DaveMatthews
Well-Known Member
Do you support the actions that put hundreds of thousands out of work?
With 125% tariffs, will the e-bike market die?
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Need to know who you are speaking about.
Chargeride
Well-Known Member
I dont want to say this but..
Worrying about bike prices that are incredibly cheap for most people not buying top end gear is absolute first world problems.
You can buy a full suspension two wheel drive fatbike with a 20ah battery in America for 1600 dollars at a perfectly good enough quality.
In a world without china and Taiwan that would be 20 grand
Worrying about bike prices that are incredibly cheap for most people not buying top end gear is absolute first world problems.
You can buy a full suspension two wheel drive fatbike with a 20ah battery in America for 1600 dollars at a perfectly good enough quality.
In a world without china and Taiwan that would be 20 grand
Mr. Coffee
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Where did you get the 20 grand figure from?
There are numerous bespoke bicycle manufacturers in the United States. If you go all-in on a custom frame build, custom paint job, and super-fancy high-end components you might get your bike a bit over ten grand. Most of those manufacturers only make a few hundred bikes a year or fewer and are pretty high touch (you usually have a personal bike fit and you get the CAD drawings of the frame build for your approval before they start work).
The key point is that the expertise to design and build bikes exists in the Untied States in adequate quantities. But that expertise is all focused on the very high end. You'd need to throw a pile of capital at that expertise to scale up the manufacturing and automate the heck out of the manufacturing process to build bikes at a reasonable price. I think that is doable given time and money. Of course we just vaporized a few trillion dollars so there is going to be less money to go around for that kind of stuff.
On the other hand scaling up bicycle manufacturing in the States is likely to be a better investment than the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on AI in either its LLM form or for self-driving cars. On the other other hand we'd need to do that for every single manufactured good in existence if we want an autarchy and that is likely to be expensive even for a formerly wealthy country.
The dirty secret is that bringing back manufacturing to the States won't bring back manufacturing jobs. Because anything we bring back will be automated at the science-fiction level and scale.
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jabberwocky
Well-Known Member
I think this really gets to the heart of the issue. The idea that we should manufacture everything in the US is basically saying the US should swap places with China, which is a significantly poorer country than the US. If we had large amounts of unemployed people there would at least be some logic to that, but we don't. So its basically saying that huge swaths of the populace should swap their higher paying service sector jobs for lower paying manufacturing jobs for [reasons].
What a great way to live life, waiting to play the presidents next "trick" Manufacturing is dead, it's not coming back, at least not as we knew it
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Life is good. Unpredictability predictable.
Roamers is offering to "help" people by telling them to buy stocks when market volatility is at a high. The markets could completely collapse, or suffer a huge down turn at any time. Of course OTOH, markets could rise but I see little reason for them doing so in the current environment. Unpredictability is never good for the markets making investing a scary proposition
DaveMatthews
Well-Known Member
Do you support the actions taken by the Trump admin to fire hundreds of thousands of Gov workers?
Correct, but never with $ you can't afford to lose or that may be needed in the short term.
I support eliminating waste. A government hiree should not consider themselves lifetime employeed.
harryS
Well-Known Member
Ten years ago. I bought my first ebike kit (also bought a complete commercially made ebike). The assembly manual for the former had a link to the motor maker's website, which proudly showed rows of women tediously hand wiring motor cores. Truly a sweat shop. Since then, chinese engineers have automated this job, and many others. Always amazed by advances in manufactiuring.
I started working in semiconductors,, but a thousand folks next door in the plant were running punch presses and lathes to build the products that supported our research. Didn't realize it at the time, but our technology eliminated their jobs as we transitioned in electronics. Later, the Asian outfits eliminated my job, but I'm here today.
Back in the 60's, I always told my colleg classmates that robots would eventually do all the work. That time is here, and it's really going to be a very hard revolution for humans.
I started working in semiconductors,, but a thousand folks next door in the plant were running punch presses and lathes to build the products that supported our research. Didn't realize it at the time, but our technology eliminated their jobs as we transitioned in electronics. Later, the Asian outfits eliminated my job, but I'm here today.
Back in the 60's, I always told my colleg classmates that robots would eventually do all the work. That time is here, and it's really going to be a very hard revolution for humans.
Eliminating waste is good and should be done more often than it is. It should be done with careful vetting though. Companies and government will always have surges that require hirring additional help during busy times or special programs. Often this help is retained long after the need for them. Laying people off is not an easy job so it often gets delayed or never done. Nobody wants to be the hatchet man.
Chargeride
Well-Known Member
The technology of just the battery would be ten grand without the innovation and mass low cost production of the far east.
Western tech before china was insanely expensive.
DaveMatthews
Well-Known Member
What do you think of the fact that this current admin is spending more than the previous?
What waste has been eliminated?
Has there been any fraud?
Chargeride
Well-Known Member
Trump announces new tariffs, panic over.
As far as eliminating waste goes, yes, a good idea. However having mass firings only to hire people back when you realize their jobs were important and some aspects on society can't function without them is at best poor policy but we've come to expect poor policy from this administration. The trillions DOGE was supposed to save is now billions (if that) and all this waste and fraud has supposedly been uncovered yet not one arrest? GOP spending is at least as out of control if not worse than democrat spending. Firing people willie nilly and stating the cause was "poor performance" follows that employee for a lifetime. Many of the fired workers were the hardest working in their segment. Such poor policy
Mr. Coffee
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About that.
Chinese manufacturing cost advantages are 100 percent about lower labor costs. If the product is more amenable to automated manufacturing, like a product with no large moving parts like a battery that cost advantage will be proportionately less.
It really comes down to willingness to make the capital investment to make it happen. Nobody in their right mind is going to make that capital investment when things are this volatile.
Chargeride
Well-Known Member
Im amazed to discover that Poland makes more batteries than America.
jabberwocky
Well-Known Member
As time goes on, I expect manufacturing for most stuff to move to where its most commonly purchased regardless of government policy. As automation improves, labor costs become more irrelevant and it makes sense to just build the factory wherever its easiest to distribute your product (assuming that location has a supply of skilled people to build and maintain the automation equipment and the necessary distribution infrastructure). I would still expect plenty of products to be made one place worldwide. One advantage of worldwide free trade is you don't have to find a market for your product in a single country; it allows niche products to be much more viable to develop and sell.
The deal the US has been offering for decades is that other countries with low labor costs get in influx of USA cash to boost their economy to make our stuff, and we get less expensive products in return. I think many people (including some in this thread) have a very romantic idea of what undoing that would actually entail.
The deal the US has been offering for decades is that other countries with low labor costs get in influx of USA cash to boost their economy to make our stuff, and we get less expensive products in return. I think many people (including some in this thread) have a very romantic idea of what undoing that would actually entail.
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