138 karma · joined October 5, 2023
I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence.
In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products.
Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.
Libgen is a solution to that.
I agree there is value to learning with experts but not at the cost we are expected to pay these days. The labs and equipment are a tiny fraction of the tuition a student pays and many disciplines do not require anymore more than pen and paper and the aforementioned resources. Why should a math and economics major pay the same as a biochem student? Because the majority of the cost is the bureaucracy and the fancy real estate investments.
I set a lot of prices during the pandemic. Any average business found that they were granted some degree of monopoly power and could generate higher net margins with less competitive prices. Many of us found the simplest solution was to just pass on all costs to the consumer because they had no choice but to take our price or not get their good.
Times are different and there is competition but many businesses have still forgotten how to increase gross margin by having a sale.
Not to get into politics but tariffs are the same way. The elasticity of demand for a good determines the monopoly power of the supplier/retailer and how much of the tariff gets passed on to the consumer. Highly interchangeable products will not see the full tariff passed on to the consumer because that would mean forgoing all sales. The importer will determine how much gross margin they can give up without loosing money…but the producer in the foreign country also does the same math. Do they completely give up the American market to save inventory for other markets or do they eat some top line profit and still make some sales.
Many goods will indeed be pulled from the market, but if the producer fails to find replacement customers in other markets they will look back at 300M Americans and reconsider whether they can give their importer a better price while still making something. If the good expires, like say a case of white wine, or becomes obsolete in the case of say a lightning charging cable there is additional pressure to make the decision before the surplus simply becomes unseeable.
If a good has no viable alternatives and is relatively shelf stable expect all tariffs to be passed along because the products price is already disconnected from its cost and the business producing it is closer to a monopoly than not.
Best Buy making a gross $250 on a $1000 priced TV or $50 when discounted to $800 still isn’t loosing any money unless they are at their credit ceiling and cannot replace the good sold. They make zero if A customer standing in their store deciding not to even give them $50 and giving it a to a competitor on their cellphone. Tho is absolutely profit opportunity lost, even if it is small.
I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.
There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.
Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
> “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”
I listen to NPR every day, have for over fifteen years. There is a lot more yelling at the radio these days. They are very open with their bias. They only promote programing that services the lefts cultural position. There is not a shred of balanced coverage here. They treat their economic and moral theory as accepted and undisputed fact. This isn't news anymore.
Congress is forbidden from exercising editorial control, but is China? Love when they choose to push articles like this, or focus on Tik tok "stealing data" rather than "shamelessly influencing our children" with that data. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260742/tiktok-china-re...
It has always been easy to imagine how advertising could destroy the integrity of LLM's. I can guarantee that there will be companies unable to resist the temporary cash flows from it. Those models will destroy their reputation in no time.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.
2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.
3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP like China? We will figure it out.
4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.
5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue to bring industry home.
6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to slow projects down.
7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable and this will harden resolve.
8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.
9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.
10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade. They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade. The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.
11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable foreign garbage that floods our markets. 12. enforcement will be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.
13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure national security in a world post-NATO.
14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in companies that sold out America.
We have problems with housing affordability because asset values inflate inverse to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar is deflating because a service economy is not as sustainable as a manufacturing economy. This is particularly pronounced when we all see the labor value of intelligent workers decreasing at a precipitous rate due to AI.