Or they'll just offshore those jobs.

You can believe this if you want, but as others have stated... it's not accurate. I work in support roles - I'm pretty confident that most of the time, the only reason they have US teams is that they want someone who is usually awake during US hours, can be managed by US leadership, and because people don't like swing shifts... but, honestly, there's no need to be *in* the time zone you're working through. I expect that we'll see a decrease in US based jobs, unless policies come into play that provide *incentives* rather than punishments. Corporations *love* incentives. They skirt punishments.

For about a decade, I've been a proponent of raising the base corporate tax rate, then providing incentives to hire American employees and buy American made parts. Roll the effects in slowly, so people have a chance to adjust.

The companies will just offshore more work. They won't bother with visas. They'll just move jobs overseas. Reagan made it far too easy to do and it's been encouraged ever since.

The only effect will be people offshoring more work. They won't bother with visas. They'll just move jobs overseas.

Why? Unions can negotiate contracts together, and those contracts can expressly call for slow or no adoption of AI agents. A corporation can try to replace them, but then their entire staff walks. The amount of tribal knowledge at most major companies is astounding. Without the development team available, there's no chance AI can catch up and replace the dev team. No chance they can replace the SRE teams. The companies can choose to negotiate their AI initiatives down, or they can choose to lose everyone.

We should be pushing hard to unionize the tech sector and then using those unions to collectively act against attempts to replace workers with AI.

Per item costs on shipping vary, and they can change while you shop based on what you add to your cart. If you buy 30 different items in a single order will be significantly less than if you buy 30 separate orders. It might even transition to free* shipping. I’d like to know the final cost of the item itself, shipping can stay a separate line item, though it would be real nice if it showed up on the cart before checkout time,

*I’m not convinced free shipping exists. Someone pays for it, and even if it’s free to you, it’s being paid for by higher overall prices or by lower volume shoppers. See “Amazon prime” for examples. Go look at the cost of prime products vs other products and you may find that your prime shopping cart comes out to a higher price even after shipping costs are accounted for because they do include shipping in the price.

This is playing havoc on smaller businesses and producers who have commitments in place already. A large number of Kickstarter or other crowd funded projects produce goods in China, and can’t afford to just eat a more than doubling in cost. Large vendors might see little impact, but small producers are getting destroyed already.

I'm of the opinion that sudden tariffs used as a blunt instrument against the rest of the world is a bad solution. It always has been. It's not like companies can open new US factories overnight and have them fully staffed and fully stocked. The right way to do this is through corporate taxes, but also through corporate tax discounts. It also requires a consistent approach over 5-10 years, not 5 minutes because someone said something mean to the President.

By law, increase corporate taxes by (for example) 20% over the next 10 years, at a rate of 2% per year. At the same time, apply a production discount based on the percentage of labor performed in the United States in the production of each product. (or in general to the practice of the labor being done, such as in the case of services, not products); This places the burden on the corporation, which Republicans are absolutely against, but does so with a way out. Move your tech support to the United States in years 1-3 while you build your factories to return your initial labor costs to the United States. While you're doing that, start scaling up production in the United States.

Note, I did say in production of the product, or services performed. I didn't say "by employees of the company." This includes contractors, and companies materials/products are bought from.

I'd love to see a similar solution to automation and AI as well, possibly with a minimum in place so that some automation is allowed to handle tasks that employees find completely inane.

Is it a perfect solution? No. No system under capitalism will ever be perfect. It's a system that applies pressure, and it may need to be scaled up or down, based on the costs of non-US labor and raw materials. It does apply broadly, and much more fairly than these tariffs do. It also gives time to ramp up production and handle changes to systems already in place. Would any Republican find it even remotely acceptable? Nope. It's a tax. No matter if it can be completely avoided by taking simple actions.

Can you name fees, other than taxes, collected by the government currently? If your purchase is taxed in an online store, those taxes are listed. Things like employee reimbursement and payroll taxes aren't listed because they don't apply to the product. Tariffs expressly apply to the product.

Inflation isn't a tax. Biden wasn't "applying inflation." These tariffs are being applied directly every product that enters the US from overseas.

I sure hope they're not using code that requires the source be available in the output without obeying the open source license that led to it.... would be a shame if that happened and these "vibe coding" folks got sued for it.

I used to have a 3rd party alarm clock app I used because Apple doesn't support one feature I need in their built in alarms function. I bought the app for $5 years ago and held onto it because it worked well until only 64bit apps were allowed, which broke it. New version from the same dev is a monthly fee for $5.50/month. The patch notes for every update from the last year are "localization updates". There have been no notable changes to the interface or functionality of the app since the version I bought years ago. I'm not sure why anyone would pay $5.50 a month in perpetuity for a developer to occasionally recompile it with no code changes or add a language they themselves don't use.

90% of apps are essentially the same situation. The developers are charging a monthly fee to use an app that they have no cost to operate. It's certainly not worth it to me.

I'm absolutely willing to pay for an app... and if they're making regular updates, I'd even pay a subscription. I will not pay a subscription for something that doesn't get attention from the dev, or that still has ads even if you buy it.

If this is how Trump expects to play it, the advert is simple: divest these corporations from operating within the borders of the EU - like he originally wanted to do to TikTok (until he flipped 180 on that - he canâ(TM)t even be strong on his own policies)

Stop Google (US), Meta (US), and Apple (US) from operating within EU states. Give those nations time and opportunity to create their own alternatives, or allow each of these companies to create entities that exist within these nations and are beholden to them.

I expect the Internet to decay into commercial states that allow some cross traffic rather than an open internet thanks to stupid stuff like Trumpâ(TM)s blustering. Itâ(TM)s going to be eyerollmazing.

If we had a truly unregulated market, the ISP situation would be significantly worse. Primary ISPs would work harder to ensure there was no competition whatsoever.

Market regulations are necessary at times, but regulations should exist to benefit the end user, not the corporation. Always.

"When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter"

And that's why cops don't use a key. They use equipment to knock down doors. They don't go to to the lock manufacturer and demand they make skeleton keys that work in every home in the country. If they want to break encryption, they can build their own digital battering rams.