested in complaints about the United States restricting trade in other ways like placing tariffs on imports or removing the de minimus exemption. Everyone is restricting trade to their advantage, we're just doing it too or in new ways, which others will do as well and so on. If you are clutching your pearls about it, you've lost the argument. If you are complaining about the United States doing it but not other countries including the EU or China, you've also lost the argument.

I don't really follow your comments about New Zealand in the context of this conversation, but certainly an interesting anecdote!

As much as China can prepare, it's still in a pretty vulnerable position and the whole "the Chinese people are more conditioned for hardship" is as much Chinese exceptionalism as any claim to American exceptionalism. At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared". Appear strong where you are weak or something like that. Meanwhile the US can see prices go up, but aside from a few specific items we can buy or make the things that China has been. At an increased cost, sure, but Americans can handle it.

> The US has benefitted for a couple generations by being the reserve currency, meaning that we can make big mistakes and not suffer for them, while any other country would suffer. This coming trade war, if it actually happens, may finally break this exceptional status.

Very doubtful. The main danger is lack of fortitude with continuing and enforcing policies, and letting ideological battles get the best of the Trump administration for cutting good and fair deals with the EU and others. You're welcome to invest in Chinese, Russian, or whatever capital markets, though.

It's not exceptionalism as much as authoritarianism. The lockdowns that happened in China for COVID were real and extreme. Meanwhile there were no lockdowns in the US and a significant chunk of the electorate acts as though there was extreme government overreach and in response gained control of large chunks of government with those arguments.

Sure, the Chinese government finally capitulated to citizen demand eventually, but the degree of control compared to the US is hard to overstate.

Americans nearly rioted over unenforced (effectively voluntary) Stay-At-Home and business closures that were openly ignored by business owners. If we can't even survive a few months of not buying khakis and eating at Olive Garden, how are we going to survive a hardcore and sustained trade war?

Americans are just like anyone else for the most part, albeit with some cultural differences.

We can put up with hardship just like anyone else, though our suburban ecosystems and factory farming make that more difficult than need be, it's just that we haven't had a real need to face true national hardship since World War II perhaps.

I don't disagree with the COVID-19 lockdowns or anything like that, but I'm not sure that's the best example here because as a nation we weren't really aligned on that being a hardship necessary to endure sacrifice.

And you think trade war with China is something that the entire nation believes is necessary hardship, when even Trump allies like Musk are speaking out against it, as is the entire business world?

Well I don't think it'll be that much of a hardship, but yea I don't think everyone is exactly aligned with how the Trump administration is going about it. Generally speaking "we have a problem with China - they took our jobs!" has broad consensus, at least in my experience. Also politically the Biden administration and others have undertaken steps to defend US economic interests against China.

I see no evidence that we will be aligned this time. A large portion of the population will be angry and blame Trump and the Republicans who supported this.

Personally I see it as a win-win. Tough on China, people get mad about their trinkets being more expensive, and then they kick the traitorous fools out of office and we go back to more sensible Democratic foreign policy and tough on China stances.

We can “buy or make the things China has been”? Buy from whom? Make in what factories, with what workers, with what supplies, equipment, and materials?

Ok if we can't then you're proving the need for economic and policy measures to make it so we can.

But yes, instead of buying a made in China t-shirt you can just spend a little more and buy one made in the USA, or even other non-authoritarian governments throughout the world (EU for example).

The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically? Immigration? Hah, that would be an interesting stance. Automation? It would work to fill some gaps, but even apple doesn't want to pay Chinese workers for tasks that machines can do today. Someone in their company decides on when they automate, and when they use elbow grease. They may be able to afford a lot of the capital outlay to greatly improve the productivity of their workers if effectively required to onshore, or they may just stop selling iPhones in the US for a few years if all cell phones become prohibitively expensive to own. If Apple can't make the economics work, I can't see who can.

> The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically?

I don't know off the top of my head, but that sounds like a great problem to have and I'd be happy to do whatever it takes to make sure we have that problem.

We instituted many processes during the Biden era for bringing manufacturing to the US. They were all carrot based: provide stability for capital investments and even some tax benefits. This resulted in massive investments in factories in the US, the most in a generation.

Tariffs do not provide capital security, they do not make it cheap to build the factories and in fact gigantically jack up the cost because we need to import a lot of the machinery to get the manufacturing going, and building the entire supply chain from scratch would add massive lead time to the other factories that use the machinery.

Further, the need for onshoring cheap tshirt manufacturing is far from clear. We have massive amounts of our workforce in far more productive areas that produce absolutely massive amounts of GDP, and reallocating the workforce to tshirt manufacturing makes us far poorer.

We are cutting drastically from scientific research, where each dollar spent by the government generates 2x-10x GDP, and telling those scientists to go work in factories. The very same types of factories that our trading partners would give up in an instant if they had the hi tech scientific research instead.

What do we need? Certainly not tshirt factories. We need scientists, services, and more productive sectors of the economy. It is absolute idiocy to give up the higher tiers of the economy only possible in the US in the 21st century, to return to far lower 20th and 19th century productivity level.

Cheap crap on Temu and phones that mainline social media into everyone's pockets are part of the circus machinery that keeps the population distracted and docile.

Nuking them is unlikely to end well politically.

As others have said, if you want to use tariffs to wage a trade war, you prepare first, so you're not cutting off the branch you're sitting on. You don't create tariffs and then build your factories.

Because you can't. It's just not possible.

But this regime has a shoot-from-the-microphone policy style which is completely irrational and unworkable, and minor considerations like practicality don't figure.

In any case, it's clear the regime is in a race between enforcing its grip on power with martial law (whatever it's going to be called) and political collapse brought about by economic collapse.

It's too early to tell, but if martial law wins, economic collapse on an unprecedented scale will follow.

You can be toxically positive and say that a lot of dead wood needed to be cleared. But in practice that just means whole swathes of the country will turn into Detroit of the 00s, but worse - rotting ghost towns, haunted by the ghosts of those who starved to death.

$5? lol try $30

For some things, I agree it’s important to have domestic capability. For most things, global trade works well for everyone involved, so long as we do it in a cooperative way. The current tariff bullying approach is the worst way of building domestic capability or improving trade relations. More likely the US will sink into a decade or more of stagflation or worse as world markets move on without us, far more easily than we can become self-sustaining.

For your t-shirt example, sure we can buy US made shirts. But the US factories have a limit to what they can produce. Then what? What business person would invest in any new factories in the current environment? Where do they buy the materials to build the factory? (From our trading partners.) Where do they buy the tools and equipment used in the factory? (From our trading partners.) who do they hire to work in the factory? Former government bureaucrats? Immigrants? Oh wait!

what EU countries have a good t-shirt supply chain? do you know? I am pretty sure limited to poland, and maybe a few other eastern european countries.

as for MUSA, i buy a lot of t-shirts and none of them are made in usa, who are you thinking of?

You can Google something like "made in America t-shirts" and should find plenty of results as I did (not trying to be a jerk and say "Google it", really just trying to be helpful if you are indeed looking). I'm not sure about the European Union.

There are quite a few but just an example: https://www.american-giant.com/pages/about-us (no affiliation or any further research other than identifying from a lengthy list of made-in-USA clothing).

All I did was a quick google search, but I searched what the US imports from China, to fill in the word "stuff" from your post:

"The U.S. imports a wide variety of products from China, with the top categories including electronics, machinery, and furniture. Specifically, significant imports include computers, smartphones, electrical equipment, toys, and furniture."

I just don't think there will be riots in the street over this stuff. Maybe there will be, maybe there should be, I can't say for sure. I do know kids will survive just fine without toys, and I don't see riots over furniture. I don't know about the rest of it.

The other side of the coin is interesting: What if China decided they were never going to sell anything to the US? Would people riot in the street? Even more interesting, if China really wanted to play that game, why don't they? Why are they so mad? If this wasn't a threat to them it would be a giant nothingburger on their end.

Vastly underestimating the impact.

Think of all the Made in USA stuff that makes use of Chinese components.

Many of the machines used in factories are made in China.

A lot of tool making is outsourced there (an injection molding die that might cost $50,000 to make in the US might be $10k in China, and the Chinese typically make them with a quicker turnaround time, even with shipping.

Unfortunately our homes, offices, and lots of infrastructure kinda require things like electrical equipment (amongst other trivial things like wood, metal, insulation materials, etc)

> At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared".

I have the feeling, not only from this comment but also those about Foxconn suicide nets, that people have a hard time judging quite how big things in China are.

Losing a million jobs would change China's unemployment rate by… 0.14% of the workforce.

Great then it is very simple and it won't bother them too much and we can gain 100k* jobs or so and pay more to make things here and everyone is happy. China can stomach the loss of a few million jobs and they shouldn't complain since it's no big deal.

* Job loss/gains wouldn't be 1-1 as new US factories would likely use fewer workers.

Why do you expect to gain jobs?

The US is currently at fairly high employment[0]. To a first approximation, if you attempt to move factory jobs to the US, not only do you need to build a factory, someone not currently working in a factory has to loose their non-factory job… or you have to encourage a lot more parenting and wait about 18 years[1].

More likely is that the US looses all the jobs that the imports were dependent on, and unemployment goes up.

"Dependent on" is also hard to determine. Lots of people now rely on smartphones, and even in a scenario like this the phones themselves won't evaporate overnight — they won't even really shift back to being the status symbol for the wealthy that they once were given how cheap the cheap brands are, but for the stake of illustrating the impact of consequences, *if* they were to shift back to being that status symbol, gradually there would also be much less call for mobile app developers and Uber, Delivery Hero, etc. drivers.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

[1] or whatever school leaving age + 9 months works out as; theoretically there's also "encourage immigration", but that's already been ruled out.

> Why do you expect to gain jobs?

Because we don't live in a static equilibrium with respect to population? Even if we didn't gain jobs because the population was stagnant, this just puts wage pressure on employers to the benefit of workers. Or is that not a good thing?

But you are providing an argument against your own point:

> More likely is that the US looses all the jobs that the imports were dependent on, and unemployment goes up.

> The US is currently at fairly high employment[0]. To a first approximation, if you attempt to move factory jobs to the US, not only do you need to build a factory, someone not currently working in a factory has to loose their non-factory job

Which is it?

> Because we don't live in a static equilibrium with respect to population? Even if we didn't gain jobs because the population was stagnant, this just puts wage pressure on employers to the benefit of workers. Or is that not a good thing?

Wage pressure in this case would be pointing in the opposite direction.

First: If the average tariffs are less than something like 558%, at current salaries and exchange rates it is currently still cheaper to import, because US salaries (well, nominal GDP/capita, I approximated) are on average that much higher than Chinese salaries. The Chinese can cope with this because of two things you don't have: (1) lower starting expectations because they're moving through the process of industrialisation and started low, (2) lower cost of living. This means that below that level (which a more detailed analysis will likely show varies between products), all the tariffs do is act like a stealth purchase tax that reduces aggregate demand without inducing production to relocate (though production may *claim* to relocate for reasons of political correctness, they won't actually move from tariffs below this level).

Second: The only way to free up US workers to work in these factories, is to first cause massive unemployment so that people are willing to take on much lower paid manufacturing jobs. Otherwise everyone says "no, I will not take this stupid manufacturing job that pays $6.5k/year, why would I want that? This won't even cover my rent!"

And that $6.5k/year is what I've heard Foxconn pays line workers — great when your rent is $2k/year; awful when your rent is $2k/month. If there were any wage uplift from moving the jobs themselves, it would act exactly like a permanent tariff, and lower aggregate demand accordingly.

> Which is it?

Which is what?

Those are the same point.

To move a factory, people have to stop doing the work they're currently paid to do.

Destroying your ability to import things that people need for their work will indeed free up people to make those things in local factories, by massively increasing unemployment. Do you, personally, want to switch from your current job to making iPhones?

> To move a factory, people have to stop doing the work they're currently paid to do.

> Destroying your ability to import things that people need for their work will indeed free up people to make those things in local factories, by massively increasing unemployment. Do you, personally, want to switch from your current job to making iPhones?

I don't, but that's because it wouldn't be economically productive for me to do so. For someone working at Waffle House it might be.

Let's be very clear though that every economic decision we make as a country has repercussions, and winners and losers. Remember the coal workers who had to Learn 2 Code?

> all the tariffs do is act like a stealth purchase tax that reduces aggregate demand without inducing production to relocate (though production may claim to relocate for reasons of political correctness, they won't actually move from tariffs below this level).

Well we do need to raise taxes to pay for these services we want and/or to reduce the national debt. I don't believe that this is the best or only way to do that but that's a nice benefit in the scenario you are describing. If we purchase less that's better for the planet too.

No doubt many companies won't relocate at least in the short term, but some will.

I don't disagree with your assessment related to the average tariffs right now, but that figure is very much subject to change, and something like the exchange rate where China has put artificial pressure on the currency to keep it lower in value than it might otherwise be is an example that I think would be worthwhile analyzing when looking at the entire picture.

> The Chinese can cope with this because of two things you don't have: (1) lower starting expectations because they're moving through the process of industrialisation and started low, (2) lower cost of living.

Cope in what way? America will be just fine even with higher prices or even supply change shortages and can find other manufacturers to produce goods. China will be just fine too losing money and jobs but finding other markets like the EU for products that no longer come to America. Both countries can cope with less trade with each other. I've seen this trope repeated time and time again in these discussions about how China somehow is exceptional and can cope with struggle more than Americans and it's just as faulty of an assumption as claims to American exceptionalism are.

> Wage pressure in this case would be pointing in the opposite direction.

> Those are the same point.

I don't think so but maybe you cold elaborate if you have the inclination? It's also a little difficult to discuss because neither of us have really laid out assumptions very well so we may be discussing different things at times.

Generally speaking though in the case of unemployment rates which I think is what I was responding to, having to build new factories in the United States (however many) with a low unemployment by definition would increase wages simply due to labor supply and demand.

The person I was responding to (again going off memory here and could be wrong and I apologize if so - maybe it was you! :) ) was supposing that this was a bad thing or that the jobs couldn't come back because of the low unemployment rate because there wouldn't be any workers.

I disagree with that general assessment completely.

We would see a rise in wages and increases in investment in automation and manufacturing technology due to the rise in labor cost.

> * Job loss/gains wouldn't be 1-1 as new US factories would likely use fewer workers.

Why in the world would you think this is the case? China leads the world in manufacturing efficiency, maybe behind only Japan and South Korea.

They'd think it because otherwise the prices would be too high and it would be difficult to sell the goods. If iphones go to $3000, the market for iphones will get much thinner.

That doesn't explain the ratio. If a highly efficient and automated China is employing (say) 1e6 people to supply US demand, it's implausible that anyone (including the US) would be able to spot a way to fire 90% of the factory workers when rebuilding the production line at same capacity anywhere else (including the US).

Of course, I simplify. But despite the wage difference, China's no longer the place you go to substitute expensive machines for cheap humans.

The wage difference between the USA and China also means that for any given product, there's a minimum tariff below which it still makes more sense to import and pay the tariff rather than to pay local workers. To paint a very broad brushstroke, if I naïvely compare GDP/capita, that's about 558% — from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... I get US 90,105 and China 13,688; then 90,105/13,688 = 6.58…, less 1 because tariff of 0% means the importer pays 100% of the money to the exporter.

To be clear I was suggesting that the number of jobs gained in the USA would not be 1-1 with the number of jobs currently in a given hypothetical factory. I.e. the Chinese factory loses 100 jobs, a corresponding American factory is unlikely in my view to gain 100 jobs, and instead the number may be much lower.

I guess it's possible if China is that good at efficient manufacturing that the number of jobs in the United States would increase relative to the job loss of the same factory in China, but I wouldn't view that as a bad thing. Higher employment and more wage pressure for regular workers, and companies will have to invest in better technology and processes to alleviate that wage pressure.

Oh so we would gain more jobs then? So we'll take a highly automated factory in China, shut it down since it won't be selling products to the US, build that factory here even though it might be a little less automated, and then we'll have the same number of jobs and maybe more than the Chinese factory had? Sign me up! That sounds awesome.

If there is a goal for more factories in the US, and it's certainly not clear at all that this is a policy goal of the current US executive branch, there's not a clear route to achieving that goal.

If the factory gets staffed at all, it will be competing in a labor pool in the US that only has 4.2% unemployment. The high employment rates, and inability to find workers during Biden's presidency, led employers to revolt against Biden.

The question is whether those automated factory jobs will be better than other jobs for the workers, whether they will be created in places with the appropriate worker pool (education, unemployment high enough etc.).

There's also the question of whether there's anybody willing to build some new high-cost automated factory when the same capital could be deployed to another purpose that likely has a far higher capital return rate. There's almost zero protection that the impetus for having the expensive highly-automated factory--namely the tariffs--will exist past for most of the life of the factory. Or in fact if they will even be in place by the time that the factory is constructed and ready to go, which will take a minimum of 3-4 years.

All the stars have to align perfectly for some sort of new jobs to appear and then it's not clear that they will be better than existing jobs. And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.

All great points and great questions - today however they're not really available for consideration because those jobs remain in China.

I mentioned in another post, but I think having a 4.2% unemployment rate and putting even more pressure on that rate is a good thing, particularly for workers who will see wages rise, and technology as new automation techniques will be created to also alleviate that same pressure.

The status quo today is, well, we have none of that and those factories sit in China and we continue to buy things and ship them over - not really great for the environment either.

> And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.

Yes, that's kind of how America operates - quarter by quarter. We focus on the short-term and worry about Temu products* doubling in price, but fail to see the long-term implications - economic outflows, loss of manufacturing capacity and know-how, etc.

* Yes, I know China manufactures more than these specific products and "we can't", which is all the more reason we need to figure out how to do it, even if it costs more money to do so. Absolute efficiency and the cheapest possible price for a good/product are not ends in themselves, but outcomes to economic policy decisions we make.

> cutting good and fair deals with the EU

Trump administration only succeeded in making the EU see the US as a foreign hostile nation.

At this point I think it's more likely the EU cut deals with China.

> Nah, the problem is EU will face the same problems the US is facing

The US problems are problems of their own making.

EU has only trade rivalries with China, not ideological issues like the US has. Those can be ironed out. And honestly the US administration also has an ideological hatred for Europe, as illustrated by the vice presidents own words. Not really conducive to any sort of deals.

As for China dumping cheap things here, as you said, EU is very protectionist (China is as well), and EU consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US. I really think that is less a problem than you believe.

> Trump no doubt damaged ties, and again I think the Biden administration's approach was superior in many ways, but there's a limit to what agreements the EU will make with China.

I think you really downplay the kind of generational damage the US is doing to the relationship with former allies.

> The manufacturing capacity that the Chinese have built isn't sustainable without a substantial increase in Chinese domestic consumption.

You forget that China is only in a trade war against the US. The US is in a trade war with everyone else.

> Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe

The US is also helping Russia in its efforts right now, it's important to underline this.

While China is more pragmatically washing their hands and keep trading with Russia, the US actually calls for Ukraine to just capitulate.

> I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?" The internet isn't day-to-day life. For some reason people think that political

1) I don't live in the internet. I barely have any online presence beyond this forum.

2) People are generally polite. I know people from the US, from very liberal to very MAGA. I try to be pleasant to them. And I don't fault them for their government, even the ones that obviously voted for the current president.

3) When I speak about generational damage to relationships, I am talking at the diplomacy level. Building a web of great allies was something that the US could do after the two world wars because the opportunity was there and they seized it. I think it will be very hard, on a diplomatic level, to repair that. This ship has already sailed.

> Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China.

Have been for a while. I don't see that as a huge problem. As I said, Europe consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US ones. Partly for cultural reasons, partly because the US had the strength (yes, strength) of commandeering a huge trade deficit that actually benefits immensely its economy.

There are some industries that for strategic importance is good to have around, but I would see no benefit in bringing over manufacturing like textiles or cell phone assembly sweatshops. Those can stay in China no problem.

Protectionism is good only for what you need protectionism.

> The US is also helping Russia in its efforts right now, it's important to underline this.

1. That's definitely false.

2. China supplies intelligence to Russia and also equipment directly or indirectly.

3. The US continues to provide intelligence and directly military support to Ukraine.

> People are generally polite. I know people from the US, from very liberal to very MAGA. I try to be pleasant to them. And I don't fault them for their government, even the ones that obviously voted for the current president.

Right - but that's not because people are seething with anger at the United States (aside from Canada which is deserved), it's because life goes on.

> When I speak about generational damage to relationships, I am talking at the diplomacy level. Building a web of great allies was something that the US could do after the two world wars because the opportunity was there and they seized it. I think it will be very hard, on a diplomatic level, to repair that. This ship has already sailed.

You're over-reacting. We dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and we're best buddies now. It's certainly a temporary setback, however. There's a lot of political grandstanding but that's just for placating domestic audiences. EU and US are the same there, as is China and Russia. Talk big and all that.

> Have been for a while. I don't see that as a huge problem. As I said, Europe consumers have a lot less appetite for consumption than the US ones.

Great, this seems like a win. European customers will buy more of the Chinese products (China needs to sell them somewhere to make up for losses in US sales so that'll be going to your markets), and the US will just suffer without the imports and everyone wins and America loses. That sounds just fine to me. We can be less consumerist oriented and the EU and China can increase their consumerism. Well, unless you're suggesting the EU won't buy more Chinese made things, in which case who will buy the Chinese products?

As I said before, you very much downplay the sort of damage the US is causing to its relationship with former allies. For example, you seem to forget the very real threats of US annexing Greenland, which is part of Denmark. Such an act of war would force every EU nation to go in its defense, even non-NATO ones. This is far beyond political grandstanding.

As for the rest, I think you very much downplay the gravity of going in a trade war with the whole world at once can do to the US economy, while you massively amp up the damage simple trade between China and EU can do to EU.

This conversation quickly got nowhere anyway, and I already said everything I wanted to. Time will tell who is right. Feel free to have the last word, and have a pleasant evening.

> As I said before, you very much downplay the sort of damage the US is causing to its relationship with former allies.

No, no I'm really not. It's more so that you are overstating the damage. All of a sudden we are "former allies" now? That's nonsense.

> For example, you seem to forget the very real threats of US annexing Greenland, which is part of Denmark. Such an act of war would force every EU nation to go in its defense, even non-NATO ones.

There's 0 chance the European Union would go to war with the United States over this. Not that I condone it, but it just won't happen. The EU can't fight Russia (why are 500 million Europeans asking 330 million Americans to defend them from 180 million Russians?) let alone the United States.

> As for the rest, I think you very much downplay the gravity of going in a trade war with the whole world at once can do to the US economy, while you massively amp up the damage simple trade between China and EU can do to EU.

Well we're not really in a "trade war with the whole world" - many tariffs haven't been implemented, some are already being suspended, exceptions are carved out, etc. I don't agree with the way we're going about things, but I think you're overstating things again. The EU isn't going to absorb the former US - China trade. That's simple a fact of reality.

I'm sad you feel the conversation got nowhere, but I suppose that happens when two people just see the world fundamentally differently. I have no interest in getting in the last word, I simply am interested in discussing and debating things and so I usually reply. I sincerely hope you have a good evening as well.

> No, no I'm really not. It's more so that you are overstating the damage. All of a sudden we are "former allies" now? That's nonsense.

It’s your president and VP saying it (and a lot of their acolytes). What do you call an "ally" who threatens to invade you? And don’t say it’s not serious. The bullshit trade wars was also something that was not serious and that he would not do, until he actually did it. A tip we learnt the hard way and that may be useful: when a wannabe dictator tells you what he wants to do, believe him.

> Depends on the specific trade issue. There's a limit to what can be ironed out, and the large bulk of the problem is that both the EU and China are rather protectionist even compared to the United States and so for either to iron out these trade issues they'll have to both open their markets.

It’s not a hypothetical. The EU in general is a trade partner of China. Both have a long history of trading with ups and downs, tensions and détentes. History is full of proofs that these issues can, in fact, be ironed out. We’ve been there before.

Similarly, there were a lot of trade skirmishes between the US and the EU (and various member-states before the EU was a thing). Again, nothing you cannot solve with diplomacy, negotiations and horse trading. What you are saying is fanciful.

> Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe so I wouldn't be so quick to assume the EU only has a trade issue with China - that's rather naive.

So is the US. I don’t think you get the full picture. As a citizen of one of your oldest ally, I have to tell you: the US are not the good guys in this. Trump is demonstrating every day that we cannot trust the US long term anymore, and that you could turn hostile very quickly. It pains me, but it is true. So you can talk all day about this and think that you are reasonable, but in fact it is completely unserious. Or indeed naïve.

> I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?"

The US have an advantage because regardless of the disagreements with France (and there were many), ultimately either side could rely on the other in the long run. Again, look at recent history. French people were at the "your countrymen are fine but your government sucks" with Russia about 10 years ago, they always have been mostly Russophile. Now, the vast majority of the population would tell you that Russians are murderous war criminals and brainwashed sycophants. What changed was that Putin got aggressive and it turned out that actually a lot of Russians supported him.

The parallel with the US right now is clear. Trump is agressive and you collectively support him. He won the election fair and square, including the popular vote.

So, give it time. 4 years of this and there will be much less sympathy for normal American people in Europe.

> For some reason people think that political grandstanding and harsh rhetoric is only an American phenomenon and that European leaders don't do the same.

Again, you don’t understand. The issue is war at our doorstep and a hostile neighbour that thinks its sphere of influence includes half the continent. It is not grandstanding, it’s about our future. Look at what most European governments are doing and you will see that they are dead serious.

> Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China. Best of luck! Let us know how that turns out for you.

You don’t have a commercial problem with China. Nothing existential, anyway. China did not prevent you from reaching a peak in manufacturing what, 2 years ago? It does not prevent you from having an overwhelming military, or a disproportionate amount of soft power. It does not prevent you from flooding the world with your services.

The trade deficit is a red herring. You do have a strategic problem with China, because they want to kick you out of their backyard, and they want their turn at being the bully in chief. We are not in the same situation.

> Again, nothing you cannot solve with diplomacy, negotiations and horse trading. What you are saying is fanciful.

Why is it that the EU and China can have a long history of trade and détente, but the United States can't or doesn't? Remind me which country brought China into the WTO? Which country negotiated opening of Chinese markets to the world? Which country provided direct military support to China against the Japanese? Your premise is faulty. The United States has a long history with China and can engage in the same diplomacy and negotiation that the EU or its member states can. We also have agency, less you forget.

And why are you suggesting that the United States cannot also solve issues with diplomacy? Certainly in my view the Trump administration is doing a bad job at it today, but so what? Things change. Maybe we have tried diplomacy and been undercut along the way? You are being overly reactionary to words and statements and espousing an ideal that this is somehow "it" or the end of everything. I mean look at where you are already - you're literally arguing that the United States is helping Russia fight a war in Europe...

Last I checked the US has and continues to provide tens of billions of dollars in direct military equipment and financial support to Ukraine, and has continued to do so since the start of the war.

Trump running his mouth hasn't changed that, and I'm not sure if you're just spouting misinformation or generally misinformed, but China isn't providing that support to Ukraine, and it is providing support, albeit covertly, to Russia. How in the world do you equivocate the actions of China and the United States here?

It's unfortunate to read comments suggesting that I "don't understand" when you're borderline parroting Russian misinformation and suggesting the US is helping Russia.

> We are not in the same situation.

Then why the complaints? The EU can increase their trade and imports with China of very valuable technology at cheaper prices and the United States as we would like can reduce that trade. Everyone is happy.

What "the same problem" EU sees? Because one huge problem EU has is America being literally hostile nation, aligning itself with Russia and capitulating to it. Oh, and threatening annexation of parts of EU.

And and hostile tariffs from USA on flimsy excuses.

I believe we were talking about trade and tariffs, so the same problem that the EU would see in this context is that Chinese manufacturing is generally better and cheaper than what western nations currently do, so the EU will have to maintain current protectionist policies or enact further trade restrictions with China or risk losing jobs to cheaper and better products from China. Germany is going to protect its auto industry, for example.

Europe specialises in high-value manufacturing - aerospace, precision tools and machinery, some pharma. China has been trying to enter those markets, but not with great success.

China is much better at components, consumer items, and mid-weight machinery.

The EU also sells a lot of food, including staples like pasta, and also niche/prestige branded foods, some with localised brand name protection. (Like balsamic vinegar from Modena.)

They're not really competing markets. The auto industry is one of the few sectors with direct competition, and the EU is working on setting minimum prices instead of tariffs.

Not great success yet. But sure, hopefully the EU and China can work out a great trade deal that works for them since they're not as you say competing markets, and everyone but America wins. That sounds great to me.

The same Americans who voted in Trump and gave Republicans in Congress a majority because of inflation? How long do you suppose it will take to build all the industries in the US to replace Chinese goods, and who is going to be performing the cheap labor making those goods after deportations kick into high gear?

America has survived stagflation before in the 70s, but there was a large political fallout.

You are making a lot of bold claims without much to back it up. As someone who reads a lot about the topic, I would characterize your assessment as far removed from mainstream opinion and rosier than the rosiest professional assessments that don't come from an acolyte of Donald Trump. In other words, a fairy tale.

If you have a specific comment or point to make I'd love to talk about it. Most mainstream opinions aren't very valuable, though certainly there are some that are better than others.

When so much is thrown at the wall at once it makes it onerous and boring to respond to every slapdash point. If they had stumbled on a truly valuable and novel perspective that convincingly goes against all prevailing knowledge, I can only imagine they would have presented it with significantly more evidence than they did in that screed. Otherwise, mildly-educated people like me discard it immediately as empty rhetoric or maybe just propaganda. Aka trolling.

I think that's rather unfair, and if you don't want to participate in a conversation you can just ignore the comment instead of accusing others of trolling. I'm not trolling, I like to discuss and debate these topics on the Internet, and if there are facts or concepts that you think should require a source in civil conversation you can ask for those. This is also a new paradigm shift in America and so most of the mainstream opinion articles you read don't have much more information than anyone else, and funny that you mention propaganda because that's exactly what you're going to find hidden away in those mainstream opinions.

If you go against established facts you have a greater burden to prove your views aren't bullshit. Yet people coming from perspectives that just happen to line up with the teachings of Donald Trump always seem to provide less information. Do you not notice this trend? If you want to convince people try being convincing.

What specific information are you asking me to provide and for what specific claims? Happy to do my best, but all you are doing is ranting about my post and that's neither interesting nor productive.

It's also just not the general lesson from history either. Plus you have to recall that in many cases war is about resource acquisition as much as anything else, and sometimes wars are popularized as ideological crusades when they are masquerading as resource disputes in order to motivate a populace.

Something that has become apparent to me is that in our years of somewhat peaceful economic growth, we seem to have forgotten that there are haves and have-nots and that the economic system that was created to hopefully replace war with peaceful competition only works so much as the large powers decide that it works well enough. Those who are have-nots tend to not have the proportional military leverage to do something about their position.

Our rejection of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism in favor of a "rules based international order" has blinded us a bit through abstraction and legalese to the reality of how the world works and the limits of resource availability given the size of the planet and the population numbers.

> As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.

I used to think this as well, but I recently re-read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address [1] and it aided me in coming to the conclusion that such a moral crusade is neither wise, nor moral, and least of all practical.

There will always be some nations that have governments, authoritarian in our eyes or otherwise, that we disagree with from a political perspective. But we simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to do something about all of them, and even as we try to do something about one or more of them we wind up with others popping up. Instead we should seek to treat fairly where possible, and treat not at all where necessary due to immoral behavior and stop trying to control the entire world. That doesn't mean we should never intervene or do anything, as in the case of Nazi Germany or perhaps other atrocities, but a national policy of extinguishing authoritarians seems to me to be one that isn't in our best interest.

[1] https://www.georgewashington.org/farewell-address.jsp

I'm not pitching this as a moral crusade, but as a practical one. Authoritarianism is a cancer that invariably spreads and disrupts the global system.

It is simply in our best interest to starve cancer whenever we find it and excise it if possible.

If the goal of buying Russian hydrocarbons was to increase the economic stability of Russia and to foster capitalistic market systems in the country to prevent the rise of authoritarianism then the second they invaded Georgia should have resulted in the cutting of those economic ties.

If the goal of opening trade up to China was to prevent a Chinese-Soviet alliance and to weaken the USSR then the second the USSR fell we should have pivoted to defeating Chinese authoritarianism instead of strengthening economic ties to them which has ultimately provided fuel for an authoritarian economic machine that has grown to surpass the capacity of the US and made the US dependent on it.

We didn't do those things and now we're facing existential economic and military threats.

Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?

It's not a very fair question to ask, I know, but I think we really need to make sure we are honest about what we're asking people to do.

Cutting economic ties in these specific cases isn't enough to actually stop the bloodshed and bring about stability.

There are practical limits to our willpower and resources and we can't just stamp out every dictatorship in the world, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? I fully support our actions in Ukraine, by the way, and in terms of picking fights that's probably one of our better ones to help stop authoritarianism.

> Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?

Not necessarily, as I’m not directly threatened, but I’m more than happy to carve out a piece of my paycheck to give Ukrainians any and every piece of equipment they need to do it for me.

Ok but that's not enough to fight all of these authoritarian regimes that spring up. We don't have enough people, resources, or willpower to defeat all authoritarian regimes militarily forever. We have to be prudent, and sometimes we just have to live with such regimes.

We have typically lived with regimes until they invade elsewhere. It seems like a reasonable middle ground.

The idea that China only makes "cheap, disposable junk" and this faux-tough guy "we gotta man up and suffer through" pose is a big part of the problem.

Yeah but the Christmas toys mentioned above are cheap disposable junk.

You're an intelligent well educated person so I wonder why you insist on poisoning the well with shallow tropes that you know to be false.

At this point I wonder if it's some sort of engagement farming thing. Surely someone who posts the same stupid stuff every time and gets yelled at it has a reason for doing it? Right?

Despite the ongoing problem of LLMs passing as human (and before that, https://xkcd.com/1019/ etc.), it is entirely possible they're 100% sincere.

First, remember that a lot of people voted for Trump despite all thay he said in the election and all that he did last time around. What he says must resonate with a lot of people, or that would not have happened.

Second, anecdotally, there's someone I used to know back in the UK who was absolutely convinced that Brexit would be a success, to the extent that at one point me simply saying "no" to some claim he made resulted in him shouting "that proves we should do it!" (or similar, it's hard to quote exactly from memory, especially 9 years later). Cambridge graduate, did the maths olympiad in their youth, still acted that way.

And third, it's very easy to get anchored on something that was once true, and not update as the world moves on. When I was a kid, "made in China" or "made in Taiwan" was not a sign of quality, but "made in Japan" was; but one of the films of my youth was Back To The Future, and one if the few things you can allow even fiction to inform you of are cultural beliefs, like 1955 Doc Brown being written to expect "made in Japan" to justify component failure.

Oh I hope he hasn't voted, because he told me before that he thinks he shouldn't be doing so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710224

Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk. And our inability to make those advanced electronics is a specific problem I called out.

With respect to the “man up” piece of it - well if you can’t go without TikTok and Temu junk you have a big problem.

Both items: inability to manufacture advanced electronics, and inability to not go without cheap junk are separate but related problems.

While I think the Trump admin is weak and will capitulate on tariffs, and that’s aside from the asinine way in which we are treating our allies with respect to the same, him and others are very much right to point out the underlying concern. Tariffs can help to address those concerns, but they are just one tool amongst many.

>Well yes, as I mentioned in my post China does make more than cheap junk.

And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.

>While I think the Trump admin is weak

Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong" it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.

> And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.

Sure people can be worried. In fact, it's America's great national pastime. But I don't think I made the claim that the Trump administration is going about the decoupling with China in the best possible way, only that the goal is one that's worthwhile precisely because the pain you are describing.

No longer importing plastic junk, again this is separate from manufacturing advanced electronics which are also an important concern, and the effects of which are so devastating that we will trigger as you put it a recession, mass economic hardship, and will cost many people their jobs and savings, seems to place our country in an intolerable situation and a reliance on such imports, which if you read the news from the Right People, China seems to experience no economic hardship from such a decoupling meaning we are simply at the mercy of their benevolence. That's a scary thought, and it seems to me we're just going to experience this pain either way, we may as well do it on our terms, generally speaking.

With respect to TikTok you can just delete it. There's no pain experienced there. I'm close-minded on that specific issue. Social media in general is bad anyway, TikTok is just currently the worst and one we can most easily ban today.

The inability to manufacture advanced electronics at scale in the United States is a self-evident problem. I personally don't care about the arguments suggesting why such things can't be built here, because those just further illustrate the problem.

> Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong"

Well I don't really care much about this tough guy stuff you are talking about, but as an aside it is rather important politically, especially when we're dealing with a despotic regime in China that must save face, both culturally and by virtue of dictatorship. I mostly just care about policy and the results of the policy.

When I say Trump is weak, I don't mean he is weak in the sense of being a macho guy - frankly there's nothing less I care about in the world aside from TikTok videos - what I mean is he doesn't have the stomach to go through with the plan because of the potential economic repercussions in the short and medium term. In fact, his inability to be stalwart on this issue is precisely the greatest problem now in our foreign policy agenda (or what remains of it) because now all we've done is screwed a bunch of things up and pissed off the allies we need to actually achieve the goal. The worst of all worlds, so to speak.

> it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.

The endeavor has merits and likely those are well worth pursuing. I wouldn't disagree that the way in which we are going about things is not the best way, and I think I mentioned that before. I preferred the Biden administration's approach in general, though I don't think they acted with enough urgency.

Note that China takes measures to suppress domestic consumption for strategic reasons.

The best way to avoid this kind of behavior is to avoid shopping at stores where you can’t trace the origin of their products.

Stop buying “brands”, and looking for “deals” and acting like a consumer. Do research and find high quality products, pay more for those products, buy less disposable junk. This isn’t just a “China” thing it’s in general.

This is actually the exact reason for the existence of brands. You absolutely should buy brands, and stop buying random "RANDOMCAPITALLETTERS Product 1"

But yeah, what people think of as good, high-quality brands often are not.

It's a little difficult for me to make the point I want to make here because I don't disagree with you, but the usage of the word "brand" is not as descriptive as I'd like it to be.

If you're buying good copper cookware the manufacturer "brand" matters, they build a reputation for having quality products, ideally continue to make those quality products at a fair price, etc. and life is good.

But then there are brands and unfortunately when we use the term brand we wind up lumping together "high quality brands" with "cheap, useless dog shit products" and it can be difficult to differentiate. At least for me and my limited vocabulary.

I get it - there are brands that are well-known for being brands (i.e. famous for being famous) and there are brands that are well-known for making legitimately good products.

Avoid the former like the plague, but the latter is one of the best methods to find legitimately great stuff.

Except there is an entire business strategy that has been consistently deployed in extracting that brand value by making the product shittier and just waiting for sales to slow as people figure it out.

Craftsman for example.

Absolutely. I actually keep and maintain extensive lists of businesses that produce "real stuff" that we only buy from for those item categories.

Do you publish these anywhere? Very into good products and as you know they’re hard to find haha

I haven't yet - I want to but honestly just haven't had any good ideas on how to do so. I could just create a website and maintain it for other people I guess?

If you have any recommendations or ideas I'd be happy to collaborate! Doesn't need to be something that makes money, though hopefully something that doesn't cost money either! Lol

I buy cheap things at Harbor Freight now instead of on Amazon because at least then I know I can return it if it breaks.

I find Amazon has the better return policy. HF has at times zero flexibility and I find I really have to pay attention to each item’s policy and weight the risk of failure (eg. A $5 hammer is low risk, $400 machine is too high risk). It’s not worth the mental math required while shopping. I only buy consumables there (HF) now, gloves, ropes, tarps, etc. Nothing with moving part, especially a motor. I’ve been left holding the bag on $400 items I I couldn’t even assemble because the bolt holes were out of alignment (obvious manufacturing defect) and they’ve refused to allow the return or force a boxing fee on me.

This seems like the exact situation a credit card chargeback is designed to fix.

I think HF technically tells you no refunds or that there's a restocking fee policy when you buy it so I don't think it would work. As a consumer, I'm used to companies like that making an exception when something goes overly wrong like what happened to me. It's not like I used it and it failed, I couldn't even assemble it. I spoke to the manager and he insisted he didn't even have the authority to wave the fees. It would require some regional VP or greater and I'd have to wait for him to return a message, and he hinted that he never approves it and it would all be a waste of time. I just gave up as I was in the middle of my project and just needed to get back to it. I stopped shopping here after that though.

Can a business just say “no refunds, even if the device is completely non-functional.”

At least (maybe it varies state by state) Massachusetts has an “implied warranty of merchantability,” the thing has to basically work at least for a little bit.

I mean, if the bolt-holes don’t line up, they didn’t just sell you a bad <thing>, they sold you a random sheet of metal that is not <thing>.

This is kind of the argument I made to the manager in a Karenesque fashion. Why would I have even bought it if I knew it was defective? How would I have known without opening the box? Etc. I live in a state that is politically conservative and probably least likely to have similar protections but also ultimately I wasn’t going to have a legal battle over it. They lost me as a customer, well not even entirely, just for tools and bigger ticket stuff. I go through work gloves too quickly and they have them a third of the prices at Home Depot so I go for that

Well, I can certainly appreciate not wanting to deal with the headache.

But, I wouldn’t characterize it as “karenesque” to expect your tools to do what they say on the box.

lol. My delivery and general temperament was the karenesque part, I was basically yelling at the guy in the store. I was in the right though so that’s what triggered it.

No, the best way to avoid this kind of behavior is to refrain from incentivizing it with misguided, poorly-thought-out, and anticapitalistic trade policy.

Smuggling is the world's second-oldest profession. Trade finds a way.

> And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company.

The entire discussion there could be summed up as people have become convinced that Apple the multi-billion dollar company should shift revenue to Facebook or Netflix (or whoever), the other multi-billion dollar company. Fantastic marketing by them to convince people this is a moral thing to do and must be done. It has nothing to do with small developers or better experiences for customers, just an increase in X for Netflix.

IQ isn't much of a proxy for anything, especially in this context.

It's especially related in this context, which is engineering success. IQ is directly related to academic achievement in STEM, which is directly related to engineering career success.

Well we're not talking about career success, we were talking about comparisons of nation states. Having an IQ advantage there might prove marginally more helpful, but it's not really that important. I'd argue physical size and strength of a people are even more important than IQ when we're looking at across the board averages. Plus you have things like, idk, access to raw materials, geographic advantages, cultural advantages or disadvantages, systemic advantages or disadvantages including strong or weak institutions, training programs, etc. In fact, if you wanted to do a comparison between America and China you'd really have a lot better things to look at to show China as better than IQ.

With respect to "career success" you can have 50 million people in your country with IQs >140 and there's still a limited market to sell to. There are diminishing returns on capacity - you can have business analysts or call center folks with the IQ of Einstein and they'll be limited by the systems they are placed in.

The other side of this is that just because you are smart doesn't mean you are capable of doing well in the real world. Recall how there are a lot of "dumb rich people" and "smart poor people".

China has a millenia-long history of organizing a very large amount of people fairly well. They basically invented bureaucracy. Not everything is better in China of course, but don't forget about that aspect.

Yep, the Chinese basically invented the State and bureaucracy as we know it. In fact it was so good (despite its faults) that when China was invaded by outside forces and occupied, those forces themselves adopted the Chinese state to administer their new holdings.

I'm not being critical of China here though, I'm just being critical of the original discussion point. Quantity has a quality of its own, but it has trade-offs.

Performance IQ and verbal IQ create the compound IQ figure.

China has the whole world to sell to, and the US has decided to make selling to the world less viable. China is better positioned to weather this kind of thing than the US.

Nobody else is engaging in the punitive tariff rates the US is imposing, so the rest of the world is economically more attractive than the US on the score. I don't see how China will be more hurt by this than the US.

Everyone will be hurt, of course, which is one of the reasons why the US starting this trade war is insanity.

> that doesn't mean other countries weren't engaging in unfair or protectionist trade policies either

True, although Trump massively overstates how much of this is actually happening. However, there are numerous ways to address this that don't involve self-harm. We're just choosing not to do them.

Also, the US engages in these practices as much as everyone else. There's more than a whiff of the pot calling the kettle black here.

> Also, the US engages in these practices as much as everyone else.

I don't know that this is factually true. I suspect it is. I also want to make it very clear that I'm not defending Donald Trump nor am I suggesting that the way he's going about things is the only or even an optimal way.

With those disclaimers aside:

> Nobody else is engaging in the punitive tariff rates the US is imposing, so the rest of the world is economically more attractive than the US on the score. I don't see how China will be more hurt by this than the US.

When you say nobody else is engaging in punitive tariff rates, well we just got started I think last week right? We're only seeing effects in the stock market today (and of course suppliers and importers are in nightmare mode as well). I've already linked an article discussing the EU telling China to turn shipments around or face tariffs. There's 0 chance that this doesn't continue to cause reactions.

I'm also not sure what the rest of the world being "more attractive on that score" means. Sure, prices may rise for American citizens on imported products, but if you postulate that Americans are the ones who "pay the tariff" as so many say then what's exactly the problem for exporters? Of course when we look at reality they will have to reduce their own costs to make their products more competitive to the US market to account for tariffs, or sell fewer products. But in this scenario the United States is still are far more attractive market to sell to than many other countries.

Only 3% of Chinas GDP is exports to the US. I don’t think they’re going to hurt anywhere near as much

https://www.ig.com/en/news-and-trade-ideas/US-China-trade-wa...

You're not accounting for countries in which China has set up manufacturing facilities to avoid US tariffs (Vietnam, Mexico, etc.), so the overall figure is higher, albeit indirectly.

The other problem is that you're not considering the full scope of impact at the nation state level.

It might be "3% of China's GDP", but when you look at dollar figures the US is buying almost $500 billion of Chinese goods, while China is buying around $150 billion. If the US stops importing Chinese goods (as an example), that's $500 billion worth of trade that's good for China that is destroyed, whereas if China cuts off the United States, the US is only losing $150 billion.

If you want to minimize the situation by suggesting it's no big deal for China to stop exporting to the United States because it's only 3% of China's GDP, you'd have to make the same argument that it's even less of a big deal for the United States to lose its $150 billion in exports to China.

Of course the situation isn't that simple, and you know that.

US has ~300B trade deficit with PRC.

Flip side is US MNCs pulls about ~300B in revenue in PRC that's not counted in trade balance accounting (because western products made in PRC factories sold to PRC consumers isn't cross borders transaction unless profit timely repatrioted, which is rarely) - most of the KFCs and Nikes and Apples can be replaced with domestic.

Whereas there aren't much PRC MNCs in US, and what few there are getting lawfared/stomped out of US, i.e. TikTok divestment and de minimis going to kill Shein/Temu.

Dependin on how / where things escalate, lots of US MNCs may lose their 10-40% revenue from PRC. There's also next rung of stupid, i.e. TikTok US getting nationalized, CFIUS forcing PRC divestments in agri, media, blah blah. Or US seize PRC assets, fucking with SWIFT, in which case trillions of US capex in PRC and not repatriated MNC profits goes up in smoke. Then we're stepping stones away from Tesla / Apple getting nationalized. Then who knows.

> Then we're stepping stones away from Tesla / Apple getting nationalized. Then who knows.

Neither company can be "nationalized" because they're American companies. Apple contracts with Chinese suppliers to build their products. Chinese companies already owns the factories. Tesla has their own factories( or factory?) in China but if China "nationalizes" it, that just amounts to Chinese workers in the Chinese Tesla factory losing their jobs and of course Tesla no longer selling their cars in the Chinese market.

> most of the KFCs and Nikes and Apples can be replaced with domestic.

Why would they replace with domestic companies? Isn't that unfair for trade? Wouldn't European or Latin American companies enter the market with their products now or be better able to freely compete in the Chinese market? Or is there something missing here?

> US has ~300B trade deficit with PRC.

What's this number based on? I see a lot of figures floating out there, but similarly to your comment about the flip-side of US companies operating in China like Kentucky Fried Chicken not being accounted for here, you're not accounting for Chinese suppliers and manufacturers set up in other countries to bypass tariffs. Unfortunately it seems everyone (not throwing shade your way here) has their own number to fit their narrative and it's hard to get the full impact.

> TikTok US getting nationalized

Preferably it should be banned (the fewer social media companies and apps that exist the better), but it would be better if it was forced to be sold to a US company, which is a far more likely scenario then nationalization.

>Neither company can be "nationalized

In response to shenanigans like TikTok US branch being nationalized, or CFIUS mass reversing PRC MNC portfolios, i.e. shares/purchases of US assets. They can be functionally "nationalized" in retaliation as in just have whatever is in country siezed, as in their presence in PRC. It means WFOE like Tesla losing their factory, whose workers will make domestic cars. Apple losing some R&D centres, all the capex infra build for foxconn can be messed with. Continue hampering capex/engineer export to India or whereever Apple wants to setup their none PRC operation to make process as painful as possible... or simply just kill Apple hardware 90% dead like US tried with Huawei/ZTE.

> replace with domestic companies

Because it's been ~30 years, foreign MNCs who wanted to be in PRC are in PRC. In the short term domestic companies better positioned to soak up domestic demand, which has been independant trend in past few years.

> this number based on

Some PRC finance portal reposted #s from Hurun Research report on US enterpises in PRC last year. There was IIRC Macquarie report a few years ago that tallied 3T in revenue in past 15-20 years or something that comports. Like US is fully of Chinese goods, and PRC is full of US brands, and in both cases US captures most of the value, or at least PRC captures very relatively little merely being margin producer.

> it's hard to get the full impact

Yeah, I'm just pointing out as you did, the situation isn't simple, not because PRC may have 300B more to lose, but potential of US loss maybe closer, not farther accounting diversion, mnc profits... services, ip/patent/licensing fees. I'm highlighting trade diversion/circumvension is not likely going to be on the scale of 100s of billions of US MNC revenue. Hence relative loss likely not as lopsided.

> likely

Full sale was never likely. Some sort of 51%+ US JV (which afaik US investors already owns majority) maybe. But tarrifs obviously blew everything up. So now it's wierd scenario where Trump seems loath to ban, as in very much want US to own so nationalization of US operations doesn't seem unfathomable.

> Full sale was never likely. Some sort of 51%+ US JV (which afaik US investors already owns majority) maybe. But tarrifs obviously blew everything up. So now it's wierd scenario where Trump seems loath to ban, as in very much want US to own so nationalization of US operations doesn't seem unfathomable.

Trump was very popular on TikTok which is why he's in favor of keeping it or making it a US company so he can sell it to one of his sycophants. But it will be fully sold to a US company or banned. I don't think a JV is on the table.

> In response to shenanigans like TikTok US branch being nationalized, or CFIUS mass reversing PRC MNC portfolios, i.e. shares/purchases of US assets. They can be functionally "nationalized" in retaliation as in just have whatever is in country siezed, as in their presence in PRC. It means WFOE like Tesla losing their factory, whose workers will make domestic cars. Apple losing some R&D centres, all the capex infra build for foxconn can be messed with. Continue hampering capex/engineer export to India or whereever Apple wants to setup their none PRC operation to make process as painful as possible... or simply just kill Apple hardware 90% dead like US tried with Huawei/ZTE.

Right but those activities harm China too. If China isn't building iPhones in China because China nationalized those specific assets then Chinese workers sort of lose too. Similarly with the Tesla factory - if they keep it running they have to spend money to retool it to make BYD cars, then they have to sell those cars to someone - perhaps domestic consumers, but there's a lot of analysis that would be needed to be done to understand the exact effects.

I mostly took issue with your statement that Apple and Tesla would be nationalized, but I think you just meant to say their assets would be nationalized in China which is certainly an option that China has on the table.

But like all things there are actions the US can take that China would be very unhappy about, like, perhaps the US decides to build a military base in Taiwan. Now what? I'm not suggesting that's a good idea or on the table, but just saying both countries can get creative.

> Because it's been ~30 years, foreign MNCs who wanted to be in PRC are in PRC. In the short term domestic companies better positioned to soak up domestic demand, which has been independant trend in past few years.

Sure but now with US ventures like KFC probably being forced to shut down there should be room for European companies or companies from other countries to move in to China, which China will be just fine with right? I'm imagining since tariffs will be higher for Mercedes in the US they'll have to ship those cars to other countries and who better than China?

I think JV was on the table, pre tariff. Already talking about "licensing" tiktok algo, i.e. concession to PRC export controlling algo which made full sale non starter. So it's either ban, or majority US JV, or some other politics to get TikTok US under US control... because as you mentioned Trump seems very intent on keeping TikTok.

> both countries can get creative.

I did preface "next rung of stupid", as in stupid / creative rungs of trade war escalation ladder. We're already at 100%+ tariffs, I think it's fair to conclude we're entering unseen/stupid/creative territory, hence highlighting increasingly wild options, because at some point the just adding to tariff %s become farcical and need to move onto other intruments. I think we're in the... almost anything short of kinectic war can happen realm.

> China will be just fine with right

Yes, I think China would actually be fine with substituting imports from EU for US if only to more balance trade with EU and further peel them from US. Under more predictable (slow) transition this would/could happen. But TBH I don't think PRC/EU relations good enough even with Trump/EU breakup. I think we're in very accelerationist trade war scenario and most likely patriotic buying (which is already growing trend in last few years) is going to do a lot of the capturing. Chinese domestic brand influence are growing, Chinese increasingly fine with consuming higher value Chinese brands.

Yeah some PRC producers heavily dependant on US is going to get burned. But shave off maximalist 3% and most Chinese will just have to face the bleek reality of... living QoL of summer 2024, which TBH weren't great time for economy due to RE unwinding, but prices were under control and borderline deflationary. Whereas Americans are going to face some of the steepest CoL increases in their lifetimes. E: PRC grew enough and diversified trade enough that even relatively total trade disruption US simply can't fuck PRC hard enough for most people to live worse than they were 5 years ago, vibes will definitely feel bad because... well the world is exploding, but very few in PRC is going to long for lifestyle 20 years ago where per capita income was 1/6th and everything including the air was shitty.

It's interesting to me how it's no big deal for China to stop selling all these products, implying that they don't send much to the US or they aren't exposed that much to trade pressure, but simultaneously Americans are supposed to somehow experience a devastating cost increase.

But if the amount of products China sells to the US aren't a big deal/don't amount to much, or whatever, Americans won't see much in the way of large price increases either.

The more likely scenario is Americans are going to see higher prices, but China is going to be very much feeling the effects of these tariffs.

We've already seen this manifest in the creation and subsidization of companies like Temu which are making the cheapest products possible without regard to environmental factors or product quality (i.e. your t-shirt disintegrates after you wash it once) to keep the manufacturing lights on and keep Chinese people employed.

It's not big deal for MOST Chinese, who are used to consuming cheap Chinese goods and will continue to. It's a big deal for MOST Americans, who are used to consuming cheap Chinese goods but will not continue to. It's also a big deal for some Chinese producers that depend on US which is minority, because US though largest, is not significant share of PRC exports, and US producers who depend on PRC. The former I've acknowledged.

I don't think Americans will see large price increases, as in nothing most households can't absorb / pile on their credit... but US is debt society, so many will drown. The pain is not the same as PRC dipping more into savings if they deal with price increase.

So no, IMO the most likely scenario is many americans are going to feel the tariffs, some will drown, some PRC producers that depend on US and american producers (that depends on PRC inputs) are going to drown. But your average Chinese will tighten belt like then did in 2024, because vibe sucks, not because they're losing purchasing power or going bankrupt, since PRC has high savings society.

> seen this manifest

Again, wipe 3% off PRC GDP (i.e. near total cessation of US trade) and they're back to 9 months ago. They'll broadly feel what they feel then. Some will feel it worse, because they're specifically exposed to US trade. But most will not. The average American will feel the trade war more than the average Chinese, because the average Chinese will continue to get cheap Chinese goods. The psychology is going to hit different on society level and influence accordingly.

Currently, China is giving the US real physical goods in exchange for paper IOUs denominated in USD which China then mostly just holds on to. If the US stops this trade, China can insulate its economy by continuing to manufacture the same products and either use them domestically or dump them in a hole in the ground if necessary.

This whole tariff narrative is based on upside down thinking where obtaining material goods somehow constitutes a liability. Are we really that far detached from reality that these memes have legs? I guess so!

Yearning to go back to some idyllic past when there was more scarcity is not going to save us, rather it's just going to destroy our own country. The only way forward is positive government action to mitigate the corrosive economic effects of abundance, especially the fast-forwarded abundance from having the world reserve currency.

The government has been dropping the ball on doing anything to meaningfully address this for the past several decades - instead being beholden to the disingenuous calls for "fiscal responsibility" of "fiscal conservatism", which have resulted in anything but responsible or conservative behavior. Rather the same new money has all still been created - it has just been handed to banks to create asset bubbles rather than being used purposefully to mitigate the economic damage.

Appreciate the different perspective. Curious what would be the end goal of imposing this tariff? Or what the president is trying to get out of it?

In my mind there are two scenarios:

1. He's literally just a moron and is fixated on tariffs. Many think that's most likely but something tells me it's not the whole story.

2. They see a war with China coming in the next few years and they need to decouple as quickly as possible and make sure the US is not reliant on China or Chinese manufactured products, while also potentially harming Chinese trade. Something to ask here is, if we thought we were going to war with China over Taiwan in the next few years what actions would we take now to better positions ourselves for that coming war? Making our allies angry doesn't seem to be helping, but were EU members really going to send troops to the Pacific to defend Taiwan anyway? Certainly not when they have Russia at their doorstep.

Agree with the decoupling, but based on what happened during his last term, tariff doesn’t seem to work for decoupling right?

As you said, China just shifted their manufacturing to southeast asia and many of them are still backed by Chinese money. Also the made in US thing didn’t really happen either.

In the latter case the US just enacted high tariffs on those countries as well. Regarding made in US, well, Apple products for example were exempted from the tariffs. This time they aren't.

If we wanted to decouple from China due to fears of war, shouldn't we be keeping tariffs on EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Korea very low? We'd want them to stay closely aligned with us as allies, not push them to build stronger connections to China as a more friendly trading partner than we are.

Mostly yea, but I think if you say to yourself the US needs manufacturing capacity no matter who it comes from those tariffs make a little more sense. Also they would levy that China has set up manufacturing facilities in countries like Canada for example to bypass tariffs.

I'm not saying I agree with this, just trying to think through what they may be thinking for fun internet discussions. Personally I love our allies and I think they make us way stronger and we should work together with them to address concerns.

Here comes the 90 days pause except China :)

Also the Ukraine is showing how much drone warfare is dependent on Chinese manufacturing: motors, PCBs, batteries, fibre optic cable yadda yadda yadda.

I wonder if the end goal of wanting onshore manufacturing is to be able to defend or attack using cheap modern electronics.

Article on Chinese drone manufacturing vis military use:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/26/1094249/china-co...

Money! He wants money!

These tariffs are a wonderfully regressive tax that will hurt the poor and middle class. The beneficiaries are his constituencies, the rich and privileged.

Well US started this, so it is fair to be anti-American (someone voted an idiot into the office) for breaking the world economy.

First being pro-Russian and making demands to Ukraine and now those tariffs.

Trump keeps on giving.

> Japanese companies prefer to buy from other Japanese companies.

> Mexico is equally nationalistic about Oil

Kind of interesting given the broader context isn’t it?

I think here in Ohio Honda and LG are working on a joint battery facility too.

Yep.

You need both the carrot (Biden era IRA/Green New Deal policies) and the stick (Trump Tariffs) to force a reorienting.

If these kinds of auto tariffs didn't occur, then there would have been greater parts co-mingling to maximize the benefit of the IRA tax credits - great for companies, but a slap in the face for IRA policies to bring domestic manufacturing back.

That said, we need to level set and recognize that most manufacturing that hasn't yet returned (or isn't already in the process of returning) to the US will not return to the US.

The tariffs are basically a de facto economic blockade against China and China-adjacent transshipment countries (Vietnam, Thailand), as China now has an overall tariff rate of 65% and Vietnam and Thailand are in the 45-50% range now, while other Asian economies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India remain at the 20-30% range, with significant exceptions to their top exports (Pharma, Semiconductors, Services of any kind, Auto Parts under an entirely separate tariff scheme)

That's why, despite all this, most other countries (except China) have been fairly muted in their response to the tariffs, because even with tariffs they are now cost competitive to Chinese manufacturing.

Maybe we should raise tariffs and raise taxes on the wealthy? Does it have to be framed as an either-or?

> and much of it does not have a domestic allegory

Well some would argue that's the problem. Maybe now we will? Idk.

The way its being framed in the public - and often in discussions even in this Hacker News comments section - is its an alternative to raising other taxes. Trump is selling it that way, along with simultaneous tax cuts he wants to either extend or implement, which goes to show the tariffs are not some way of addressing the national debt concerns either.

While nothing does, the actual discussion around it isn't allowing any room for non-tariff tax increases regardless.

I agree with your point about how the discussion is framed. To add to where it should be framed, in my mind, you can toss in cost cutting at the federal government in there as well.

Neither tariffs nor cost cutting, unless it targets major programs such as Social Security or Medicaid, will have an effect on the national debt or the deficit.

It’s all marketing.

Cost cutting always enters the equation, because somehow its better to eliminate benefits. Why not reform the programs? There is actually ample room for this, particularly with Social Security. Why not raise revenue via land value taxes, closing tax loopholes and other less and/or non regressive means?

The social safety net in this country is already terrible, making it more terrible by cutting the programs won't be better for anyone except a slice of the wealthy