I’m curious just how much pain and abuse Americans need to feel before they do something about it. So far it seems to be record-setting.

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K0balt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately, it became so impossible to do business in the USA for many companies (where there isn’t a monopoly and you have to compete globally) that we left.

I moved ops to a Caribbean nation where we can get parts, (it’s simply not possible to source many parts and services within the USA anymore without paying 2-3x in fees or enduring weeks to months of delays in customs) and iterate at a competitive speed.

R&D in the USA went from riding a sport bike to swimming in molasses with crocodiles basically overnight, way too unpredictable to even sign contracts with suppliers, with random tariffs creating 2x cost uncertainty.

You simply cannot plan or make long term contracts when the uncertainty is so high with no predictable pattern. Ironically, we also cannot sign even with US suppliers, because they don’t know if they will have ongoing tariffs to protect buildout or if they will evaporate, so they also cannot risk expanding production.

It’s a total shitshow and the only reason it exists is to power the grift train. If a company is big enough, some shady deal goes down and suddenly they magically qualify under de minimus or some other supposedly dead exemption. I would not be surprised to see that you could correlate these exemptions with purchases of shitcoicins or similar shady wanker-works. The trade shenanigans do nothing to help US businesses, and drive innovation out of the USA like rats off a sinking ship.

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sanderjd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean by "do something about it"? The elections are in November and the new Congress will be seated a few months later.

Our system progresses in two year increments, by design.

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Waterluvian 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's like Americans are on a train and some of them are being rowdy, rude, aggressive. They find a few passengers to harass. One they lock in a lavatory. Another they throw off the train for not being the right kind of American. Some have opened windows and are actively throwing their feces at whoever they're passing by. And the strongest response mustered by the other passengers is to avoid catching attention, and a meek self-soothing utterance of, "a station is coming up soon and we can vote to kick them off." Except this is the fourth two-year cycle that they've just gotten back on, broken up only by a four-year period underscored by a loud and somewhat violent insistence that their right to throw feces from the train shall not be abridged.

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sanderjd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't find analogies like this helpful for thinking about this, because they don't illuminate anything about what is being suggested. In your analogy, I could come up with some ideas about what the "passengers" could do prior to reaching the next stop, but that wouldn't tell us anything about what we should do in the real situation.

So I ask again, what would you propose?

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Waterluvian 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What John Lewis tried to suggest to you all. Good trouble. Necessary trouble. If you in good faith need someone else to tell you what other options you have, ho buddy have you guys lost the trail. My original point is that Americans won't do this until they hit a tipping point of discomfort. And for Americans, that tipping point is a very high mark. They will tolerate an enormous amount of fecal frenzy so long as they can just look the other way and plug their nose.

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sanderjd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What good trouble would you suggest that would be more effective than seating a new Congress?

I'm a big fan of the civil rights movement, but a lot of this kind of stuff like your comment that I see strikes me as nostalgia that doesn't seem to understand what made that movement effective. It was effective because they thought, concretely, about their goals and about what concrete steps they could take that they thought would make progress toward those goals. That concreteness always seems (to me) to be lost in these contemporary discussions, replaced with "do something" and sloganeering.

Another difference, in my view, is that John Lewis was trying to figure out how to change a system in which there was no hope that the next election, or the one after that, or the one after that, ad infinitum, would itself affect the desired change, because both parties were opposed to the policy he desired. In my view, that's not the current situation. This thread started out being about the Trump administration's tariff policy (which I think is awful and stupid). But the next Congress, which will be seated quite soon - certainly much sooner than any kind of civil disobedience campaign would be able to bear fruit - can write laws that change that policy. And the more people are mad about the current policy, and the more they vote for the opposing party because they are mad about the status quo, the more likely that new Congress is to write those new laws.

There are times when it makes sense to lose faith in normal electoral politics, but in my view, the eve of an election where the incumbent powers are about to get routed is a weird time to suggest it.

	▲	testing22321 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A general strike is often proposed. If even 50% of people just stopped going to work and spending money, things would change veeeery quickly. A few weeks of inconvenience for decades of a better future? Sign me up.