MystikIncarnate

Let's be reasonable here.

Won't work, they yell "fake news" then bury their heads in the sand like they always do.

I don't mean to imply the US should go back to manufacturing their own goods like they had to before global trade was economical.

I hope the point I'm making is that the people like Trump, mostly aggressive capitalists, are significantly in favor of these trends, and adding tariffs to imported goods will harm the businesses that the tariff is intended to protect.

Sales will drop because most goods are simply more price elastic than that. Cost goes up, sales drop, and overall you lose profits. When costs go up, alternative products are supposed to take up the business you lost by raising prices.

Though, to be fair, that price elasticity model is broken. Most product types have been agglutinated into a couple of large companies in an oligopoly, so all brands of that kind of product raise prices to match all the other brands. With no other competition in the market, consumers have the "choice" of paying more for the same thing, or not buying it.

In any case, the entire economy has been so thoroughly fucked by corporations that is just a money printing machine for the ultra rich to get richer.

I've depressed myself now. I'm gonna go.

I'm not American, but tariffs to fix import issues is pretty stupid.

This is the capitalist dream, export all the production of the goods you use daily to third world countries, who will have shit labor practices like the US used to have when slavery was a thing (and bluntly, for quite a while afterwards), so that the boots-on-the-ground laborers that produce everything are either treated like slaves or literally are slaves, then import the raw material to be manufactured into whatever you're selling in the US, so you can slap a "made in the USA" sticker on your shit to enhance sales and charge more. Meanwhile "made in the USA" doesn't and shouldn't imply that there's no imported goods going into the manufacturing process to make that thing, just that you took raw materials (from wherever) and made this thing in the USA.

Tariffs unduly harm end consumers, pretty much everything we buy and own is, or has components that are, imported shit.

Most microchips, a large amount of the food we eat, most electronics, pretty much everything you'll find at a dollar general, etc (the list is very very long)... all imported in whole or in part.

Hell, there was a time that it was more economical to have your raw materials, even if they're mined/harvested/produced in the USA, shipped overseas for assembly by slave labor, then shipped back for sale to the US public, than to have it assembled inside the US. Much of that is still true. The US neither has the manufacturing capacity, nor the desire to build their own shit. The only time that's not the economical option is for large cost (and scale, either in size or money) items, like housing or vehicles. Assembly generally happens in the country/landmass where the vehicle will be sold and used. Even a company like Toyota, a Japanese brand, will have assembly plants in the USA for cars sold in the USA, because that's cheaper than importing hundreds of vehicles. For everything else, it's generally cheaper to assemble it outside of the country and import the final product.

You think process are high now? Wait until the tariff wars really kick off.

No company is going to accept the costs of tariffs and be okay with that eating their profits, they're passing that cost into consumers, because we're the saps that are still going to buy it.

When the tariffs come down, and they will eventually, prices will drop, but not to where they were from before the tariffs. Companies will continue to post record profits, justifying not giving raises because tariffs, and wages will remain stagnant. We'll earn less, while they rob is for more than they already do.

The worst part is that when the tariffs are lifted, we'll thank them for lowering the prices by buying more of their shit. We'll be grateful for the opportunity to pay even more into their profit margins.

Congratulations, you're experiencing late stage capitalism. The system is working as intended. You are poor, you remain poor, barely able to scratch out a living, while your owners profit more and more off of your hard work, and you get to thank them for that opportunity.

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Technically, we don't need raw sugar for our diet at all. So technically correct?

We also don't need any sugar substitutes, like HFCS, but you can find that or sugar, in the ingredients list of pretty much all processed foods.

Yay capitalism!

Fact is, HFCS is cheaper. I haven't checked the entirety of it's supply chain to figure out why, but it is cheaper.

If sugar was the same cost, they wouldn't have switched to HFCS in the first place (why mess with your successful product for no gain?). Fact of the matter is that HFCS is saving them money. It might be pennies per bottle, but when you're moving 10M bottles of soda, those pennies turn into dividends, literally.

You mean, so-called shit hole countries?

As a Canadian, I'm curious if we're considered a "shit hole country" to these fucks.

Foreign slave plantations.

.... Not that slave plantations anywhere makes it better, but the fact that it's foreign will mean that not only is the labor mainly performed by slaves, but we're also paying a premium because it's imported goods. Double jeopardy.

Yay capitalism!

I work in IT support, which is basically the next pond over from development. Because the job is so mentally intensive, if I'm working on complex tasks for more than 4-5 hours, my brain is catatonic by the time I hit the end of my shift.

Mental effort, is still effort. Most of the time you can't see that someone is mentally tired, but it is just as debilitating as being physically exhausted.

I can not do my job while mentally exhausted. One screw up from me, and I have the ability to, entirely by accident, take out an entire organizations ability to do useful work.

Some of my clients, I've seen log into the system at 8AM or earlier, and still be online after midnight. I don't understand how they're getting anything useful done by that time.

I'm not American, and I can't vote in US elections. Bernie Sanders is one of few US political figures that I respect the opinions of.

I don't know what Pelosi is smoking, but it has to be some good shit.

If I can quote the late George Carlin: "They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

I would argue that George was right and the American dream doesn't exist, and never existed. You cannot destroy that which does not exist..

I hear that. It's insidious how it whispers back at you when shit hits the fan, even if you haven't thought about it in months.