sj_zero

@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I gotta take my licks at the moment, since it looks like the US is relenting particularly with China.

  So yeah, it's a couple months of pain for a slightly better(?) tariff deal, but that's not transformative. It isn't going to work like the 1800s to actually build a whole infrastructure.

  If things were done like back then, it would hurt in the short and long term but the US would come out stronger for it. Instead it was just some volatility and some mild trade concessions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I tend to think that even if Trump came up with the best policy on planet earth, nobody on lemmy would admit it, they'd just keep calling him stupid. It seems like things are pretty tribal and so even if something does have some thought behind it, it's required to just keep on the attack so everything is evil and stupid. You can say "no, we'd be honest", but just look at the economics community here -- virtually every post is about how stupid Trump is.

  There weren't just tariffs against China, they were just particularly bad to that country because they are a major US strategic rival. Something being created in China being moved to India may not necessarily be the optimal outcome (or even something being "made in the USA" being made in India being the optimal outcome), but as I said in my long post about tariffs, there are multiple things going on with different time constants for each. Immediate consequences are going to look bad because none of the potentially good things can happen on short timespans -- as everyone else has pointed out (and as I pointed out in my post on tariffs), building a factory or moving supply to the US takes a really long time, whereas the immediate negative consequences of tariffs occur almost immediately. That doesn't mean eating short-term pain for long-term benefits is stupid, it just means the pain comes first.

  Will Trump's tariffs work -- that's what would make them smart or stupid -- so what's the answer? I don't really know. Widespread tariffs like the tariffs of abomination did work to increase the US manufacturing output in the 1800s despite introducing massive amounts of pain including being a (though certainly not the primary) likely causal element of the civil war. However, we aren't living in the same world as America was in the 1800s. England was more or less self-sufficient back in the 1700s and 1800s, the world is more globalized today, so it might not be so simple to do the same thing again.

  Is dramatic action required immediately? Yes. Full-stop.

  The US national debt is at 36.8 Trillion dollars at the moment according to US national debt clock. The interest on the national debt is already larger than the US defense budget. The idea that globalization can exist as it does in 20 years without the Americans being able to defend maritime shipping lanes with their absurd army is nearly 0. Moreover, as I mentioned, if war with China occurs and it really looks like there's a chance they try in the next little while, then all the Chinese supply chains immediately shut down.

  So the only option is to start taking major actions. Just look at the news feed, it's all filled with how we should have just kept with the status quo, but that's not wise at all. So are the tariffs a dumb idea? In the short term, definitely. Do nothing and you won't hurt anything. But if you've been living in the rust belt you know full well what we've already lost -- the post-war policies have decimated the entire region. And I'm not saying the rust belt can return, but if nobody does anything painful to try to get something somewhere to return, the post-globalization era will be much more painful than it has to be.

  One of the biggest moments of globalization failing in history was the Bronze Age Collapse, and it destroyed every ancient civilization in the fertile crescent except Egypt. In the near future of that event entirely new civilizations lived in those regions and some, such as Crete, would be lost to history entirely until a mere 100 years ago due to some exceptional archeological work. That collapse in part caused global supply chains feeding the bronze age to end, and that was a less integrated economy than today.

  It isn't just peacetime vs. wartime. It's about good times vs. hard times. The current economic consensus was built in the post-war period where the US was the only country whose manufacturing capacity hadn't been blown to smithereens over two world wars. It made sense at that time because it was a move without a downside -- utilize multilateral free trade and everyone had to buy from you anyway, and if you needed anything from your clients you could get them at low prices without any tariffs. The problem is it isn't 75 years ago anymore -- Europe has a manufacturing base of some design again (with Germany at its heart, ironically), Asia is a manufacturing superpower and not just China, and the US is still following a foreign economic policy that was designed when nobody else was making anything. The US was also funding protecting the planet's shipping lanes to make globalization practical and that worked because it was doing everything for the planet earth, but now it has as high a debt/gdp ratio as it did after the second world war, but it isn't the end of the second world war any longer.

  My country is generally fairly left, and we have some massive tariffs against the United States, including over 100% on dairy products, and 45% tariffs on aluminium and steel. All of those tariffs predate Trump's political career. It seems like high protectionist tariffs only are complained against in one direction.

  Here's my previous analysis of the tariffs: https://lemmy.world/post/28221500

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  One thing that you are absolutely mistaken about is that I don't understand how manufacturing works. I'm a pretty old guy, and I've spent my entire career in manufacturing and heavy industry. That's exactly why I think it's important to be trying to rebuild local supply chains.

  During covid, and for quite a few years after, parts that claimed to be made in America couldn't be purchased without massive lead times because it turns out that they were heavily reliant on Chinese supply chains. It doesn't matter that you have a factory that can build a vfd for example if you can't get resistors. That matters a lot.

  Now you can say that the factories don't exist, and that is absolutely true. The problem is that you need to stop thinking in terms of first order effects and start thinking about knock-on effects. This is been our problem for the past 50 years. We don't have the factories because they shut down because industrial policy was to globalize. And we thought we could get away with that, because for example we could sell our expertise to other countries. The problem is that all the people who had expertise are dying of old age. Their kids are growing up in a world where they never had to go to a factory, they don't know how to build a factory, they don't know how to build anything. This is a big problem, and it's always been a big problem. In the 1700s, Alexander Hamilton presented a report that suggested that tariffs would be useful in helping to produce big enough trade barriers to build the industry on this new continent of america, and there was a lot of trouble caused by such tariffs. At the time the global manufacturing hub was not China but england. England was able to produce materials cheaper and better then the Americans could. The tariffs were effectively keeping out higher quality, lower cost goods. Regardless, this was how the United States ended up with its industrial base that was hollowed out centuries later.

  I'm not pretending that tariffs aren't going to cause pain. They caused tremendous pain back in the 1700s and 1800s, and in fact we're likely part of the kindling that helped spark the civil War. Extremely high tariffs with England resulted in England putting retaliatory tariffs on American cotton and other agricultural exports, and so the South tended to suffer while the north benefited. Eventually things came to a head and they ended up needing to come to a compromise of higher tariffs then you might expect, but much lower than what the north was originally implementing. All that being said however, this is long-term thinking. It's what long-term thinking looks like. It's not looking around and saying that factories don't exist today, it's asking how we can make sure that there are factories tomorrow. It isn't talking about how we are relatively peaceful with China today, it's about asking what could happen if we ended up in a war with China tomorrow. This sort of long-term thinking is actually what the West in general needs.

  And I think it's important to note, I'm not saying this from the perspective of an American who's going to benefit from these tariffs. I'm saying it from the perspective of a citizen of a country who has been hit hard by US tariffs. It would be better for me if everything was tariffed at zero percent. On the other hand, just because something hurts me doesn't mean I don't understand why it's important.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people didn't see it during covid, but even a lot of stuff that was "made in America" basically became unobtainable for a long time afterwards, particularly on the industrial front. If the precursors of most things they do make come from China, then it doesn't matter what America or the west in general makes because for example it becomes difficult to get electronics components like resistors, but also they've basically become the place to go to get molds for plastic manufacturing.

  The trade war is just a taste of what that would be like, and adafruit is just one of the casualties.

  The fact that it's going to be hard to make a change I think doesn't justify doing nothing. You have to at least try, because maybe you fail but maybe the next administration besides that that wasn't such a bad idea after all and keeps some of those policies in place, the same way that the Biden administration had kept tariffs against China in place.

  It's a two-way street here, yes to an extent there is additional risk from building factories in a country where tariffs are rising, but on the other hand if you are not building your things in America then there's a chance that you end up getting priced out of the market. I've already written more than most people on the tariffs, but protectionist tariff policy goes all the way back to Alexander Hamilton in the 1700s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I know you're just being snarky, but if a company's main purpose is importing parts from China then they suffer as a result of tariffs on China, than it is in fact working as intended.

  Millions of Americans in the entire swaths of the country had to watch their homes die as businesses were outsourced. What's left is crime, drugs, and suicide. Like a lot of things, the people on the ground were just told to suck it up and deal with the new normal.

  Besides, with China increasingly saber rattling, what happens if they try to take Taiwan, or end up in full scale conflict with India? COVID was a taste of a future that could be upcoming.

  It is true that tariffs are paid for by American companies and by American consumers, but it is also true that if it is American companies and American consumers who end up buying the stuff from China and justifying the movement of industries from developed countries to countries like China. People don't talk a whole lot about it, but there were a number of policy changes that were made around the 1970s which were instrumental in hollowing out the rust belt over the past 50 years.

  Countries particularly like China can impose their own tariffs, but the reality is that prior to the economic changes in the world wars that made globalization and free trade a good idea, America was its own biggest market. Henry Ford famously increased the pay of his workers and one of the benefits of that was that they could afford the cars that they were building.

  Another thing is that tariffs alone don't rebuild industry, but unlike the previous changes they don't hurt. If they're going to stick around in the long term which unfortunately remains to be seen since American democracy happens in four your increments, then companies that were going to invest in China suddenly have a large incentive to invest in America for American markets.

  It is true that reducing us trade can affect soft power, but I think that there's a counterpoint that letting things continue as they are will also reduce soft power because racking up debt to buy Chinese goods isn't sustainable in the long term or even the medium term. Moreover, if the United States can't manufacture anything to defend itself, and that conflict with China happens, it look a lot like Europe and it's struggle against Russia.

  It could also be the case that this isn't being rolled out in a very nuanced and structured way, and I think that there is legitimacy to that, but as I mentioned before United States politics happens in 4-year increments, and so you have to go hard early.

  Oh, sorry, it's Lemmy. "Look at how stupid and bad Cheetos Hitler is!"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are AAA Games too bloated?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They might be, but most AAA games for many years just haven't been worth playing at all, much less forever.

  Like 95% of my gaming is pre-pandemic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-H legacy tracking⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh died on nostr. Basically gone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harassed by Assassin’s Creed gamers, a professor fought back with kindness⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  "we based this off of actual historical Japanese battles"

  "So here's a giant enemy crab, you flip it over and attack it's weak spot for massive damage"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I started on Plex and even considered a lifetime Plex pass, but I felt like it was more interested in showing their content than my content. It was a lot of effort just to show music and movies.

  My family and I use jellyfin every day now, and a key thing is it starts off boring but it shows your music, your movies, your books, your photos.

  For folks who migrate who were paying, consider a donation to projects you make heavy use of. They don't usually have big companies behind them and can use the help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Except that that solar farm doesn't produce energy at night, so you'd need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you're looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you'd need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.

  Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required -- for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.

  Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It's fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things -- like ethanol fuels.

  That's where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don't need to be oversized and don't need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren't available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn't enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they're probably just shouldn't be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ❤️

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carney wins Canadian election, while Conservative leader loses his seat in Parliament⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In this election, leftists put a hedge fund manager/banker in charge of the country.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shein Hikes Prices by Up to 377% Thanks to Trump’s Tariffs War⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People really need to think for themselves like this.

  We don't need cheap crappy disposable clothing, I don't care what Trump says in this regard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord CEO steps down, replaced with former Activision Blizzard CSO as they work towards being a public company⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Discord is like the dread pirate Roberts combined with a used car salesman. "I'll probably kill you tomorrow, you should buy nitro"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for ... inventory management, I guess?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think Apache has an enterprise resource planning software, but it's exactly as complex as you'd expect enterprise erp

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unaware Atelier Meister • Kanchigai no Atelier Meister: Eiyuu Party no Moto Zatsuyougakari ga, Jitsu wa Sentou Igai ga SSS Rank Datta to Iu Yoku Aru Hanashi - Episode 5 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is isekai trash even if it isn't isekai and I love it because fuck you that's why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whats Something you Can find on Lemmy but not on Reddit ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Instances power mods can't touch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The important thing is that it shows that canonically the holodeck is for porn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there a cold there were two Vulcans on that ship, and I think they both had to do it at least once, but according to dialog from memory alpha, it sounds like it's pretty common:

  "I am a married man." "It's the holodeck, Tuvok. It doesn't count." "Is that what you tell your wife?" "No, of course not. My days of rescuing slave girls from Planet Ten are history. Look, you have photographs of your wife, right? The computer can use them to create a replica. You wouldn't be breaking your vows if it's a hologram of your wife."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait a sec, tuvok literally used it to pon far. So even more canon, on screen canon!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not just Barclay either. Remember laforge? He was basically married to his warp drive waifu and then she showed up and it's like "oh shit uh awkward I've boned you in every hole"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That's just canonical at this point. 👉 👌

  Otherwise why can you create holograms of your coworkers to bang and apparently that's not against the rules or the programming of the holodeck?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Especially time cops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You kind have to admit that Star Trek isn't much of a post-scarcity socialist utopia.

  For one thing, it's viciously elitist and hierarchical. You'd think a "post-scarcity socialist utopia" would have ways that a decorated captain would be able to get their hands on a ship in a pinch, but every Star Trek captain has had to steal a ship at some point because turns out there aren't a lot of them and they don't hand them out very easily.

  Now you might say "Yeah but they can't just give out prime war assets to whoever asks for them!" -- at one point the ship they steal is an Enterprise that's being decommissioned -- you can't even use their junk without permission! Then ended up sending half the fleet after a piece of junk they were in the process of throwing out!

  "We're delivering food and medical supplies to the colonies!" why? Why is that a thing you need to deliver? I thought this was post scarcity?

  For another thing, Seems to me like there's plenty of racism in the star trek world. I mean, you don't want to be a borg, and God forbid you're one of soong's androids, you'll be on trial because they want to dissect your brain.

  God help you if your ancestors were genetically modified, that's a jailin'.

  Wanna live on the wrong planet? That's a jailin'.

  Wanna stop a pre-warp civilization from being destroyed? that's a jailin'.

  Wanna be a pre-warp indigenous civilization and not be destroyed if the Federation wants your planet? that's a jailin'.

  Wanna get trained at star fleet academy without being part of the top 0.1%? You know that's a jailin'.

  wanna be a hologram and get too uppity? That's a deletin'.

  Wanna be a combination of two of the captains pet crew members and you don't want to be separated again? That's a murderin'.

  Wanna be inconvenient to the fleet? That's a section 31...in'.

  Some utopia. Some socialist utopia.

  But look on the bright side! If the shiny headed captain wants to bang your mom, maybe you'll get made a member of the bridge crew anyway! Hope you have a hot mom!

  But uh oh! Sorry Wesley, you got kicked out of the academy, you have to go off with space pedo now or no space for you! Maybe if your mom was seven of nine instead? "Your mom is seven? Never mind then, no space pedos for you because I want to get in that skintight catsuit!"

  It's actually a technocratic aristocracy where we get to see the aristocratic few and only occasionally see the earth tone bedecked underclass in establishing shots.

  Oh, we do get to see a space autist in Barclay -- oh, and he's mocked and ridiculed and belittled, and they're looking for any chance to get rid of him. Utopia, ladies and gentlemen! (Let's not talk about the fact that he's not allowed to be a space autist, but anyone is allowed to use the holodeck to create bangable versions of real people you've met or are likely to meet. Turns out the hierarchy can't enter yellow gridlines, go ahead and bang the ship's doctor, or the hot lady who's real good and making the space ships go fast good!)

  "We're so advanced because we don't use money" great but who needs money when the highest ranking aristocrats get to choose exactly how all the capital gets used and the lowest ranking proleteriat can just die because there's no star ships available to deliver supplies this week?

  "You don't understand! We're morally superior! We've ended want! We've elevated the common man to a new level!"

  Yeah, that's exactly the logic by which the natives in America were subjugated. "Good news! We're bringing you Jesus and freeing you from your heathen ways!"

  To be honest, Voyager is really great because it lays bare the fascist undertones. The young, attractive crew in nice uniforms walk around the pristine ship and live under the thumb of the God-King Janeway who will kill you if she can get 2 crew members out of it, and will destroy entire civilizations if she deems it acceptable.

  But don't worry, she got her comeuppance by.... being promoted to Admiral (and that's not in Picard, that's during the movie timeline)! But don't worry, our good pal Picard, he.... was kicked out of Star Fleet for having political opinions the people higher on the hierarchy (I guess Janeway?) didn't like. How embarrassing. I guess he just didn't murder enough crew members to get them to multiply like firing neutrons at an atom until it splits.

  While we're talking about Picard, let's talk a bit about holograms and synths. Why does star trek need EMH mark 1s cleaning plasma conduits in a socialist utopia? Why does star trek need mass produced worker-synths in a socialist utopia? Is it because they need slaves and they're not allowed to use black people anymore in their space aristocracy? Sounds a bit like a Greek or Roman socialist utopia.

  But all joking aside? It's the space military-industrial complex. It's Space America minus the capitalism and the democracy. Far from a socialist utopia, unless joining space Raytheon is socialist utopia.

  Maybe Q was right and humanity is just lucky he picked the francophone shakespearian hawk-tua who bamboozled him with bullshit into thinking humanity wasn't still a savage child-race?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any “headcanons” (so to speak) about the Star Trek TNG characters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I like to think that after his episode in TNG, Scotty went on to have all kinds of adventures in his little shuttlecraft.

  When I was a kid, I'd draw his little shuttle craft showing up in battles against the borg and the like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Really Who watch it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironic. That same starter pack means I'm probably gonna read it. And the light novels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beelink ME mini is a NAS with an Intel N200 processor and support for up to 6 SSDs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the SSD. I've only ever had one SSD become read only, and I've seen a lot of failed SSDs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beelink ME mini is a NAS with an Intel N200 processor and support for up to 6 SSDs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  SSDs dominant failure modes of catastrophic failure?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i frankly don’t care what your excuse is.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone has a choice to take the bad parts of their life and reject them or to choose to make them a lesson on what you don't want to see moving forward.

  Doesn't mean you don't have empathy or sympathy for people who have hard lives, but it's a dangerous road assuming people aren't capable of choosing for themselves how to behave. We had better have a choice, or nothing can ever get better and we can't really give people freedom since they aren't able to choose for themselves.

  Epictitus was a physically disabled slave in ancient Rome, and he said a lot about this sort of thing: people could control his body, but they couldn't control his mind. Now, over a millennium later, that lame slave has his name remembered alongside the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius as people of great virtue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solar Panel Waste is Tiny—Coal & Gas Emit Hundreds Of Times Mass Per MWh - CleanTechnica⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. It doesn't take any energy to produce solar panels, and no part of the process of building one produces any waste. Til!