I think you're confused about what the communication is.
The communication isn't the waving in "reaction" (it's not clear it's simply a reaction, but let's assume it is) to the original wave, but the original wave itself.
And the fact that it's also triggered by videos indicates it's not just a mechanical reaction (like some of the research about how plants "communicate" is which are essentially mechanical responses to stimuli).
However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the communication is meaningful. It just shows that a means of communicating exists.
America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr.
The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.
And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.
But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.
A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an hour than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A skilled tradesman can make $40+.
Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage of labor--not because of wages.
>>A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an hour than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A skilled tradesman can make $40+.
In theory. In practice the numbers are way lower.
As some one who has done quite a big time in India IT services firms, have lots of war stories, our Delivery manager would often tell us if US managers only knew adjusted for regular all nighters, whole week on-call hell weeks. Development phases where teams would be working days at stretch in office. The actual per hour rate of an engineer in India is at best $1 - $5 an hour. You just can't bill the customer that way.
Only reason why this even works is India is still poor and people work for anything.
Im sure, adjust for everything(in real practice) manufacturing hourly wages in China aren't all that different and wouldn't be surprised if they are at something like $1 per hour, or something such.
Americans have little idea how much affluence and luxury their ordinary citizen has. Most of the world would do anything even to be poor in the US.
Fair enough to say nobody in the US is signing up to work a hellish factory job for $1/hr anytime soon.
The policy should be collaboration with China. 50/50 state subsidized joint ventures with Chinese corporations on EVs, raw materials refining, solar panels and batteries, etc. At the same time, a gradual and predictable tariff in those targeted areas. All of this, with the explicit consent and collaboration with the Chinese government. You could kill 2 birds with one stone and focus these policies on green energy and energy independence -- lessening the effects of climate change.
That is what you would do, if you really cared about bringing manufacturing back.
As of today, there is absolutely no off-ramp. The Dem policy is basically trump lite with respect to China. We are moving in lockstep towards making them a geopolitical adversary, and for what?
None of those places have manufacturing prowess in EVs, batteries, electronics, and solar, which is largely where China has comparative advantage over the US.
But yes in general, if we want to re-industrialize, we need to move the collaboration into the physical world and out of the financial world.
If we're going to defy the invisible hand, we should at least do it to benefit people in a concrete way - health care, education, UBI. Doing it for "strategy" is equivalent to simply burning the money people would have otherwise saved by doing nothing.
The components of a strategic manufactured product can be as simple as an injection molded switch, a LiION battery, capacitors, copper wire, etc., so the notion of bringing only "strategic items" back is as much a myth as the idea its mostly coming back to the USA. The goal here is to diversify the supply chain globally so its not concentrated in China. Internally this is sold as bringing MFG back to the USA (will happen to a noticeable degree), but that's not the actual plan.
> There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work.
Work to do what?
> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.
Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?
> How do we get that level of prosperity back?
Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from building housing and therefore driving up housing costs. Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable developed countries almost all of which deliver better healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the government support children's upbringing by paying for high quality education, instituting rules and regulations that require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine. The US is far richer than most of those countries.
Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling from 18mm to 13mm.
Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better for workers.
> Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?
Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.
Companies moved overseas to save money on that expensive labor.
Now, companies have all the negotiation leverage. "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" is a real and credible threat, as countless companies have already done it.
Tariffs are supposed to make operating overseas more expensive. Undo the economic justification for moving the jobs overseas and they will come back.
This takes away the companies' negotiation leverage. The "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" threat isn't credible if everyone knows overseas manufacturing is super expensive due to tariffs.
I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland. The drugs are getting bad. A lot of people have lost hope. Young ambitious folks see no reason to stay here.
The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to me that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed, intelligent people who don't seem to understand it.
> The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to me that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed, intelligent people who don't seem to understand it.
Do you understand that labor is priced into the cost of the product? Who is going to buy all of these American products made by highly paid unionized workers?
I understand the Rust Belt situation sucks, but people can’t afford to buy everyday consumer goods made with American labor. I’m wearing an American made pair of shoes right now that is 20-30x more expensive
than a pair of shoes from Walmart, and even ‘less expensive’ US made shoes like Red Wing are 10-15x as expensive. Now imagine paying 10-30x more for everything, it’s not sustainable.
Hey, guess what would help the average American with being able to afford something that is expensive?
A job that pays a living wage!
I am reminded of when the great offshoring started and everyone was looking down on poorer folks for shopping at Walmart because it was filled with cheap junk and they should know better than to buy that stuff(when in reality it's all they could afford since their good job was gone...).
>Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better for workers.
Seemingly, this is going to magically happen? Where are the programs to make sure this does happen? Erecting tariffs is one thing, but having an actual plan and executing on said plan is another. So far, all I see is rising prices and looming threats of job cuts due to slow downs which stem from increased costs, and there is nothing coming to buffer that.
Let alone, the investment capital isn't moving in this direction. As of this writing, the general posture of the Republican donor class is 'wait and see how long the tariffs last' not 'lets invest in American industry again'
>Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.
Emphasis mine. Do you believe that the modern Republican party is pro union? Do you really think they won't undermine organized labor even if jobs come back in some form? Even though the modern Democratic party have a spotty history on labor issues, the Republicans have shown for 40 years to be the anti labor party. They rarely - if ever - pass legislation that is pro labor. This administration isn't proving to be different in that regard either, and it wasn't different the first time around.
>I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland.
So did I. Hallowed home town and all. One of the poorest in the state I grew up. You know what else never happened? Sustained public policy to help these areas. There were largely no programs to help transition workers from one industry to another. We don't have comprehensive safety nets and retraining / re-education programs for workers. We lack all of that. Why aren't we starting by implementing those programs? Its rather wishful thinking that bringing manufacturing back to the US, that it will end up in these same areas to begin with, because manufacturing is very different than it used to be. I doubt most of these areas would be good places to re-build manufacturing capacity in the US. What manufacturing is done here is already concentrated in the South which precludes huge chunks of the traditional rust belt.
The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.
The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
Especially after they added the ability to minimize, expand on hover, or keep expanded (originally this was the only option), the ribbon has been a great addition.
But then they also had to go ahead and dump it in places where it had no reason to be, such as Windows Explorer.
> The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.
To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).
Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.
I know nothing of your objections, so this is more about how I think of mine and how they relate to these kinds of changes.
Being a power users is difficult, I think the best way to do software is to make it APL complicated and only educate one guy in it. The way power users in Excel/Emacs/Accounting software out perform user friendly stuff is amazing. But somethings are meant for the masses, e.g. opening a file.
Dumbing down or magification of interfaces was needed for many other reasons. Gnome and Ribbon were necessary changes IMO, what we had was never going to improve. Of course I wish there was elements that could be reused elsewhere, but that is a pipedream of Smalltalk proportions.
I am now stuck with windows at work, and it is a horrible experience. Everything is so needlessly complicated. In the same way Linux is. I do believe Gnome did manage to improve things, at least when I look at children using Mac, Linux and Windows as power users. My view is that the complexity of Linux is still a little bit easier to understand, but that is just because of a long history and easy abstractions.
I think core objections are often not compatible with products that need to fit and be produced for many people. I do software that is used once by many this has changed my view if GUIs for ever, especially in regards to desktops.
Close to 20 years later, people still complain about the ribbon. (1)
I think that says something about it.
--
1. And not just "grumble, grumble... get off my lawn..." Many of its controls are at best obscure. It hides many of them away. It makes them awkward to reach.
Many new users seem as clueless, or even more so, than pre-existing customers who experienced the rug pull. At least pre-ribbon users knew there was certain functionality that they just wanted to find.
(And I still remember how MS concurrently f-cked with Excel shortcut keys. Or seemed to have, when I next picked Excel up after a couple year hiatus from being a power user.)
For me peak UX was before Ribbon. Just menus and customizable toolbars. Didn't need nothing more to be productive enough. Nowadays I can hardly use Office suite, its feature discoverability essentially zero for me.
That’s not true. They have the same amount of calories roughly. It’s physically impossible for animal fat to have that many calories. Tallow has 900 calories per 100 grams while olive oil has 884. They are almost pure fat and pure fat has 9 calories per gram.
I'd be curious to hear from anyone that uses Nextcloud and it's actually functional instead of being so slow that it is unusable. I've never had success getting it running
I've been running first Owncloud, then Nextloud since it became a thing. It mostly works as it should, file synchronisation from mobile devices to user accounts works as intended and since the Vue rewrite of the Files app the file-related UI is adequate, i.e. about as good as you can expect a web app to be. I use various other apps - News, Talk, Maps, Podcast sync, Memories, Notes - which also mostly work just fine. All in all Nextcloud is a good all-round platform which performs it tasks good enough while being easy to manage. There are better file sync apps, better RSS apps, better photo management apps, better communication apps, better mail apps... but hosting all those is a lot of work compared to hosting just Nextcloud with a bunch of apps.
Been running nextcloud on a raspberry pi 4 on prem for a very small business <5 users for about 3-4 years ish. It’s faster than most clouds because it’s local. I’ve had very little trouble with it. Don’t tend to use much the features apart from files sync though.
How did you set it up and how do you run it? What are the specs of the machine you run it on. I've tried setting it up a few times, because it looks exactly like a project I'd want to self host, but its just been unusable.
I used to run it on a 4 core Celeron NUC with a measly 8 gig of ram and 1 TB SSD via the community fpm container: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker I now run it on a much more powerful system but performance wise it's the same.
Side containers
DB: I use postgres
Redis: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly as the redis container
Image processing: imaginary container maintained by the Nextcloud team
Most of this is available in the AIO setup but I prefer manually tuning things for my system
As it's a __big__ SAS product to run it well on lower end systems you MUST:
- Tune your PHP settings to your system.
- Tune your DB settings
- Set up caching properly
- Offload as much processing as possible to background processes (e.g. preview generation)
Probably tune your Proxy settings as well.
Big changes I've made:
- Switch logging to error only and syslog (not the normal file on disk) as it can hammer single disk systems.
- Switch to unix sockets for redis and the database for quite a performance boost.
I’ve never done much in the way of tuning Nextcloud, but I do enable APCu and Redis. I also ditched MariaDB years ago and moved to PostgreSQL.
It definitely isn’t so slow it is unusable, limited to 2 cores of an Intel N95 CPU and 2GB RAM.
I have often wonder if some apps drag the whole thing down because my experience doesn’t seem to be universal. That dashboard thing had to go, and the talk app was never something I was interested in either.
I’ve been running it since it was OwnCloud and never really have upgrade issues either. YMMV.
Companies used the very real inflationary pressures to increase the cost of their products well beyond what those inflationary pressures alone would require.
There are 2 reasons IMO that led to this working:
1. If every company does it, the normal competitive market pressures to reduce prices don't operate. Normally, every company will only raise prices due to collusion, which would be illegal. But when there's a broad based increase in cost, every company will also raise prices beyond just the absolute values of those costs independently, because companies are judged by their margins more than they are by absolute numbers. This is not illegal but the effect is the same.
If in your example, Acer sells 1000 laptops, they originally made $1mm in revenues, with $500k in costs, leading to $500k in gross profits and a gross profit margin of 50%.
If their costs increase by 50%, they need to increase their selling price by $100 to maintain those margins. $1.1mm revenue, with $550k costs, leading to $550k gross profits for a gross profit margin of 50%.
If, however, they increase their Selling price only by the cost, their new selling price will be $1050, for revenues of $1.05mm, costs of $550k, gross profits of $500k, but gross profit margins declining to $500/$1050 = ~47.6%.
The decline in gross profits will hurt their stock price and their valuations (if private) significantly.
2. Consumer pressure. The other reason companies do not easily increase prices with higher costs is negative publicity. Pandemic related inflation, and now tariffs, give them an easy way to explain the reason for the price increases to their consumers and avoid facing any backlash directly.
What did surprise me with the pandemic, which will likely be true with the tariff increases, is that once the companies did increase their selling prices after the pandemic, even though their costs then subsequently dropped, they did not drop prices, across the board.
And the result were the record breaking profits companies have been declaring.
> What did surprise me with the pandemic, which will likely be true with the tariff increases, is that once the companies did increase their selling prices after the pandemic, even though their costs then subsequently dropped, they did not drop prices, across the board.
Prices will only decrease when demand decreases. If your competitor offers a higher-value product and attracts more customers, you'll need to decide whether to increase the value of your product or lower your prices to remain competitive.
If the market can support your current prices there's no reason to lower them.
Businesses are also very conservative - if you go to the Big Boss and say "we should increase our price 20%" you're likely to be shot down unless you can show WHY it must be done or you go bankrupt.
This means that competitive prices will be "lower" than what the market clearing amount should be. So when they are "forced" to raise them, they then find they're still selling, and will be slow to bring them back down.
Which does occur, but first as sales, then perpetual sales, and then a new product size that's coincidentally cheaper.
Businesses are constantly doing a price sensitivity analysis to see if they can raise prices and by how much. Economic factors like tariffs allow you to raise prices more than your usual price sensitivity would allow because you can blame it on factors out of your control.
Except they really don't, because each aisle of your grocery store only has two actual companies making 90% of the products, and coke does not compete with pepsi on price
If Pepsi doubles in price but coke does not, you will not see most pepsi drinkers switch to coke, you will see a small amount of pepsi drinkers abstain, a small amount of pepsi drinkers switch to coke, and the majority of pepsi drinkers just grumbling about paying more.
We've had decades of shrinkflation at this point. I can't use a recipe from twenty years ago because it calls for 15.5oz cans when we've already moved to 14.7oz cans of that product. I can't buy a competitor's version because they use the same can and same can sizes.
A great demonstration of this is something I've been bitching about since "inflation" happened. Lays (the same company that owns pepsi) massively increased chip prices. So did their competitors. Our regional store brand DID NOT (because potato prices did not increase for over a year!). Our regional store brand is comparable to basic chips from other brands. Predictably, people just paid the higher price for lays and the competitors who also raised their prices.
The past several decades, companies realized that consumers have WAY MORE stickiness to a "brand" than ever realized. People still buy craftsman tools, including my father the contractor, despite them being cheap garbage for decades now. Companies don't compete on prices because there is only one competitor in each market segment, and they love the sky high profit margins too. It's not worth it to gain an extra 5% of the market by lowering your price significantly, which is what it would take to get the extra market share. Consumers aren't rational, they are tribal. Nobody drinks pepsi or coke, or prefers red vines to twizzlers, because of some rational evaluation of product merits.
What DID switch people from pepsi to coke was not price, but marketing!
This is pretty common now. At least my Vim/git combo does this, where I always open source code with my preferred formatting but by the time it's pushed to the server it's changed to match the repo preferences.
> stressing over the formatting and conventions of the blueprint (to use a civil engineering metaphor)
This is incredibly important.
This is the kind of stuff that prevents shit like half the team using metric and the other half thinking they're imperial, or you coming up with the perfect design, but then the manufacturer makes a mirrored version of it because you didn't have the conventions agreed upon.
Imperial vs Metric is a hard requirement not a convention or formatting. I have a co-worker who wants everything to be a one liner, doesn't like if/else statements, thinks exception handling is bad and will fail a code review over a variable that he feels isn't cased properly.
This makes code reviews super slow and painful, it also means you aren't focusing on the important stuff. What the code actually does and if it meets the requirements in functionality. You don't have time for that stuff, you are too busy trying to make this one person happy by turning an if else into a ternary and the end of sprint is a day away.
If a reviewer is regularly rejecting PRs because the variable names have incorrect capitalization then that's a problem with the author, not the reviewer. That is the incredibly basic shit you decide on at the start of a codebase and then follow regardless of your personal thoughts on what scheme is preferable.
If/else vs ternaries is something where consistency is a lot less important, but if you know that a team member has a strong preference for one over the other and you think it's unimportant then you should just write it how they prefer to begin with. Fight over things you think are important, not things that you think don't matter.
I worked with a guy where you would try to predict what he would bitch about next. In this example, you would write it as a ternary so you don't have to hear about it ... and he'd suggest it be an if-else statement.
Nobody fucking cares which one it is; is it readable? That's the real question. Your preference of which version of "readable" it is only applies when you are the author. If you're that picky about it, write it yourself. That's what we eventually did to that guy after the team got sick of it. Anytime he'd complain about something like that, we would invite him to write a PR to our PR, otherwise, get over it. Then, we would merge our PR before he could finish.
He eventually got fired for no longer able to keep up with his work due to constantly opening refactor PR's to the dev branch.
Sure, but if there are actual rules, agreed to and accepted by the entire team (as opposed to one guy's idiosyncratic preferences) then there should be a commit-hook to run the code through a linter and reject the commit if the rules are violated.
Yes indeed. I'm a fan of getting the team to pick an already existing lint ruleset and then doing this. You can also set to only lint changed files if you want a gradual change over in existing codebase.
The communication isn't the waving in "reaction" (it's not clear it's simply a reaction, but let's assume it is) to the original wave, but the original wave itself.
And the fact that it's also triggered by videos indicates it's not just a mechanical reaction (like some of the research about how plants "communicate" is which are essentially mechanical responses to stimuli).
However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the communication is meaningful. It just shows that a means of communicating exists.