What are they manufacturing? It must not involve any metal. Due to the tariffs on metals manufacturing costs have increased significantly for anyone using them.
As someone who grew up in a machine shop, still in manufacturing, and have my own hobby shop, its gross how much raw materials cost. I can get finished parts shipped from China cheaper then I can buy the raw material here in the US. I almost wept looking at over $500 for a simple 2x4 foot sheet of 1/2 inch thick 6061 aluminum.
Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead.
It is going to get worse. Iron/steel and aluminum are some of the most common elements on the planet. They are literally everywhere. The cost is in the energy for production, and to a lesser extent transport. But energy is not only going to become more expensive but actually hard to get (thank you again AI). Canada has energy, from empty land for wind/solar/hydro, to oil, to enormous piles of uranium ore. That is not an enemy worth making.
It would, but smelting is not a process that likes being started and stopped. Once furnaces and other bits and pieces are up to temperature they want to stay there. Thermal expansion is a thing, but also letting them all cool down is throwing energy away. And iron workers don't like sitting around "on call" waiting for energy prices to swing enough to justify going to work.
Same too with customers. The people buying bulk metal need is when they need it. They don't want to wait around, literally, for the winds to change.
Can you expand on what relevance this has to the pragmatic thermal process based point raised in the comment above yours?
The aluminium smelters I've had contact with have all avoided any shutdowns (back up generators, etc) because any significant breakdown in continuous processing involves several days of tear down in order to restart.
I am literally within 20 feet of someone who worked 5 years as a general foreman in charge of the smelter portion of the Portland aluminium smelter* who is not embracing the idea that this a process you can just turn off and turn on again later w/out a large chunk of effort.
The relevance is that you would have a base load to keep the system hot which is separate from the electricity that does the work.
I think at a steel smelter, since the heat does the work, they aren't as easily separable. You would still use less energy at the times when you processed less metal.
Aluminium smelters were traditionally some of the biggest loads on the grid. They were built near hydroelectric dams and had contracts with electricity providers to absorb excess energy and to pause operations on short notice when other demand is high. In exchange for this they get it very cheap, which is good because they need a lot of it. Variable energy supply is not new to them.
Now I've never worked at either and I'm just spitballing ideas on the internet, but you haven't either and you are too.
Or perhaps people are thinking longer than you and realize it’s a problem America isn’t domestically producing these things? I can not stand that trade offs and thinking about domestic production cant be done because otherwise smart engineers pretend like the economy is black and white and thus if a price goes up due to a lack of domestic supply that will always be the case. Industrial policy is designed to fix that, it will not be magically fixed overnight but neither will it be fixed if we do nothing and call people idiots when they try things.
Everybody I know in construction, especially larger scale, is losing their minds because nobody can bid on jobs without risking loosing their shirts. Tariffs could hit somewhere between the bid and the time the job starts and could increase material costs by 150-200% and could cause more delays. It's been like this for 2 years or so and they're losing their minds.
Tariffs have been hell for marina renovation work I'm associated with. Things paid for well in advance have exploded way past their budgets thanks to all the raw material costing so much more. Thanks to Trump.
Even the MAGA folks I have to deal with are bitter about it. They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect. I think they'd still vote for Trump though. I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
Turns out, the real “TDS” was in the morons who thought a treasonous conman would fix the country this whole time. Almost like his critics were fucking right.
> They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect.
I'm sure fox news will give them some Olympic tier training in mental gymnastics and they'll be blaming - with certainty and conviction - brown people, democrats, trans people and/or women in no time.
> I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
A family friend recently sent me this and it's been helpful to wrap my head around some of the naked hypocrisy:
```
The reason they aren’t more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren’t more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality.
They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man, and that naked hypocrisy is the point.
They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth?
Their will is a hammer that they are useing to beat reality
itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent.
I think it's simpler. He hates the same people they hate and he's willing to ignore the constitution to bring pain to those people. As long as that's true they'll put up with the corruption.
I think you’re ascribing malice where stupidity would suffice. Raw tribal stupidity.
And of course there’s those that know exactly how wrong and awful this is, but support it out of self interest anyway (eg: Marco Rubio). That’s even worse.
Spite for others can overpower any self interest. If the person has been shaped by past experiences to rely on spiteful actions as a coping mechanism they will struggle to do anything else. The reward centers in their brain respond more to the disadvantage their actions have caused the other party rather than any advantage they create for themselves. Rebecca Kazinka's actually been doing studies on this for a few years now if you want some reading.
I'm certainly not alone in trying to make sense of it all without completely destroying my faith in averaged-out humanity.
A hypothesis: The "spite" is secondary to their insecurity and fear of not belonging to a "safe" group, in a world they assume has vicious and unavoidable hierarchies or cruelty. Having the out-group hurt (or even just baffled) occurs in service of that.
Professing and supporting stupid beliefs is "loyalty", an expensive (and therefore prominent) signal of membership. Like tattooing Dear Leader's name on one's forehead. It's less an opinion one holds and more a song they sing to fit in with the flock.
I find that focus on insecurity and loneliness and fear—versus the reward of belonging—a bit more comprehensible than spite as its own reward.
Then every founder you know has no idea how policy should be done. There’s a difference between having a pro manufacturing policy and applying tariffs and trade wars ad hoc based on how you feel slighted and giving no warning to any businesses nor having any sort of stability to your plans for any sort of appreciable time in the future. Also, the whole announced news on Friday changed it on the next week so that whoever is betting on the stock market can make some money also is not great for a pro manufacturing base. It’s all a grift and your buddies are dupes to believe in it.
Policy is about trade offs, you can disagree if they’re worth it but that isn’t what people do. They instead dig in their heels and pretend policies designed to incentivize local production don’t work because local production doesn’t exist without them. That’s the point of them, and it takes time.
Really? I know people in the hardware space for whom the tariffs have been an unmitigated disaster. They had to go through a lot to not lose their customer base outside the US. I have seen many US-people with businesses swearing about that admin, especially the smaller ones.
Uh, I'm in manufacturing in the US and EU. Can confirm the tariffs are a total disaster. It's increasingly difficult and expensive to ship raw materials and components to the US!
"Just find US suppliers."
It's not that simple. There are a lot of things that simply aren't made in the US. (The majority of tool steels, all titanium alloys, everything made of tungsten, and I could go on all day.)
Besides, dealing with the Chinese is like life on easy mode. Handshake agreements are always respected. In most cases service and support are 24/7. Importantly for QoL, they never make you fill out a dozen forms, pay for a D&B report, "let's get on a Zoom call to touch base," and all of that nonsense. American B2B firms aren't really into customer service, as a general rule, I think.
it's remarkable how much presentation can distort ppls judgment .. they'll actually admire narcissistic behaviour as long as its wrapped in a polished and presentable package (the ex PM of cananda) and yet label the less polished, ill mannered person with common sense as the narcissist ..
really ? one resigned after turning his country into a dumping ground through disastrous immigration policies .. while the other restricted immigration .. put his own citizens first .. and generally shook up a complacent West .. and you think ther are not in the same ballpark? Let me ask you, in what ballpark would you put Trump in ? up there wkth Hitler ? Stalin ? You would wouldn’t you ?
