RickSly @ricksliter

@mikefutia CHAT

@Seanfrank Who did you end up switching to? Evaluating leaving Avalara now after a similar situation

@CodifyBaseball No ghost runner, but ties after 11 innings of regular season baseball.

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@dodger_chris Cracker is both proud and startled to be part of such a prestigious collection

Philip Rivers won’t go to the playoffs because the Chargers lost again

@TMZ My "curtains for Zoosha" Christmas gift has arrived

Is the new 10% tariff on imports from Canada related to the fentanyl emergency or the reciprocal trade emergency or are hurt feelings also now a national emergency?

Maybe - and I'm just spitballing here - having one person frenetically set, and then suddenly change, taxes on trillions of dollars in annual commerce isn't the best way to do US economic policy?

Trump tariffs, although twice ruled illegal, remain in place pending further litigation, taxing those Americans least able to pay and putting the world economy at risk.

My fear is that ordinary Americans are not experiencing the firing of an experienced, non-partisan, leader of a statistical agency as the major earthquake for the United States that it is.

literally still not how tariffs work

Howard Lutnick @howardlutnick

a year ago

Our trade deal with Vietnam is a massive win for America's businesses, manufacturers, and farmers! For the FIRST TIME EVER, Vietnam will open its market to the United States. They will pay 20% to sell their products here, and 40% on transshipping - meaning if another country

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The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn’t realize it yet. Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down. It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA. 45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train. 55 to New York by sea. That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th. Around that time (it’s already started to happen) trucking work is going to dry up. Warehouses will start doing layoffs because no labor is needed to unload containers and some products will be out of stock, reducing the need for shipping labor. All this will start in the Los Angeles area. After about 2 weeks, it’ll start hitting Chicago and Houston. Let’s say the White House, after 3 weeks, changes its mind, on May 31st. “This isn’t working out like we thought it would. Tariffs back to 0.” Let’s say China says “bygones be bygones, we’ll go back to how things were”. Let’s say every factory in China that got screwed by their orders being cancelled says the same thing “no problem, we’ll make and ship”. The problem is, even under the most favorable conditions of China and the factories restarting economic ties as though nothing happened, it will be at least another 30 days before economic activity is revived. And that’s just in LA. In Chicago/Houston, you’ll need to wait another 45 days. New York, at that point, will still be getting containers from before April 10th, they will then have 50 days (May 31 minus April 10) of zero economic activity at the ports, in trucking of Chinese goods, in warehousing. The whole situation is a bit like lockdowns. Once you shut down, it takes a long time to get economic activity back to where it was, if you ever can. And again, this assumes, that China and its factories, which make things you can’t buy elsewhere, will start right back up again as though nothing happened, which is unlikely. It’s almost like we’re speeding towards a brick wall but the driver of the car doesn’t see it yet. By the time he does, it’ll be too late to hit the brakes.

Year-over-year trucking activity out of Los Angeles down 23%. It will likely drop to 50% in the coming weeks if there isn't trade war resolution. Massive layoffs coming to the West Coast trucking sector

The amount of people who think the pain will be isolated to “import” businesses are showing very little forethought as to what is about to happen. If tariffs stand (I doubt they can) it will make Covid look like a bad haircut. We risk losing reserve currency status. Retirement accounts will be halved. People think a recession is likely but a depression is 1 out of 4 working age people unemployed. The unemployment won’t be isolated to import businesses. It already started with shipping companies. Dock workers are next followed by trucking companies. Retailers are next large and small. The proportion of lost jobs across these sectors will tighten the purse strings of all these workers which is the text book definition of recession as the restaurants and service businesses lose income and also begin layoffs. Parallel industries will start to contract. Plumbers, HVAC, electricians won’t be able to get parts (yes those things are made in China too) willing to work but unable to. Medical devices and pharmaceuticals follow. Accounting and legal firms are next that serviced all the above businesses as the recession spirals. People who are saying just source somewhere else or produce domestically don’t understand that $500M factories don’t just pop out of the ground like a lemonade stand. It takes years to build up new supply chains. And who would invest in something like that here when the guy in office will be gone in a few years and the $500M investment won’t be needed anymore. I don’t say all this to scare anyone, I say it because I believe tariffs can’t stand due to the above. (I would still prepare accordingly however)

Just to remind everyone: It is absolutely nuts that a single person is wreaking total havoc on the global economy, and doing it by exercising powers that the Constitution explicitly (and for good reason) reserves for Congress. This is not OK, and we shouldn't pretend it is.

We think tariffs are about bringing back manufacturing. Talk to small businesses first

Time to spit some truth. Tariffs can't possibly make this $5 injection-molded spatula made in Vietnam or China a level-playing field. Why? Because the $2/hr Vietnam worker or $4/hr Chinese worker literally can't be made equal to the $35/hr US worker through a tariff; the math simply doesn't work. And China already uses the world's best automation, so the US can't make up the difference via higher productivity. The only thing tariffs will do—and this isn't speculative, this will happen—is that if someone needs a spatula they'll now pay $7 for it (based on 50% tariffs and 20% Amazon margin). So a consumer will pay 40% more for that item, starting basically now. Now, the reason no one is going to setup a spatula factory in the US is the same reason we shouldn't be tariffing spatulas: the US should not be producing them, and no one in their right mind will try. There is a value curve in international economics, and poorer countries make cheap stuff and rich countries make expensive, complicated stuff. Just imagine trying to make spatulas in the US, even with state-of-the-art automation (the same the Chinese use): now your cheap plastic spatula will be $30. This entire program is an act of strongman theater by people who have no intention of keeping these tariffs in place. Trump's team knows the US will be impoverished by moving down the value curve to compete with developing nations for stuff we shouldn't be producing in the first place. So why do it? They're hoping that every nation blinks and eliminates their own tariffs, and that this magically creates American jobs. The problem with that, though, is twofold. First, the economic carnage that is wrought while doing so could be catastrophic, as markets, asset values, investment, consumer spending and varied nation's policy replies generate a chaotic complex system that could very easily throw off all sorts of nonlinear black swans; they're playing with fire. If this doesn't get resolved soon, it's a guaranteed recession and wealth effect down-spiral. Which brings me to the second reason tariffs are a problem: they play with fire here, but tariffs won't even work. The US's core economic problem isn't unfair trade, it is that it is rich, has fallen behind in the global economic value curve, and its prosperity is massively unequally distributed. These effects arise not because of unfair trade, but because as the global reserve currency our currency is overvalued relative to everyone else (esp China). Not to mention we've done a terrible job of investing in the education, innovation and productivity enhancement needed to remain competitive in the face of that GRC headwind. Yes, China needs to boost its domestic demand so as to soak up its excess savings that currently is being absorbed by US trade deficits, but the US has not done a single thing in 80 years to actually free itself from the yolk of being the GRC. Indeed, Trump and his team keep talking it up as if it's a source of power! It's not, it's the very disease that will inevitably choke us out, and not a single foreign nation has to fire a shot to do it. Beyond the GRC, decades ago we gave up on our future: the U.S. historically led in innovation—DARPA, semiconductors, the Internet, biotech—but starting in the 1980s, there was a strong political shift away from public R&D and industrial policy in favor of neoliberal market ideology. Unsurprisingly, public R&D as a % of GDP has declined since the 1970s. The sad part is DOGE is doing it all over again as we speak, hollowing out our public R&D investments and talent and eliminating what little lead we still have, and MAGA is cheering them on. The lack of knowledge and self-awareness is almost inconceivable. More, American education has been terrible. We have stagnant K–12 outcomes, especially in STEM, and underfunded schools. We've had skyrocketing college costs and student debt, and little investment in vocational training, apprenticeships, or mid-career up-skilling—areas where Germany, South Korea, and now China excel. Meanwhile, China massively invested in education, with rapid university expansion, heavy investment in STEM (over 4.7 million STEM grads/year vs ~0.6M in the U.S.), and deeply subsidized AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing and materials PhDs. We want to even be in this conversation? Then we need to stop acting like petulant children, learn some basic facts about how the world actually works, and then get ready to compete for the future by laying down long-term, strategic investment in the core of the nation's capacities and which will take decades to come to fruition. If you think we're going to overcome 50 years of short-sighted policy and lack of truth-telling to the American people, lies that continue right up to this afternoon, than you should absolutely expect, with totally fair warning, that this only gets worse from here, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

“But guys, we don’t even trade with your country” “Shut the fuck up penguin. Did you even say thank you? We’re tired of you taking advantage of hard working American patriots”