Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

That's why there's such a strong push towards "alternative facts"

Ships can be rerouted while in transit. I bet it is extremely unusual for a container ship, but we do live in interesting times.

That's the thing. "Mainstream" Media in the US are no longer bound to the fairness doctrine. Thus, we have corporate ownership which steers how a story is written or at all. Independent media beholden only to their viewers (not corporate benefactors) are incentivized to do what you want more effectively.

Someday colleges will have Tubers, who outrank Chairs.

Echoing davidw's comments down thread, I would love if HN put a collapsed, expandable LLM summary like this after every Youtube link.

Speak for yourself. I have no such llm as easily accessible as this comment was.

An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.

An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.

HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.

I'm undecided. I hate these llm summaries, and nearly always downvote them. They're rarely helpful, often unpleasant, and very very lazy.

But... I may hate links to videos even more. A summary of a video isn't lazy, it's nearly a requirement. So, an upvote for now, at least.

The problem is that no layman can know whether the summary is correct without watching the video, so it takes 11 minutes instead of 10 to assess the information with the summary.

You’re right, but if I want an LLM to summarize a video I can do it myself. I come to HN to talk to humans; talking to AIs makes me depressed. That’s why I downvote immediately every time anyone posts LLM content here.

Be the change you want to see in the world. You can write that blog!

Hmm, I’ve been using the phrase a fox in the hen house. Seems apt?

IMO, which isn’t worth a lot, it’ll go on as long as Trump refuses to eat crow. China hunkered down under extreme duress during COVID and emerged stable. We barely managed to survive much milder restrictions. And that was a global natural disaster of no one’s choosing. In this situation it’s all artificial, but it stokes the nationalism of literally every other country than America. The imperialism and condescension at work, the pure malice towards our allies and partners, it all works against America. China will never bend and nor do they need to or should they. In fact at this point it’s probably a point of national pride to maximize the embarrassment of Trump, and national strategy to push him into a corner hoping he lashes out more and further isolates America from its partners. This is an opportunity for China to break out of the corner America and its partners put it into and flip the roles. Once done, and Trump is neutered and America reduced, China will have a clear path to ascendancy as the primary global super power.

I’m actually not sure this is all bad. A flatter more multipolar world is probably better for everyone, including America. But I think it’ll be a tough time in our history and the people who voted for Trump will be the ones who bear the most pain for his delusional misunderstanding of the way the world actually is vs what he wishes it were.

But if I were to put $5 down, I’d wager this lasts until the GOP political fortunes have been decimated through their hubris and magical thinking and Trump is personally hung out to dry for his strategic blunder in launching a 195 front war.

... what hope exactly.

The republicans in congress are so lost in the sauce that they won't challenge the great orange hope in the quarter. The soonest I think we can see anyone fighting back, politically, won't happen until the midterms AT BEST.

This is assuming that the republicans/trump don't come up with some issue that they can swing the midterms on and/or don't gut the electoral system to the point that they can't lose.

And even then I'm not sure that congress can actually do anything to fix this issue while trump is still in the white house and impeachment and removal seems unachievable. Say congress reverses it's delegation of tarrif power to the president. What happens if trump just does not obey congress, much like they are not obeying the supreme court. Do the republicans in congress have enough of a spine to actually remove him? How do we assure that removal actually takes place in the event that we can even meet the threshold? The man still, ostensibly, still has control of the military. Perhaps the military, secret service, any other guys with guns just refuses to help him resist congress like they did when he tried to deploy the military after jan 6th.. but they seem to have already cleaned house at the pentagon, with hagseth getting rid of more people who aren't sufficiently loyal enough to do crimes and/or coup the fucking government for trump.

shit is getting scary.

Varies based on market. Where middle men actually do things and add lots of value they don't generally care.

When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.

Those with high markup wouldn't get affected that much. Those with lower markup will get affected more, and they need to show the tariff charge.

The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.

No they didn’t. If anything it was being discussed and most likely only for Amazon Haul, which is not normal Amazon.

That said I wish they would.

Source? I did not see this active anywhere, only mentioned.

> The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades.

Common misconception that trade prevents war and war prevents trade. Turns out that it is wrong: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501782466/trad...

That isn't the lesson from Russia invading Ukraine.

The lesson from Russia invading Ukraine is that the presence of authoritarians anywhere is a threat to democracies everywhere.

The kind of people who crush freedom aren't content to just do so within their own borders and will eventually do so to others around them.

As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.

>Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading.

World War 1 begs to differ, hell even the Russian invasion of Crimea back in 2014 begs to differ. Economic interdependence dosen't stop authoritarians, it only threatens democracies with a larger margin for dissent.

So what you're saying is, there still won't be a world war, but everyone else might go to war with the US.

Any assumption that there is targeting or any sort of planning by the chaos goblins we currently have running this administration is long on hope and short on reality.

>all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings.

It was comical how quickly amazon back pedaled on showing tariffs transparently in pricing as soon as the whitehouse complained.

Dictionary definition of oligarchy: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

If you're "kissing the ring", you're not in control. The people with the ring are.

To spell it out, the US is not governed by a billionaire oligarchy.

is it not obvious the oligarchs control the globalist politicians and not the nationalists?

Is it controversial to say that if you really wanted to "fight the oligarchy", your policy positions would be pretty similar to the America first agenda (sans social issues)?

Ford is a bad example because the Chinese never really liked American cars. Before the EV boom they preferred BBA (Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi). Right now it's homegrown brands.

Pharmaceuticals would be a slightly better example.

GM used to sell more cars in China than in the US .Same with VW , Mercedes and BMW

Whatever your hopes and dreams around domestic manufacturing, blanket tariffs capriciously imposed at random are unlikely to get any dream closer to reality, except perhaps the dream of total devastation of all manufacturing.

Let's look at what an actual domestic manufacturer has to say about tariffs[1]?

Oh, looks bad! Turns out, manufacturers import stuff, add value to it, and sell it for more money!

Hopefully we'll get more cast iron plants in Cape Cod. I'm off to the mill!

[1]https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2025/04/09/trump-tar...

> I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best.

I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.

Why would the US and EU losing manufacturing be bad?

> How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?

What worries me more is that the US has been funding global military security through deficit spending funded by foreign investors (who got their dollars from US trade). We're cutting legs off that stool, so we might see more wars and a declining dollar, never mind fewer cheap imports.

> In other words, the relationship with hundreds of countries has been very one-sided for a long time. US industry needs to export to thrive, but if countries like Turkey impose 140% tariffs on our autos and trucks, markets are de-facto shut down.

These comparisons (and conclusions of one-sidedness) always leave the greatest benefit the US has enjoyed: access to a massive labor force willing to do work most Americans aren't[1] at wages lower than are Legal in the US.

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...

You lost me at Kevin O’Leary. He’s historically been a dishonest and unethical snake oil salesman and I doubt he’s changed.

One of my career highlights was having him explain how much it will do for my career to do his project at a discount (I was helping a friend as a favor) and I told Kevin that it was just as likely to have the opposite effect.

Kevin O'Leary is not a credentialed economist.

I think you do a good job of high-lighting the underlying problem.

Which is not being discussed enough.

And that the current situation can go on a long time but not forever.

I think the above quote is accounting for both constrained supply and reduced demand from rising prices. Vendors consolidate their product lines to remove redundant (ish) offerings due to reduced demand and the new difficulties in managing supply chains. I.e. a shirt may only come in 3 colors instead of 10, and it may be harder to get the popular color because vendors are less likely to keep a large stock in warehouses.

It doesn't violate market dynamics that I can see, though I'm far from an expert.

One possible complication is that there’s quite a lot of waste that’s tolerated in pursuit of fashion and variety. (For example, Ross Dress For Less specializes in liquidating excess inventory.)

So I wonder how that plays out? My guess is that retailers take fewer risks when ordering, sticking with products that they know they can sell, even if prices are higher.

But they will still guess wrong sometimes.

There's a lot of levers and people to squeeze along the way:

Currency Manipulation to relatively increase Chinese manufacturing income

Relocating manufacturing based on tariffs

Retail margin

US based design & engineering of products

Advertising and other marketing activities

Depending on the product some will be passed onto consumers. But for something like Nike's it's probably more like fewer shoe designers, Footlockers, less advertising, smaller contracts to athletes, more manufacturing in non-China countries, and so on. Everyone is going to take a bit of a bit and it's probably not going to be super noticable to any one part.

No reason to expect empty shelves. Higher prices for stuff that can't be moved out of China. Sure. But it's a tariff, not an embargo.

In addition tik-tok/insta are having post after post warning people that the shelves are going to be empty which tends to feedback into itself.

If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly. Other people see the shelves emptying and buy more too.

Going to be messy.

All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.

Yeah, my Great Aunt and her friends would coordinate their purchase of sugar for making preserves each year w/ the local grocer --- while each of them could have bought all they needed at once, his stocking couldn't accommodate that, so everyone would let him know when they would start, and stop, buying a 5 lb. bag each week for each year's preserves.

It's that one person on the highway driving just a little too fast and a little too close to the person in front of them, then they tap on their brakes and it starts the chain reaction of 3 hours of bumper to bumper rush hour traffic.

No. The price insensitive shoppers will buy everything and the shelves will be empty.

Which will cause a significant revenue issue for the retailer.

And depending on how much you’ve thought ahead, a significant supply chain issue for you.

Notably, this is really going to screw everyone using JIT supply chains.

No, we really don’t. We don’t need a bot bringing marginally positive value for a single person and shitting the bed, cluttering everything with stupid useless noise and bringing negative value for everyone else. "Be more like Reddit" is really not something HN should aspire to. If you like Reddit, it’s ok to be both there and here.

Please let's not make this place any more like Reddit than it's already become lately.

Paper is one of the things one should be least worried about.

We source chips from Canada because it's marginally cheaper to source it from there. It's not like the US doesn't have a ton of sources of wood pulp. Canada just has bigger cheaper sources (comparing like for like quality).

We also burn a lot of "less than ideal for paper" chips for energy rather than feed them into a paper mill, also for marginal cost per result reasons.

Wood chips suitable for paper pulp are also hugely elastic in the same way that recycled metal is. Huge volume is either directed into the supply chain or not based on marginal price. The people making every wood product are choosing what do with their waste based on chip prices and energy prices. Even your local tree service is choosing what to chip and where to dump based on economic conditions and balancing act between relative prices.

If you wanna be worried about something be worried about stuff we don't make much of in the US. Super high volume commodity widgets made from metal, all manner of electronics, etc, basically the kind of stuff where our only domestic capacity is super high dollar stuff to serve defense and aerospace.

Who is “us”? Do you work for a grocery store?

[dead]

the question is which shelves. Not ALL shelves. only 13% of our stuff comes from China. they might run out of toys and electric shavers but there will still be a lot left to buy.

Even if the future of the tariffs themselves were at all predictable many outlets are allergic to any connecting of dots. I saw an article from The Hill just yesterday that took the line that the RTO mandate for federal workers was an actual attempt to "improve productivity" at face value without an ounce of push back in an article about how poorly the RTO is going.

The big outlets are terrified to get on this admin's bad side because their current business wants to do a lot of mergers which have to be approved and the administration can tie those up for years on a whim so they're already lying down.

More concerning: I don't think the administration really knows what will happen and I lack confidence in their ability to appropriately handle any fallout.

The specifics of predictions may change, but the supply chain shock doesn’t just evaporate. Trump could transform into a 100% rational, economically wise leader today and the impacts of the past few months’ insanity would still be felt for years. Those bullets are already in flight and can’t be recalled.

Or he doesn't lower them randomly, but in response to other countries lowering their own tariffs and other protectionist measures against the US, resulting in the more "balanced" trade which, whether we agree with it or not, has been the goal all along.

But yes, whatever the reason, the situation could change too quickly for safe predictions. In 2020, the US economy had recovered from the massive disruptions of the Covid lockdowns by Q4. There were shortages of toilet paper and eggs for a while, then there were surpluses and sales for a while, and then it smoothed out.

Same number of ships, but they are skipping the shortcut through he Suez canal (and have been for a year) thus meaning they take longer and so can haul a lot less.

The United States has never had such incompetence in governance. Americans aren't accustomed to this degree of ineptness.

I had a conversation with someone who I usually respect, and would say is an intelligent person. He's a trump supporter for the manufacturing support.

He said, "It's just not that hard to get these factories back to the states. We can get that done this month."

The amount of cognitive dissonance and just outright believing the lies is astounding.

Trump won't say that states need to build those factories. He'll tell governors that they're failures for not having done it already.

Candy bars for example. They want to charge $3 for a single candy bar now, but no one wants to pay that much so they're selling them 2 for $5.

But retailers have studied that this trick isn't going to last because not everyone wants to buy candy bars in bulk, and they won't spend more than $3 for a single candy bar, which means if it goes any higher they won't by any candy bars at all.

It is not just hobbyist. My friend runs a business of smart stove tops and they do have a lot of R&D which needs small runs as they fine-tune the electronics and test them out. All the R&D is now moving out.

Engineering often needs one off PCBs until their design is trusted enough to work. That doesn't look any different from what a hobbyist wants other than the account type. (final manufacturing will likely be done by someone else)