ericmay

I'm in favor of solutions which give American automakers advantages and also motivation to build better cars, but it has to be done in a way that keeps China out of our market, and protects union jobs.

I think it's fine that cars are expensive and getting more expensive. More people should be walking or using alternative means anyway because we spend way too much money and are dealing with a number of negative externalities from our car-only infrastructure. Having competition in terms of method of transportation itself can solve many of our problems, no artificially cheap Chinese cars required.

I drive an EV and generally prefer that to ICE vehicles but we have to acknowledge that there are still emissions that go in to EV manufacturing and mining rare earths, which China created a strong monopoly on the processing of so we'll have to do more ICE to compensate, sucks. There seems to be a desire to push cheaper EVs on to the American market, but it's even cheaper to build sidewalks and live closer to your place of employment or where you do the majority of your daily activities. It's better for the environment too.

So if we can't build EVs in a way that is advantageous to us and on our terms, we should avoid it and just walk and build transit and keep the ICE going.

You just tell them to pound sand and switch providers no matter how painful. Google Cloud exists and the product suite is better than Microsoft’s anyway. Never except extortion, doubly so for our government.

Believe it or not, Microsoft is more dependent on those government contracts than the other way around.

I was a long-time lurker on a few subreddits (r/tennis, r/cfb, things like that) but once they made me log in to use old.reddit.com I basically stopped using the site. A lot of things I would have looked up on Reddit before, you know, the whole DDG "how do I/what's the best XYZ reddit" searches have stopped and I just use Claude now. It's actually been quite nice.

One of my hopes with AI tools is that we'll eliminate a lot of what people do on the Internet today (social media). I'm guessing a lot will stay around primarily as zombie companies or bot land where fools are participating in ever greater foolishness, but if AI can destroy the Internet as its used today boy that would do wonders for us all. I'm hoping websites will fail to do things like prove human (HN for example) and we'll have a cultural shift where everyone thinks everyone else is a bot so they just come to believe all of this conversation is super pointless and we instead get back to more in-person or more intentional use instead of mindless scrolling.

Sure but that means the US should do things like subsidize American companies (leftists are against this of course) while keeping Chinese ones out until we have competitors who are sufficiently advanced, and then…… China just open its market to American companies that we subsidized?

The key piece I think is missing here is reciprocity.

We can’t have “China subsidies its industries until they are super competitive and then they get to sell in our market but we don’t get to sell in theirs”. Europe does a little of the same with regulatory lawfare.

The problem with lowering the level of protectionism is that it doesn’t really serve anyone’s best interest besides Chinese automakers. American companies lose out, American workers lose out, and we wind up in a worse position than before.

In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.

Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.

Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.

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Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.

Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.

Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".

You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.

Sure but you can leave some of those up to local nuances - like in Canada maybe they show both. In the US maybe they don't since we only call it the English Channel.

But I'd say that it's probably not a big deal anyway because how often are you going to run into such a scenario, and even if you do how would Google/whoever capture a lot of informal names for things? A little bit of confusion is fine too anyway.

> This type of work is never coming back to the US in any meaningful volume unless it can be done by robots.

Well yea that's what will happen most likely. Obviously not all will come back and in what form it does will probably be different. But we don't have to focus only on Apple assembling computers since that's not the only company or industry at hand.

> The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".

Well I think we can, we'd just have to buy fewer things but probably higher quality/more handmade/local, and then we'd have more people making more money. Personally I'm in favor of it just because I think it's a better way of life for many people (owning your own business, doing work yourself, &c.) But to your broad point, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying this idea of a "living wage" is a farce unless Americans are willing to do what I believe you and I are both generally suggesting here. :)

> American brands like Apple capture the vast majority of the value of their products even when the manufacturing is done elsewhere. Final assembly, which is the type of work that is done in countries like China, Vietnam and India, makes up less than 5% of the retail price of most electronics products.

True, but in that case the important part is still buying from an American company, even if the product is wholly assembled elsewhere. I didn't mean to imply you can and will only buy American made products from start to finish. Even in the case of Apple you're supporting very high American wages and the products cost more. Some manufacturing/assembly has been moved to the US.

> The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.

I agree with you, though I think items like clothing can be made much more costly but higher quality and with local manufacturing (like in Europe for some companies) but if we go back to the original point it was about supporting "living wages".

My point was just that where American (or western depending on your own beliefs) companies exist and make a given products (a skillet/frying pan was just an example where I knew there were a few American manufacturers), and let's assume it's not fraud or rebranding or something, you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages". Otherwise you can buy "the thing from China [1]" but you can't do that and also support "living wages" because from an assembly/manufacturing worker perspective there is no wage to be had because they aren't doing the job. To your point also of course you can argue that the company that's HQ'd in the US, doing the design work, with manufacturing in China also receives a lot of the profits or can capture the majority of the value of the product, but those folks are already paid corporate wages which are higher than a "living wage".

I'd also mention I suppose that not everyone can just work in an office and have people in other countries work in assembly lines.

[1] China makes incredible stuff, I don't mean to imply everything made there is cheap or something along those lines, though of course many products that Americans are exposed to are of that nature, there's nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about it.

> The assumption that "Made in America" results in higher wages for American workers is not always well-founded.

Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers. Any company, to varying degrees of just how raw/local the product is made, which builds, assembles, manufacturers, grows, whatever a product here in the US has to hire and pay Americans an American wage. Naturally that may not be a "livable" wage (which is a loaded term but w/e) but it's still a wage that goes to Americans more than it goes to non-Americans.

We should avoid scumbag companies, American or otherwise, and we should do research into just how much a product is made in the US, but as a general rule there's no way around (until automation or something) paying more for American products and that's what you'll have to do to support American workers and American jobs.

Worker Unions have been telling us this for decades.

In the case of supply chain issues, yea, shit happens. But the supply chain issues also occur in the downstream foreign market you're buying the product from. So you can buy an American product and if it has parts that come from, say, China and you see a supply chain concern you'd have to be more concerned about the Chinese-made/assembled product because you have even less supply chain oversight.

It's an ok policy. For example I don't want to see "Chinese Taiwan/Republic of Taiwan" when I view Taiwan on a map as an America. It's just Taiwan to me and I'm not concerned with what people from other countries call it.

Same thing basically with the English Channel. It's just the English Channel. I don't want to see a bunch of different names for it. If the French want Google to show it as La Manche for French people that makes sense.

Well if you think about it the “don’t be evil” slogan was never really true in the first place.

The expansion of the internet advertising industry, addiction algorithms via YouTube and/or other dark patterns, and more were pretty evil from the start. If you need a slogan to remind you to not be evil, maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near power. It’s one of those tells in advertising - if you have to tell me you are something you probably aren’t whatever you are claiming to be.

Renaming Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, and renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America just aren’t in the same room in terms of “evil” things. Annoying perhaps? Sure. Evil? Not. A. Chance.

Nobody really cares about this stuff in day-to-day life besides people who desire to be outraged as a way of entertaining themselves or mask over some other personal deficiency they have.

What countries call it the South China Sea? What does France call the English Channel?

Had this occurred 100 years ago we wouldn’t even be talking about it today.

Probably not because at the end of the day the employees and engineers at Apple have to use the Mac and macOS to write software so there's a concrete floor that they can't break through in terms of usability. They may make some mistakes or something but the OS has basically been the same thing for like 20 years. I wouldn't worry about it too much.