pre 2023, it took real human effort to make shit up, and there was much less incentive for the amount of effort, and you could more easily guess what was made up by judging whether a human would go through the effort of making it up. these days it's literally anything, all the time, zero effort. you're right there's always been fake shit but it's more than half the posts on /r/all these days are misleading, wrong, or just fake
This seems to imply that the only thing we import from China is junk. That hasn't been the case for decades. Beyond the junk we have pretty much the entire consumer electronic market, and beyond that the equipment running the infrastructure required for many of those electronics to operate. Beyond that, we have equipment for communication and navigation networks for government and first responders, and the countless components required for their vehicles or an effective response to crisis. Then we have the vast variety of equipment required for modern farming, each piece containing countless Chinese components, even if it's an American made tractor.
There is no possible way for anyone to foresee the totality of effects from a serious trade war with China, but I can assure you, it will be far worse than a lack of junk on store shelves.
This is not true. I was in Beijing around then and never met a single person who spoke English if they hadn't learned it for professional reasons (they worked in tourism, international business, etc.).
It could not have been further from a bilingual society.
I suppose you probably were visiting some university districts/CBDs where people likely to have received higher education. Elsewhere, aside from basic "hello"/"how are you", locals in general are not able to communicate in English.
Not sure which part you were in, but this is just not true in my experience. I've been to Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and some others, and Mandarin really is a must if you want to even have a chance of communicating. I can't imagine how I'd function here if I only had English.
I've not yet been to Shanghai, and while I would expect the English-speaking percentage to be a bit higher, it would still likely only be in the single-digits by my estimation.
Maybe I am missing something but sales tax is something that the seller pays. It's a % of the retail price and so they collect it from the customer, so it's added in and shown to the customer.
Tariffs are paid by the importer and I would think that they would put that into the price of the good itself based on their desired profit margins etc. How would Amazon even know what to put for the tariff amount? It's not a % of the retail price, it's a % of the import price which the seller doesn't typically share with the end customer.
"What it costs now" - "What it cost in March" = "Tariff cost"
The math is not perfect, but to a good approximation (certainly a far better approximation than the administration's insane computation of international "tariffs") that will indicate the cost to the consumer of Trump's tariff policies.
So yes, if the importer eats a significant chunk of the tariff cost and doesn't pass it on to Amazon/the consumer, the computation will reflect that (as it should). And if they don't, it will reflect that too (as it should).
Chaotic: one might disagree on the magnitude of flip-flopping that can be labelled "chaotic", but the unpredictable on-again, off-again nature of the policies is well-described by "chaotic" I think.
Ill-conceived: if you can find me one serious economist who agrees with the Trump tariff policy (i.e. agrees on the goal, the means and the ends, and the match between them), I'll consider retracting this. Otherwise, yep, ill-conceived describes imposing tariffs without any apparent understanding of how they work or their likely effects.
Kagi search is great, but I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300 searches isn't enough. I have no interest in Kagi AI. Adding more searches would've caused me to sign up again. A rate limit instead of a monthly limit would prevent the "search anxiety" that creeps in as your available searches dwindle. Make it so and you can have my money again.
I suspect that Kagi’s price point might be a close approximation of what these services actually cost to provide without being subsidized by ad services and data harvesting; free search can only really sustain itself under those conditions. Heavy users who block ads have been getting subsidized by other users for decades now, and this has led these users to expect these services to be provided at an unrealistically low price.
Yes, but don’t twist it: it’s VC money, greedy corporations and personal data exploitation that enabled all that. Not those who came to expect expensive services for free.
People like free and the “greedy corporations” found a way to give them what they want.
Google search is trash now (for reasons that aren’t entirely in Google’s control), but for the first decade it was magical how well it could one shot finding relevant data on the web.
> People like free and the “greedy corporations” found a way to give them what they want.
It’s like saying, “People want Fentanyl, so drug dealers just give them what they want.”
Social media causes addiction and depression.
Have you ever tried browsing the web for a couple of months without a Gmail, Facebook, or similar account — and without JavaScript enabled or using only non-standard browsers? The experience is terrible.
If they can't scale 300 searches for way less than $5 in costs, they are doing something very wrong. Consider that you can get 1M tokens of inference for less.
You can get 1M tokens of inference because it's subsidized by VC money. The whole point of the parent comment is that this is closer to the actual cost to provide a service.
That $5 has to cover organizational costs, not just compute. There's 40+ employees, so salaries alone would be a significant chunk of their entire income if all of the 45k members were on the $5/mo plan.
the $5 is the cheap drugs that your dealer is offering. They hope you'll start popping for the good stuff for $10, which is often less than I pay for a single lunch, and I use it constantly
That is actually a really nice model. Effectively it is 300 Search for $5 valid for one month. And instantly renew if you exceed $5.
May be Kagi could also consider rolling over unused search for one month. So if you only did 200 searches, the remaining 100 will roll over to next month so you have 400 searches.
Do you mean that they charge you an additional $5 (so in a 12 month period, exceeding the 300 search limit would result in 13 payments instead of 12), or does the next month’s subscription payment get moved up to the day that you ran out searches, with the number of payments remaining the same?
I’m usually cautious with subscriptions and regularly review what I’m paying for. That said, Kagi at $10/month has earned its place — been using it for 20 months now and it’s been worth every cent.
I'm curious about how you think about the "value" for a service like Kagi? What determines how much it is worth to you? I don't think that Kagi is for everyone, but, at least for my own internal model of value, Kagi comes out so far ahead, that I'm curious about alternate ways of thinking about value that don't see it that way (to be extra clear: I do not think that my view is the "correct" view or only view).
How do you think about its value? I too am interested in others' perspectives. I'm not the person you asked, but I rarely do more than "{query} reddit" or "{technology name} {documentation-oriented query}". Google, or any of its free competitors, work fine for that. On top of that I'm subscription averse: the only "digital" subscription I have is additional google drive capacity and a VPS, which together cost less than 10 moneys per month, and I'm fantasizing about canceling those too.
For me, it is how much faster I find the results I want than I was with Google. The results are enough better that, at the rate I value my time, I'm more than making up the subscription cost every month.
And then the gravy on top is that I fundamentally think that direct payment is a "better" (both from a consumer perspective and from a societal perspective) model than an ad-supported model, so I'm also supporting a company that aligns with that larger philosophical viewpoint.
> I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300 searches isn't enough
Most of the population is well served with search funded with ads and tracking. Kagi is for the minority who don’t want that. I’m not sure there is enough if a market between 300 and some other number that would treat search anxiety just to satisfy those who won’t pay $60 a year more to relieve it.
I'm gonna guess you aren't their target audience, so you both win thanks to the filter of capitalism. $10 a month to avoid google and microsoft AND get a decent AI assistant is a bargain to me. Plus it's a small tech company trying to make a good product for a certain audience and I can dig that. I hope they succeed and become wealthy.
It simply isn't worth servicing people who aren't willing to pay $10 per month. They are problem customers and frequently churn. Much better for your sanity and your wallet to focus on improving your offer for the people who are happy to pay.
I think we need to re-term dosage levels for LSD. A micro dose is a therapeutic dose. A recreational dose is an overdose. It's not really any different than say, DXM in Robitussin.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
To clarify, I'm not defending the tariffs or the way this whole thing is implemented. I'm sure it puts a lot of people in trouble.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
There is no dissonance here, workers being put in competition with much cheaper ones on the other side of the planet is absolutely going to drive their wages down. They got 30 years of that... and many of us in Europe did too.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.
Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.
It's easy to look at the internet at large see people with these contradictory takes. But 1) these groups may consist of entirely different people who are vocal about different topics, or 2) the wide brush obscures critical context.
I support a $20 minimum wage AND
I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND
I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent
Most people bemoaning the tariffs are doing so because they understand that production will not actually come back to the US. It's not that these people hate Americans and don't want domestic manufacturing (or to pay for it), it's that they can see the reality that this isn't what's actually going to happen. Instead, the price of goods will just rise.
A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.
I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.
However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.
I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place.
Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".
Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.
Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!
So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.
If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as well, in order to prevent evasion by trans-shipping (until and unless they restrict Chinese imports as well).
Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
There were way cheaper and more-effective ways to achieve that. And that's not why the administration says they're doing this, anyway. It's because we have trade deficits, period. Or it's because of fentanyl, since that was the justification for the invocation of emergency powers that're letting the executive impose tariffs at all.
>If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as wel
A good strategy would be not to impose tariffs all goods, just the more important ones, and you would do it WITH your allies. Threaten the same tariffs on allies as China if they do not get on board. You could even use the leverage to get China to increase domestic consumption so they aren't exporting so hard.
Trump's policies aren't going to achieve what he thinks they will.
This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
A few months ago, I had an AliExpress order beat an Amazon order to my house. I wasn't using Prime, but the AliExpress order did ship from China. It took about a week.
https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/reddit-faked-i...
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