robomartin

This is not political or even about Trump.

I manufacture products. I have been in manufacturing for decades. These are products with electronics, mechanical assemblies, software, etc.

I used to manufacture in the US. For a while, this worked out OK.

The competitors started to move production to China, one by one.

I continued to manufacture here, lowered my prices, which lowered my margins, but I accepted that against keeping people employed here.

At some point this was not sustainable and I had to layoff a few people. I bought subassemblies made in China for less and continued to assemble in the US.

That, too, became unsustainable.

Today, I have no choice but to manufacture in China. There is no way. None. No path. No way to manufacture in the US (or Europe). The supply chain is gone, it does not exist here. Our insistence in committing suicide by raising minimum wage instead of lowering our costs (lower taxes, investing in reindustrialization, etc.) has made it impossible to manufacture here. I can't pay someone $25/hour to put screws into holes or push cables into connectors. Not when everyone else is paying a very small fraction of that manufacturing in China and customers will not pay double or triple for the same product.

Do tariffs help?

I am sure that, in the mid term (a few years) they probably help a few industries. What they don't do and can't do is materially expand our industrial base. My opinion is that we have already gone too far and this is impossible to bring back.

What would we have to do to fix it?

In short, the impossible.

We would have to implement almost zero taxes, materially reduce or eliminate minimum wage, materially reduce or eliminate regulatory burden across the board, heavily subsidize a planned re-industrialization strategy and actually execute at scale and at speed.

Importantly, we would have to also create a large cultural change away from the crazy anti-business mentality that seems to prevail in certain circles and towards a maniacal entrepreneurial culture. We would have to put in systems, tools and funding to support entrepreneurship at levels that have never been seen in this country.

Again, the impossible.

And, if we actually did this we would have to sustain it for at least 25 years and, with luck, we could come out ahead.

My go-to example of just how bad things have gotten is the insanity of the California high speed train project. This is emblematic of just how badly this nation has degraded.

US unemployment has been about 5%

Anyone who has studied and actually used statistics beyond toy exercises understands how these single variable statements are 100% misplaced. I won't go into the details because it might be pointless and I have to get work done. The main point is that grabbing this magical single variable 5% unemployment number to explain 50 years of deindustrialization is, well, nonsensical.

It's like the old example about the fallacy of averages being applied to the entire sample: A billionaire and a minimum wage worker walk into a room. Someone comments that the average net worth in that room is half a billion dollars.

Right.

It isn't.

The "didn't want to pay for American labour" idea is a false reality. Nobody makes decisions like that. This is preposterous.

Business decisions are made against the competitive landscape. In that chess game, if you can come up with a way to deliver the same goods for less --regardless of where they are made-- you could win greater market share, beat your competitors, etc. That's it. There is no "I don't want to pay for <insert city/state/province/country/continent> labor" in that decision.

Also, the mechanism I explained is one where once there's a first mover in an industry, it quickly becomes a chain reaction from there. There's no explicit plan or malice at all on the part of those who are facing a binary choice: do the same or shut down the business.

Here's an example that has nothing to do with China (at least now): Software manufacturing.

Companies are having to face competitors who, using AI, are able to manufacture software faster and with less people. We know this isn't smooth sailing yet, but it is happening and it is the way this is going to go.

If you run a software company and your competitors are using AI effectively with less people, all else being equal, you have a few options:

  1- Adopt AI and lower your head count
  2- Double (or more) your head count to be able to keep up
  3- Hire a large team at a region with lower costs
  4- Give up and shut down the company

Yeah, sure, you can add features, try to deliver a better product, etc. At the end of the day, a shop using AI well will be able to replicate everything you can throw at the market, do it quickly and at a lower cost.

So, that's it. It isn't that you are saying "I don't want to pay <insert region> software engineer wages". It's a competitive environment that forces decisions on you.

Someone once told me: A business is a living organism that tells you what you are going to do every day. You don't have the control you think you have.

I was young and stupid and did not understand what he said so many decades ago. Over time I would learn he was 100% correct.

Someone without the experience of running a non-trivial business likely isn't equipped to understand the hundreds of variables that drive the beast as you try to ride it and stay on top. From the context of someone with this experience, the single variable "don't want to pay <region> labor" idea is nothing less than, to be kind, completely inaccurate.

The companies shifted production abroad because they didn't want to pay for US labor.

That's not true. Reality is far more nuanced than that. Sadly, it is the equivalent of a bunch of Dodo birds falling off a cliff. And this applies to every industry, not just automobiles.

The simplified version goes something like this:

Three companies manufacture forks and knives in the US. They share the market equally. Each has 1/3 market share.

One of them decides they can be clever, manufacture in China, reduce the price of their products and get more than 1/3 share.

Their plan succeeds. Their market share goes up to 1/2 and the other two companies down to 1/4 each

Try as they might to compete, they cannot, the cost basis in the US is higher.

One of them decides "We can be just as clever" and they start manufacturing in China.

Now two of the companies, on account of their lower prices, have 2/5 of the market each. The third company is down to 1/5 share.

The last company has no choice at all, they have to manufacture in China or shut their doors.

With all three companies manufacturing in China, we are now back to each having 1/3 of the market again. Except that, due to the price war, they are now selling the same product they were selling before the transition for half the price. And, of course, their margins are no better, maybe even worse.

And now, the grand finale: The industrial development all three companies effectively funded in China has taught one or more factories how to make these products. Now the Chinese companies enter the market directly, compete with their customers and drop the prices even more. All three companies go out of business. One of the companies is acquired in bankruptcy by one of the Chinese factories who sell the same product for less under the same brand.

Ironically, the reason (one of them) consumers are at the breaking point is because this chain reaction --which required consumers to prefer cheaper goods from abroad-- managed to destroy untold number of industries everywhere. This destroyed jobs by the millions. And here we are.

In some ways this is no different from the race for higher minimum wage. The huge sucking sound you are hearing are the millions of jobs that are being lost because of it.

A few months ago I had a conversation with a friend who runs a small company doing about $10M/year. He was thrilled about being able to drop his $40K/year Salesforce expense. One of his employees, let's call him Joe, a customer service person with some coding experience, used AI to create a CRM for the company that addressed most, if not all, of their needs.

He, the CEO, saw this as saving $40K per year. Until I asked simple questions:

What happens when Joe leaves?

When he goes on vacation?

If he has a health emergency?

The LLM isn't going to magically maintain the software, evolve, fix or support it.

What are you going to do?

The obvious conclusion was that he likely had to hire another person to work with Joe on this in-house CRM and, at a minimum, have redundant project ownership. Backup for development, maintenance and support.

The easy conclusion was: This will save him $40K a year until he decides to hire another person, at which point this "free" software will cost him $150K per year, $110K/year more than what he was paying Salesforce. If he does not hire a second person to work in the internal CRM, he might get lucky and things could be fine for a few years or he will have to face a crisis at some point when Joe is no longer around and nobody knows the first thing about his mini-CRM, not even the LLM.

I wonder how many people are falling for this trap these days. The allure of zero-cost software vs. the reality of introducing risk, technical debt and organizational risk.

To be sure, we are using LLM's extensively. However, until this is better understood, in the realm of software development it is constrained to what I would call "advanced auto complete" at the file level rather than anything resembling project-wide work. When we do write full applications, they are often relatively trivial internal tools that a person could complete in not much more than one week. In other words, easy to understand and code if another engineer had to jump in and none of these utilities are mission critical.

On top of that, your laptop becomes a loud hot churning machine, it's uncomfortable to work with.

Laptop?

OK, I've made that mistake before. I understand modern laptops are powerful, but nobody wanting to do serious AI/ML work should be using a laptop for anything other than SSH or similar low-performance access into a proper system.

Years ago I fried two laptops just doing finite element analysis work running 18+ hours per day. It was one of those "I'm giving you all she's got, Captain!" workloads. They fried, even with powerful fans cooling them. I should have known better. Such workloads belong on purpose built systems.

I would love to be able to have a conversation with the people who decided Liquid Glass was a good idea. The first question would be:

Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users?

I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?

AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.

Sure, but your list should also include the most fundamental distinction: AI does not know what it is saying, understands nothing, has no real connections to reality and can easily degenerate in all kinds of undesirable directions.

It does, over time. It changes the way you think about computational problem solving. It's like the difference between designing objects in 2D on a drafting table and moving to 3D CAD. It changes your brain visualizes, explores and solves problems.

That said, learning APL isn't about learning the symbols any more than learning mathematics is not about learning the meaning of the various symbols it uses. To continue with that parallel, it also isn't about memorizing formulas. It is about using the tools to solve problems and, over time, changing the way you solve problems...now in 3D.

I learned APL in the early 80's and used it professionally for about ten years. The way I think of solving problems is fundamentally different in many ways because of this experience.

I might be unpopular, but that does not make it not real. I have witnessed this kind of thing multiple times in different organizations and at different levels over my 40+ year career.

I think of it as what happens in the show Survivor, where people sometimes team-up and vote out the strongest players because they perceive them as a threat, rather than taking advantage of them to help the team advance in the game. In other words, it's human nature.

the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses"

In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.

When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.

Think bigger.

Think clearly, correctly and grounded in reality.

Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.

Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.

This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.

This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?

Failure to understand the general idea I guess?

Politicians enjoy a pile of benefits and privileges that the average citizen has no access to at all.

Simple example: They can lie to you and suffer no consequences. If you lie to them, even a minor lie, you can end up with serious criminal charges.

You took the list as literally applying to average citizens.

You took this part:

"In other words, like any real job by average citizens."

and completely ignored the next sentence:

"They should not be a privileged and protected class."

That's the point.

They are supposed to work for us and represent us, and yet they fly far above us at so many levels it is incredible. This is what students should be demonstrating about. It is destructive and equally corrupt regardless of political party.

In other words, it should be a universal truth (no party exceptions) that politicians should not exist as a class above those who elect them. Simple examples are health insurance, consequences for lies, fully paid lifetime benefits and pensions, etc. This is wrong.

Almost there...

Both for Senators and Representatives:

- Term limits (2 consecutive terms max) - No stock market participation in any form during office - No corporate or PAC contributions - Prison for lying to the public or during the course of their work (hearings, media, etc.) - Serious legal consequences for defamation or libel - No special medical/healthcare insurance, accounts or treatment - Pensions only bases on their own contributions, nothing else - No lifetime pensions or healthcare - This one is tough: Consequences for campaign promises not met (part of no lies) - Consequences for shutting down government - Serious consequences for not balancing the budget or driving meaningful reductions that will result in a balanced budget in short order - No media-related jobs for five years after leaving office - No book deals for five years after leaving office - No movie deals for five years after leaving office - No fancy office anything that costs more than your average Ikea/Walmart office furniture - Severe consequences for illicit enrichment; a bartender cannot come out of Congress a multi-millionaire, period.

In other words, like any real job by average citizens. They should not be a privileged and protected class.

I think it would be good for the world to see the reality of society around the world. So, yeah. Everything, everywhere at the same time.

Let's see Europe protect itself. Let's see the Middle East decide if they are a region that wants to support world terrorism or --on their own-- achieve peace. Let's see if China helps anybody.

I am perfectly comfortable with at least a one decade pullback. I see no reason for US citizens to subsidize countries all over the world to the tune of over $80 billion dollars and absolutely burn far more than that protecting Europe and others. Pull that back 100% and let's see what the world looks like. Invest that money internally on real infrastructure (not California bullshit projects that never get done), education, healthcare, housing and so many things we need far more than protecting the universe.

Yeah, I'd vote for that. I am sick un thankless nations always pointing a finger at the US. Let's eliminate that target and see how places like Spain and the UK and others do when they need help and we are busy watching it from across the ocean.

Stop trolling. You are speaking like the theocratic Iranian regime were saints building gardens and farms. C'mon. Who do you think you are fooling. They funded nearly all of the terrorism that has been causing so much mayhem in the Middle East and beyond. Now, if you are a Jew hater, so be it. There's nothing I can say to make you accept that Israel could not invent terrorists launching HUNDREDS of missiles into their territory. Yet, you are convinced that Iran is a good actor in world politics that was not within reach of something that could have launched us into and unthinkable version of WW3.

So be it. You are free to believe whatever you wish.

Sure. Read my prior comment. We (the US) should pull out of every nation, NATO and stop funding the UN. If the world needs help, each nation can face it on their own or team-up on a case-by-case basis to deal with their issues.

I don't claim the US to be perfect. Not even close. Yet, we cover 70% of Europe's defense (likely more), fund the UN to the tune of billions, etc.

It's 2026. I think it's time for everyone who thinks the US is evil to just step back and be responsible for their own shit. Fine with me. I'd rather invest that money here for infrastructure, education, affordable housing, healthcare, etc. No more miliary bases outside the US. No more funding for NATO or the UN. No more subsidies for dozens of nations.

Yeah, if you only subscribe to the US view of the world, then of course the US are the good guys.

Kindly show me where I said that "the US are the good guys".

There are no good guys in this crap. The world is a mess. And you cannot do any of this without things getting messy.

As for my opinion: As a US citizen, I would be perfectly fine with the US closing down all military bases in Europe and elsewhere. Bring it all home.

If Europe wants to defend their territory, they should do it themselves. The US funds somewhere around 70% of NATO. We should exit that thankless organization. Countries like Spain can face reality on their own. We can use the money at home. I don't know how much we spend on all the bases around the world. I'd shut them all down. Again, <insert country here> can invest their own citizen's taxes to defend themselves.

I'd say the same about the UN. We are spending billions to support that organization. Why? Let someone else host them, we'll gladly show up and vote.

In other words, if all the US has gained at an international level for what we have done, it's time to stop.

I don't have a problem with this at all. It isn't about being an isolationist. It's about what we are paying for and how we are being taken advantage of.

This is very similar with the situation we had with drugs. We pay for the R&D here and Europe (and others) enjoyed low drug prices because they did not have to pay for it. We subsidized low prices around the world. Now that is largely ending. Drug prices are going up around the world because we are no longer going to be taken advantage of in that domain. If you want the drugs we develop, pay your fair share of the R&D.

Is any of the above simple or perfect in concept and execution? No. Of course not. Name anything in international relations that is. Nobody can. It does not exist. But you certainly can try to do the right thing and end-up people hating you for it. Whereas those who do nothing don't have that problem. Funny how that works.

Sadly, that Canada is not today's Canada.

No, they were not.

How do you know that?

You do realize that the Iranian government (whatever remains of it) is actually insisting, as a condition, that their nuclear materials not be removed from the country?

These conversations are always interesting. Most treat the world as a single variable problem when, in reality, it is an exceedingly complex multivariate problem. And the Arab world sure is responsible for a large number of variables to decipher reality from a simple article that ignores so much.

Others have mentioned China as a benevolent actor of sorts. I find this interesting, maybe even laughable. China is not interested in coming to the aid of anyone in the world. I am not saying this to criticize China. I believe this is purely a statement of fact: They don't do that.

If we pulled it forward to modern times, China, for example, would not put it all on the table and lose nearly 500K lives to save Europe in a world war. They exist for one thing, and one thing only: To do business that benefits their nation. And that's it.

Again, not being critical, just stating what I believe to be a fact. I can also say that I envy that focus to some extent. It's "China first" to an extreme level.

OK, so, if we accept my premise: Who in the world would come to the aid of societies in need?

Let's also agree that perfection does not and will note ever exist on this planet. So, insisting on perfect interventions, actions and outcomes is not rational. We are --humanity-- not perfect.

Well, the answer to this is simple. The only nation with the ability and the demonstrated willingness to risk life, limb and treasure is the US. The rest of the American continent cannot and has never taken this role. Europe has self-decimated over the decades in terms of these capabilities. So, they can't. Africa? Asia? Who's left? Nobody.

Without a doubt, the Arab world --or Middle East in general-- has been a complex neighborhood for quite some time. Yet, things have gotten massively worse when a country like Iran sponsors murderous terrorists in the region and --as confirmed by the current conflict-- makes it a point to build-up a Middle-East-Annihilation arsenal of missiles that could have almost no other purpose than to obliterate everything around them and even as far as Europe.

And then you add the potential for some of these missiles carrying nuclear warheads.

And then you add a regime that simply has not been a rational actor.

So, what do you do? Do you wait until they are a nuclear power? Just like we waited for Hitler to come to power and kill millions of Jews and others? How much slack do you give a regime who's publicly stated goals, for decades, have been the complete destruction of others?

Without a doubt, the actions of the last month or so have not been perfect. They will not be. That's just reality. For example, I don't understand how sinking their entire navy, destroying their air force, destroying their anti-aircraft capabilities, some 20,000 sorties and targets later...we still have to make a deal with them to keep Hormuz open.

How does that happen? Drones and missiles, of course. What is remarkable is that you'd think we would have mitigated that danger to the point where the international waters of the strait would no longer be threatened. I don't understand why stupid reporters never ask this question. Well, I answered it right there.

And yet, to go back to the thought: Who else but the US could have even approached setting Iran back far enough to make the neighborhood less of an issue? China? They would never. They have happily been selling Iran weapons hardware and know-how. They do not exist to benefit the rest of the world. China first. That's the policy.

Can anyone imagine just how far worse --horrific, really-- this would be if Iran had gone nuclear in the next few months or couple of years? This would truly be unimaginable. We've already seen that NATO does not seem to be willing to engage and might be largely useless.

So, while not perfect, at this point in time I believe that this is one of those "treating the cancer early" scenarios. Iran was on a straight path to being a nuclear nation run by deranged theocratic lunatics. This, while not ideal, not perfect, not desirable, not pretty, is likely a good thing. Now it has to end with the right outcome, whose minimum definition is to denuclearize Iran. From there, it would be nice to see the wonderful Iranian people get out from under the oppression they have been living under for so long. If you know any Iranians (we have many friends) you know they are actively rooting for the US to succeed and are thankful. Same with Venezuelans, BTW.

Took my first couple of Uber Waymo rides today in Austin. The experience was pleasant, felt perfectly safe and very well implemented. Yes, it did do a couple of interesting things here and there. In all cases it felt like it made decisions in favor of safety, which is good. In fact, the rides felt just like how I taught my kids to drive, patient, safe and looking ahead for planning and making decisions.

I also thought about Tesla's problem, which is interesting: No recognition whatsoever.

This, I think, is critical. If you are in Austin, it is impossible not to see Waymo's driving around seemingly everywhere. You see them, watch them interact, interact with them (crossing the street, etc.) and start thinking "I have to try this".

I have no clue if there are Tesla robot taxi's driving around Austin. Why? Because I can see Waymo's on the road a block away and recognize them due to the very visible hardware stack they carry. Tesla's? They all look the same. no clue what a Tesla autonomous vehicle might look like, much less see them in action and watch them navigate traffic at a distance and close-up.

So, for a few days, the thought was "I have to ride a Waymo" and Tesla did not even remotely own any part of that sentiment.

They have a big problem. It's the lack of non-trivial physical branding.

Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them

That's a gross misinterpretation of what "doing business with" means.

I thankfully learned that lesson about twenty years go. Google had a product that allowed you to park domains with them for ad insertion to generate some revenue. Owning over 400 domains at the time I though, why not?

The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.

A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.

Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.

That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.

Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.

If we were serious as a society about fighting this disease we would engineer an approach that guarantees early detection on as many people as possible. My guess, not having looked at numbers at all, is that the societal cost of late detection must be staggering. In other words, I am thinking --and I could be wrong-- that even if we provided annual checkups for free with a suitable technology, it might be cheaper than the devastation caused by cancer.

While not all cancers are the same, we cannot ignore the fact that there's a metabolic link to cancer onset and development. Our industrialized food system simply isn't healthy. I don't know how we do it, but there has to be a way to alter behavioral patterns (nutrition, exercise, visceral fat control, substance abuse, etc.) to actually protect people from both bad inputs and, frankly, themselves.

I don't say "themselves" in the sense of suggesting an overlord scenario. The reality is that most people are ill-informed and our industrialized food system is designed to be supremely addictive. Anyone who has battled with processed food understands just how difficult it can be not to consume it, both from a widespread availability perspective and what it does to your brain.

Despite the fact that treatment options and efficacy have improved, without fixing these factors it will be impossible to win this battle at scale.

I was afraid of that. I hope you find a path.

Having lost several members of our family to cancer over the last several decades, including my mother, I sometimes question where all the money going into cancer research has gone. Maybe what has been lacking are motivated patients with both the means and the intellectual capacity to drive for solutions. Again, I hope you find a path.

Not sure what you mean by "open replacement".

Pinterest is useful. I mostly use it to get industrial design ideas on some projects. They do send other email without stupid titles. Those are "like" fine.

it could also hack your home network, delete your family pictures folder, log into your bank account and wire all your money to shrimp charities.

It's interesting that Jason Calacanis is fully committed to OpenClaw. In a recent podcast he said that at a run rate around $100K a year per agent, if not more. They are providing each agent with a full set of tools, access to online paid LLM accounts, etc.

These are experiments you can only run if you can risk cash at those levels and see what happens. Watching it closely.