fursona
dubiously
Does it count as a fursona if it's got no fur, just scales?
tal
joined 2 years ago
The group further warned that the tariffs will not result in bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., as Trump has promised, because they erase the certainty that businesses require in order to invest in sourcing changes.
To expand on that, Trump hasn't built any kind of a durable consensus even with the broader Congressional GOP, much less the Democrats, which you'd expect if you wanted the trade environment to be predictable and lasting. He's operating under (questionable) emergency authority from the Executive Branch alone. That might work if his goal is to extract a bunch of taxes out of poorer Americans via tariffs for four years. But it's probably not a very effective way to restructure global supply chains, to convince countries to make major investments in domestic production.
Nobody wants to dump a ton of money into a factory in the US which is going to be globally uncompetitive, only makes sense to serve a protected domestic market, and would take take many years to make back the investment, and then have the protection go away and be left in the hole.
Howard Lutnick, Trump's Secretary of Commerce, had some quote from the other day where it sounded like he was promoting the idea that companies could just heavily automate production, so workers are just programming and maintaining industrial robots, basically.
Howard Lutnick says the 'great jobs of the future' will be fixing robots in factories
So, what would these near-future human workers be doing in factories? Lutnick said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that the United States should train people to be technicians for these automated machines.
"It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future," Lutnick said. "You know, this is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here."
In a separate CNBC interview on April 3, Lutnick said US factories are "going to see the greatest surge in training for what we call tradecraft — teaching people how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers, and electricians for high-tech factories."
If he's actually serious about that and it's not just political-speak, there are a couple of problems.
First, the people who voted for Trump over manufacturing probably aren't going to be interested in that. If they had the skillset to do industrial automation, they probably would be a lot less concerned about finding a job.
Here's an NPR Planet Money podcast from a decade back.
Young is the perfect model of the new factory worker. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of metals and microscopes, gauges and plugs. He works on the team that makes fuel injectors, which require precision engineering. At the heart of the assembly process is an automated machine run by a computer process known as CNC.
"When I came here 20 years ago, we didn't have CNC equipment," he says. "It was more of the hammer and screwdriver fix, to where now it's all finesse."
"Now it's all finesse" could be the motto of American manufacturing today. In factories around the country, manufacturing is becoming a high-tech, high-precision business. And not everyone has the finesse to run a CNC machine.
I can read, I've had some computer classes, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree. But when I asked Ralph's boss, Tony Scalzitti, if he would hire me and train me on the job, his answer surprised me.
"No," he said. "The risk of having you being able to come up to speed with training would be a risk I wouldn't be willing to take."
To become like Ralph, I'd have to learn the machine's computer language. I'd have to learn the strengths of various metals and their resistance to various blades. And then there's something I don't believe I'd ever be able to achieve: the ability to picture dozens of moving parts in my head. Half the people Tony has trained over the years just never were able to get that skill.
And if you don't get that skill, a mistake on this machine can be catastrophic. All the work that's done here happens on a scale of microns. One micron is four-hundred-thousandths of an inch. A human hair, for example, is 70 microns thick. Here, you cannot be off by one-tenth the thickness of a hair.
"A 7- or 8-micron wrong adjustment in this machine cost us a $25,000 workhead spindle," Young says. "Two seconds, we could lose $25,000."
Madelyn "Maddie" Parlier is more like the old style of worker. She does have a high school diploma, but no further education. She works on a simple machine that seals the the cap of a fuel injector onto the body. All she does is insert two parts and push a button. It requires no discretion, no judgment. There's only one way to run it: the right way.
"It does it for you," Maddie says. "All you do is put the piece in, push the clamps down, and push your finger."
There are a lot of things Ralph knows that Maddie wishes she knew. She wants to know how many microns thick the different parts are. She wants to know the computer language used on the machine she runs. She wants to know all the things that make Ralph's job prospects so much brighter than her own. And until she knows those things, her future is far less certain.
Maddie has a job, I learned, because of some simple math. A machine could easily replace her — a robotic arm could put the parts in and take them out — but it would cost around $100,000. Maddie makes a lot less than that, and, for now, the math is in her favor.
But if the price of a robotic arm goes down, or a factory in China learns how to make that part for a lot less, Maddie's job is at risk. Simple calculations like that have cost around 5 million factory workers their jobs over the past decade.
If you voted for Trump because you were thinking that you'd get a lot of low-skill assembly line jobs that don't require a ton of education and training, and you wanted them to be high-pay, you're probably not getting what you want out of this arrangement.
Second, there are some other issues, like environmental regulations, that don't help the US be competitive even if a process is automated.
Third, my understanding is that with tariffs, at least some, if not all goods, it's the final stage in processing that matters for determining origin. So all one really needs to do is move legally-minimum transformative final stage out of China to some other country that has lower US tariffs, leave the inputs in China, and do the last step in that other country. Do no more than is necessary to keep this from being a re-export.
Fourth, even if you (could) change the international system of trade and tracked all the inputs, then there's still little reason to do labor-intensive manufacturing in the US. You might take it out of China, but you'd do it in Vietnam or Indonesia or whatever, somewhere where you aren't going to be left with an un-economically-viable factory if the tariffs on China go away or are relaxed. Avoiding that would require taking the US to autarky, which would really dick up its economy a la North Korea.
This was pretty much what Michael Kofman predicted was going to happen months ago. As long as Russia feels that they can prevail militarily and is making maximalist demands based on that, and Ukraine is unwilling to accept those terms, there's not really much room for mutually-acceptable terms.
Even if they got something on paper, that's not likely to translate to a durable peace.
"Each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit," he wrote on April 28 (PDF). "Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon."
The Court is not a cartoon.
They're portraying themselves as a scalie, not you.
That being said, why is anyone involved here watermarking PDF with anything? I mean, normally the purpose of a watermark is to link content with the creator. But I seriously doubt that the text and the background image have been merged into some kind of raster image.
investigates
Yeah, they link to the original dragonized PDF.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.114988/gov.uscourts.miwd.114988.1.0.pdf
It's just text on top of the image. You can copy-paste the text:
DRAGON LAWYERS PC
Jacob A. Perrone (P71915)
Attorneys for Plaintiff
325 East Grand River Ave., Suite 250
East Lansing, MI 48823
Phone: (844) JAKELAW
jacob.perrone@yahoo.com
It's like having a screensaver on an LCD monitor.
And pdftotext, in poppler-utils, looks like it makes a pretty decent de-watermarked text file of it too.
Yeah, I've got some warm fuzzies for 'em too, have had a few situations where I needed some component or exotic battery cell ASAP and having it minutes away was really nice. That being said, I wouldn't have wanted to try to keep them afloat as a business.
I don’t need units of 500 from Mouser.
If there's demand, I expect that they'll offer smaller shipments at a higher unit price. There's lots of stuff that they do sell in smaller shipments. If not, theoretically some electronics distributor could go into business just buying larger shipments, repackaging them into smaller shipments, adding a markup, and addressing that market.
Poor Radio Shack didn't live long enough, but this would have probably been a good time for them.
EDIT: Not available everywhere in the US
like, not a solution for some electronics engineer in Wyoming trying to design a prototype of some new device
but we have some brick-and-mortar electronics component stores in the Bay Area in California still, stuff like Anchor Electronics.
EDIT2: Apparently there are actually still some post-bankruptcy Radio Shack stores, though under new ownership, and looking at their website, I think that they've exited the electronics component business entirely, just doing consumer electronics.
I don't believe that they're likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they're going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.
Android's had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren't doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they're Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.
That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there -- MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.
If the mobile OS space fragments further -- like, Android splits into "Google Android" and "China Android"
my guess is that that'll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.
Yeah, that's a thought, but those games have some additional QoL logic to them, like automated stats keeping and checking and stuff. Nice to just have the computer handle it.
https://www.history.com/articles/royal-palace-life-hygiene-henry-viii
The Western European belief that baths were unhealthy did not help matters, either. Although neat freak Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily, he was a royal rarity. Louis XIV is rumored to have bathed twice in his life, as did Queen Isabella of Castile, Herman says. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month. The 17th century British King James I was said to never bathe, causing the rooms he frequented to be filled with lice.
It was the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, whose choice to no longer travel from court to court would lead to a particularly putrid living situation. In 1682, in an effort to seal his authority and subjugate his nobles, Louis XIV moved his court permanently to the gilded mega-palace of Versailles. At times over 10,000 royals, aristocrats, government officials, servants and military officers lived in Versailles and its surrounding lodgings.
Despite its reputation for magnificence, life at Versailles, for both royals and servants, was no cleaner than the slum-like conditions in many European cities at the time. Women pulled up their skirts up to pee where they stood, while some men urinated off the balustrade in the middle of the royal chapel. According to historian Tony Spawforth, author of Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, Marie-Antoinette was once hit by human waste being thrown out the window as she walked through an interior courtyard.
The heavily trafficked latrines often leaked into the bedrooms below them, while blockages and corrosion in the palace’s iron and lead pipes were known to occasionally “poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen. “Not even the rooms of the royal children were safe,” writes Spawforth. An occasional court exodus could have reduced the wear and tear on Versailles, perhaps leading to fewer unpleasant structural failures.
This unsanitary way of living no doubt led to countless deaths throughout royal European households. It was not until the 19th century that standards of cleanliness and technological developments improved life for many people, including members of royal courts. Today, many European royals still move from residence to residence—but for pleasure, not to try and outrun squalor.
Downvoted for editorializing the title.
Would be fine with the original NPR title. Put your opinions in the comments, not the title.
The transexual atheist Chinese-Americans are extra scary.