Not many companies have the margins to shrug off 10%, and if there isn’t a cheap domestic alternative everyone in the market will be raising prices.
Take coffee, tea, or chocolate: Americans buy a ton of those, there’s almost no domestic production, and most of the market lives on tight margins. Trump’s tax hike means that the average consumer’s choices devolve to paying more or buying less.
If they raise prices by 10%, consumers will buy significantly less. There's a sweetspot somewhere for max profit, it's not 10% and probably not 0% either.
Coffee and tea are very cheap when you buy from a retailer and make it yourself, 10% is nothing anyway. Stuff like starbucks have crazy profit margings. Chocolate is a delicacy that shouldn't be consumed in large quantities anyway. That shit should have a 200% tax.
There isn’t a serious plan to bring manufacturing back. You can debate whether there is a plan for high-pressure negotiations, insider trading or kickbacks (e.g. Nvidia’s successful deployment of a million dollar dinner at Mar-a-Lago), etc. but you can tell that it’s not a good-faith attempt to invest in American industry because that would start with the two things you mentioned: you’d see the investment in those industries now and a commitment to raising taxes on foreign competition in 2030 or so when people have had time to actually be able to meet demand.
What we’re seeing now makes as much sense as a middle-aged laptop jockey deciding that they want to be in better shape – and then quitting their job to run in the Badwater Ultramarathon the next week.
You’ve been repeating that a lot but as many people have corrected you, they’re nothing like this broad or high: only 1%, and that’s balanced by the EU’s trade deficit on services since we don’t make things like good cars for Europe but they buy a lot of software, entertainment, etc.
Buy the NASDAQ at 1:17PM. Sell at 2PM. You’ve just made 10% without doing any work. If you’re doing any kind of leveraged play, you can get even higher returns.
my point is that's the exact same if its a random microcap, just massively magnified. The president can easily cause triple digit swings. Doing a broad market movement is inefficient from this point of view.
> “I said to them, was there any sign of love?” Trump said, recounting his conversation with released hostages.
> “Did the, Hamas, show any signs of like, help? Or liking you? Did they wink? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? … Like, you know, what happened in Germany?”
That sure seems like he’s saying the Jews’ captors showed mercy in ways which we know did not happen on anything like a wide scale.
Where I live, Uber is recognized as the high prices option. Once VCs stopped subsidizing rides prices went up and availability went down - it was a running joke for years that at DCA you’d see people waiting in line for 20 minutes to spend $20 more than hopping in a waiting cab.
That makes sense for me. I would easily pay $20 more to take an Uber over a cab in SF. The prices are the other way around which is convenient for me. The last time I took a cab from the airport the guy asked me which cross streets and how to get there. That's not my Uber experience. I don't want to be telling this guy how to do his job. I want personal transportation and we can chat about something else if he likes but I want him to use the satnav.
Yeah, there are real regional variations. I think the problem Uber has is that they’re valued like a high-end tech company (with locked in overhead like compensation) but they don’t have much of a competitive moat. They can have a better app and global reach is a plus for frequent travelers, but at the end of the day their profit is anchored by how much a taxi costs – even if the service is better people only value that so much, especially in a down economy like the one just created.
They've created a business model any metropolitan community can duplicate for practically nothing, and the first community that does so will share their notes with the rest of us.
People should be asking themselves if their service is a quango waiting to happen, because most of them definitely are.
That’s not a problem here (they have an app, too) but it’s definitely valid for Uber to compete on better service. I am skeptical that they will be able to get the kind of returns which their investors want that way, however.
Sure, as I said they have a potential edge in service and people who frequently travel to new places. My point was just that it’s not a very big edge: most people are not traveling to new places all of the time and if there’s a big savings they’ll switch. That doesn’t mean that Uber is doomed, just that they’re not a Google/Facebook money printing machine where local competitors can pop up easily.
they already IPOed so the original investors made out with a ton of money. if you think there's still a version where Uber evaporates overnight, I have some puts to sell you.
I’m not expecting anything like evaporating, only that things like their share price and compensation are more like a tech company than a taxi company but they don’t have a strong moat. There’s interest around things like self-driving taxis, but they don’t own the technology so it won’t open up extra margins.
Most individual share prices is buoyed by continuous pumping from 401ks and the like buying into funds, not on the fundamentals of the companies in question.
The damage is bad but also entirely voluntary, and there are a lot of people who really want to believe that there is some kind of complex strategy where this is a negotiating ploy which won’t be around long enough to really change things.
There's no 5D chess strategy, Trump literally just loves tariffs and thinks they actually work. He's been talking about tariffs since the 80's. Last year he even said that "tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language".
Everyone I know who’s looked said they cost too much. I think they’re walking away from a commodity market because they don’t want to spend time on lower margin business lines.
Trump is only in power because millions of Biden voters stayed home. His tariff power is not constitutionally specified but delegated by the legislature, who can withdraw it at any time. I think that China, and other world leaders, believe there’s a good chance that a handful of Republicans – who were already having to hide from their constituents – will be willing to join Democrats in repealing or restricting that delegates tariff authority by the end of the month or so. This would certainly be plausible given how their party used to pride itself on free trade and is heavily funded by the Wall Street guys who are eating huge losses right now, not to mention the non-trivial percentage of their voters are watching their retirement portfolios and home equity shrink.
> "Trump is only in power because millions of Biden voters stayed home."
From a detailed post-election analysis posted on HN a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400172): "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a 'we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone' strategy would’ve made things worse." Anyone who still thinks that there's some latent segment of the voting public that's on the Democrats' side needs a wake up call.
It’s not that simple. As Shor noted, most of the weak Democratic voters were motivated by economic concerns (Gaza was also a big factor for roughly a third, too). The fact that they stayed home in 2024 doesn’t mean that they will next time, but it absolutely means that Democrats need to give them a convincing reason to show up. His analysis of social media trends is similarly incomplete: he identifies the degree to which it’s influential but misses the billions of dollars plowed into promoting right wing content, just as the age gap analysis sees a real phenomenon (younger voters aren’t as likely to vote for Democrats) but misses whether the explanation is that they’re ideologically conservative or economically more precarious and swimming in a sea of propaganda blaming Biden for the pandemic fallout, which has affected every incumbent party around the world. Again, that doesn’t mean that the Democrats don’t need to do a lot of hard work but I think it’s a mistake to see it as “they’re all movement Republicans” rather than “we need to focus on economic inequality”.
Take coffee, tea, or chocolate: Americans buy a ton of those, there’s almost no domestic production, and most of the market lives on tight margins. Trump’s tax hike means that the average consumer’s choices devolve to paying more or buying less.
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