AThing4String

As a good faith answer to your question that I hope you read with an open mind -

Between the tariffs and what the tariffs have done to the market (reducing options for supply makes the market less competitive and increases demand in other ways), my industry's publicly available market costs went up a few tenths of a percentage point shy of 50% in the last two months alone.

In my industry, to pay your bills (your rent, your taxes, your employees, your lights, your freight, marketing, R&D, liabilities, funds to replace equipment when it breaks, etc) you are targeting 25-30% "direct" margin - minimum, if you're barely treading water - which is (sell price - material costs) / sell price. With that math, a company that was previously reporting a 40% margin (say ($100 - $60)/$100) that had a 50% increase in material costs is now making a 10% margin (($100 - $60x1.5)/$100 = (100-90)/100 = 10%). That's bankruptcy.

That's not considering that costs have been increasing for more than just the last 2 months - anyone with a wallet knows that already, our industry number is 80% YOY increase in basic costs (margin math: 40% ==> negative 8%) - or that the true costs of tariffs haven't even hit yet.

We also cannot pass an 80% increase in costs on to our customers without literally triggering industry recession if not collapse. We can barely pass on 40% and "tightening belts" to make absorbing the other 40% possible (margin math: 40% ==> 16%, half the general target) means good guys and gals with families lose honest, hard-working jobs. Even for a highly efficient business, being told the government is going to send you an extra 25-104% bill because fuck you, that's why is going to be a heart attack level shock.

This is local manufacturing - the exact businesses who tariffs are supposed to be encouraging to do business in the US. A LOT of manufacturing is like this - it turns out tariffing the ever living fuck out of literally everything includes raw materials that you can't get here that manufacturers need. This is literally just for our divisions' own internal numbers too - no CEO pay coming out of this. Administratively, we run a skeleton crew already to make sure our costs are competitive, and it costs us hard already in turnover due to burnout.

The number of meetings we've had trying to figure out how on earth we keep our doors open without crashing an industry and then closing our doors anyway has quite literally had people in tears in the board room.

Are there companies who will use this for profiteering? Absolutely, tons of them. The companies who have the luxury of doing so are either are "inflexible demands" (ie food and medical care) or extremely large monopolies. Smaller companies, "discretionary spending", and highly competitive markets like mine are just going to hold their breath and try not to drown, raise prices where they have to, inevitably go out of business in droves, THEN get bought up by a large monopoly who will make an 80% price increase look like child's play because fuck you, everyone else closed.

We don't need to fuck ourselves, Trump is doing that for us, thank you. And yes, people without jobs or who have nothing left after groceries don't buy a lot of luxury keyboards, especially after their costs go up significantly - something I'm sure they have considered once or twice or repeatedly at checks watch 2 in the morning when they wish they could sleep, if they're having the sort of time we're having here.

I think tariffs are generally applied based on date of customs arrival, not time of order - discussion on wine imports who order months+ in advance as well as some small businesses getting hit unexpectedly on long-ordered goods, plus my own industry that has a several month lead time on orders and some bills we have received. I'm less familiar with that mechanic but I don't know that placing the order before that time will help you if it has to ship from overseas.

sweats in supply chain management

And 85% of medical isotopes come from Canada!

That does get audited - customs officials do have a look at a lot, and frequently check products against stated claims.

At least this is my experience with my own company's cross border business - labeling, valuation, documentation of sales and invoices, etc, all matter. We've had shipments to the US stopped and held before over what you'd consider minor issues with labeling or newer guys at the ship desk leaving i's undotted or t's uncrossed. I've had some panicked calls about costing and valuation documentation in big shipments. There were some loopholes to a few rules, but they were small and because these tariffs apply to pretty much everything from any given country, I have a hard time imagining there would be major work arounds for this.

Smaller drop-shippers with more discreet packaging might be able to get away with reducing their numbers - or at least rolling the dice on not getting checked - but for large commercial shipments, absolutely not.

Lost the birth parent lottery hard.

Won the in-law lottery like you can't believe.

My actual parents are raging mentally-ill disasters who are far too consumed by their own shit to realize they have kids, or that kids aren't meant to be used as crutches and emotional punching bags. They love me in name but not action, and are generally disintereted in me unless they think they can use me for something. They have no idea who I am as a person, frequently forget where I live (same place for 6 years) and what I do for work (4 years), and couldn't pick my spouse out of a lineup (7 years). I haven't given them grandkids, I left a prestigious sounding but financially unwise program to do generic business admin, I live far enough away they can't "invite" me over to do tens if thousands of dollars in free labor anymore, I won't let Mom call me out of the blue to scream and insult me when she's having a bad day, and I won't "loan" them money, so from their perspective, what's the point of me?

In my early marriage I used to HOUND them with calls trying and failing to get 5 minutes of their attention - they'd literally answer and then set the phone down and ignore it or just talk to anyone else and ignore me with the phone to their ear - the problem was so bad I could barely get them to commit to meeting my now-husband until we were already engaged, and even then it was a fight (it took multiple months of proposing a time every weekend to even schedule them for a video call - in person was off the table. They have regular jobs and schedules). So I stopped trying around 6 years ago and said I'd answer when they called, but they could call me.

In the 6 years since I believe we've had about 7 phone calls or so, and about as many texts - that's for both parents total, not each. Not Christmas or birthdays, not to actually catch up, just Mom wanting to yell - she used to start the call already angry, THEN start asking questions about my life until she found something to yell about. She used to frequently do this and accuse me of lying if I didn't report sufficient failures, then have a go at me for lying. Eventually blocked for my own sanity. Dad getting caught by his siblings not even knowing where I lived at a family function and trying to cram all the trivia about my life into a short phone call so he could go back to the party and save face (this actually happened twice). Dad calling and without prompting comparing my mom to a man-eating tiger with a taste for my flesh personally (literally), then asking me to unblock her anyway because now she was treating HIM that way ("I feel for the tiger keeper, but I am not the tiger-keeper's meat shield."). 100% promise rate from Dad that he'd call again next week and then not hearing from him for well over a year - just recently got a text because he heard from a different relative that I bought a house and got caught looking bad again - he did not want to talk more.

My MIL frequently accidentally refers to me as her child and then trips up when she tries to refer to my spouse - "auto complete" in her brain says the spouse of a child should be an in-law, but they are also her child and in fact is her ACTUAL child. She also adds me to her Total Kid Count (high) and when she has to walk someone through the timing on That Many Kids, realizes she put one too many in there. When I want to call "my mom", I call her. We just bought a house, and I prioritized one with a guest room for her frequent visits (every time: "Is it ok if I spend a day seeing my siblings when I'm I'm town?" "Of course?? When has it ever not been??" "Well I did say I was coming to see you two!!"). She calls just to chat multiple times a week and I know I can tell her anything. She's not perfect, but she literally taught me what unconditional love looked and felt like, and has been there for me through every win and loss I've had over the last 7 years. She is the envy of our married friend group.

My FIL is great and we get on well, but I think it's a standard positive in-law relationship. When I want Dad advice, I call an old family friend who fell out with my folks over them generally being the people described above, to make an extremely long story short. We try to talk once a week on a schedule - but he's busy with a family of his own and a demanding career in addition to the gaggle of my siblings he volunteered to Dad-up, so it's more structured. It's always meant a ton to me that he still prioritizes carving out that time just to be a listening ear and a friend. He's been a great example to me of what it means to be a self-accountable, good person in every way, what admitting you're wrong and changing for the better looks like, and how to just generally be a kick-ass community member. He's the one who gets the Father's Day call around here.

All this to say, just because your assigned parents are a couple of slouches doesn't mean you're cursed to never have that parental support - even if you don't cut contact with your assigned parents, please give yourself permission and space in your life to find some better ones. I highly recommend joining some hobbies - especially old person hobbies - or volunteering to make those connections. We all know it's important to have peer friends, but Older Mentor Friends are also so freaking critical - my knitting group ladies got me through SO MUCH before I had that solid support system, and they're still a huge wealth of knowledge, community, and support.

It gets better, dude.

Honestly actually thanks for this - doom scrolling late at night and feeling 0/10 hopeless.

Shit's bleak, but if there's legitimately nothing we can do about it we might as well lay on the railroad tracks, eh?

I'm not a biologist, so forgive me for being a complete layperson about this - but to check my understanding, this means that the material in the vaccine itself ('immunogen') has had the sugar stripped, correct? In other words, if we think of the sugar as "armour" on the virus, the vaccine isn't injecting some sort of armor removing enzyme, it's sending "armourless training dummies" into your body that THEY used an enzyme on, so your immune cells can prepare to hit their "vital organs"?

Reading the abstract itself it was a bit hard to parse, but we do try!

Not a streamer, but MKIceandFire does long-form YouTube that fits the rest of the criteria. He also publishes new videos at what can only be described as a frightening pace, especially for hotly anticipated games right after release, in case your preference for streamers was due to anticipated volume per session.

I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I'm not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I'm doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I'm actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I'll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.

750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we're talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??

Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.

I meant to reply to you earlier and accidentally replied to the whole thread - I agree with the sentiment below. Honestly, using AI as a coding partner when learning is actually a pretty great use for it, if you're reviewing it properly, testing, and know its limits. This initiative is much more focused on the same sorts of low quality content farms and c-suite "cost cutting" initiatives that have been making gaming suck since long before AI. If you're the sort of developer doing game jams, focusing on learning rather than volume, and taking pride in your work the quality will show through regardless.