Tariffs

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…a few quick notes.

The US reciprocal tariffs announced by Trump yesterday are not based simply on the other’s countries’ tariffs for imports of US goods; rather, they attempt to also factor in the effect of currency and of non-tariff barriers. The way the numbers were actually determined is based on a simple algorithm driven by relative trade flows.  Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen explains how it works.  Here’s some detail from the US Trade Representative.

Also from the USTR, a very long document containing a country-by-country analysis of non-barriers faced by US imports.

Interesting post from a guy whose company builds machine tools in Japan:

I’m on the machine builder side of the equation, out of Japan. Looks like our product is going up 24% in price (we’ll probably absorb some, but machine tool margins are not astronomical).

We do production machines. Our biggest single customer is Apple, so when you need 100,000+ of something, you call us. If this was just a Japan trade war, we would be boned…

But it isn’t. My books were already full of projects coming back from China. Small companies with big, commodity (500k+ unit) volumes, and we were already showing that you *can* do stuff in the US at a competitive cost with good process design, smart machine selection, and existing automation. This market will be able to absorb a 20% equipment price increase, and still come out way ahed compared to building their product oversees (not just China, but bejesus… overseas *anywhere*).

So short term, this is gonna suck… but the future was going in a direction of unlimited downside, and if this is what it takes to swing that into long-term health? So be it – all of the people saying this is insanity seem to be clinging to a status quo that everyone with eyes could see is headed towards disaster – they have no better answers.

 

 

 

Conclusion: The Secret Voyage of the Kofuku Maru

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(Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)

Once they passed through the Lombok Strait, the Krait (formerly the Kofuku Maru) threaded a cautious way among islands that were irregular polka-dots of green along the Sumatra coast, Engineer McDowell and his assistant nursing his engine as if it were a cranky child prone to tantrums. One of the officers was in the wheelhouse at all times. The mixed crew of soldiers and sailors kept a careful look-out, day and night – but they had come deliberately by a route that avoided the normal shipping lanes in and around Singapore. They made a happy discovery, upon encountering other craft—mostly native fishing boats and small commerce; such craft turned around and went the other way, at top speed, upon seeing the purposefully stained and tattered Japanese flag which they flew now. By the 18th, they were a bare 22 miles from Singapore, lurking with intent among the islands star-scattered to the south of the city, searching for a deserted and unobserved spot within striking distance of Keppel Harbor. Anchoring off Panjang Island at 4 in the morning, they decided that spot would do, for disembarking the six members of the canoe teams, and deadly cargo: Lyon, Davidson, and Page, with the three naval ratings: Walter Falls, Arthur “Joe” Jones and A.W. Huston. In two weeks exactly, the Krait would return to the rendezvous at Panjang to retrieve the six … if all went according to plan.

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About That New York Times Article…

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There is a lot of hubub on the nets concerning the NY Times article outlining the three-year history of the relationship between the US and Ukraine militaries during the Russian invasion. It’s fascinating, and while the larger strategic issues of the war are pushed into the background in favor of tactical and operational considerations, it fills in important details. Given the length (13,000 words) and the research involved, I’m sure there is a book in the works somewhere.

Given that, there’s something strange going on.

There is little in the article that should be shocking to anyone who has been paying attention for the past three years. It doesn’t take a proverbial “leaked Signal chat” to know that we have been providing the Ukrainians not only with supply, training, and planning support but also with ISR plugged right into the kill chain. We were everything but (officially) boots on the ground.

Problems in paradise between American and Ukrainian military planners? A staple of coalition warfare. The details are interesting, but the overall tenor is not surprising

That there were opportunities on the battlefield lost through miscommunication and political meddling? These dangers are present (and realized) in every war, and it’s the mark of a general’s ability to navigate those shoals at the highest levels of policy that gives them their place in history. George Marshall was a grandmaster at it. Mark Milley, not so much.

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Retrotech: Sending Photographs Under the Ocean, in 1925

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In my post Technology in 1925, I mentioned the Bartlane process for transmitting news photographs via undersea cable. The way that this process works is so..so…the words ‘elegant’ and ‘baroque’ both come to mind..that I thought it deserved its own post.

Transatlantic cables had been around since the 1860s, originally handling transmissions in Morse Code or its cable variant. By 1925, teleprinter transmission thru the cables was increasingly common.  Bandwidths had increased but were still quite limited–a maximum of 25 to 40 characters per second, usually multiplexed into multiple slower subchannels. These cables were strictly for telegraphy: voice telephony under the Atlantic was still many years away.  News stories could be transmitted under the ocean almost instantaneously, but the accompanying photos would take a week or more: obviously there would be commercial value if the photos could be transmitted by cable as well.

So how was telegraphy married with photography?

The Bartlane process (Bartlane comes from the names of co-inventors Maynard McFarlane and Harry Bartholomew) starts with analog-to-digital conversion of the filmed image (although neither ‘analog’ nor ‘digital’ were terms in common use at the time)..varying shades of gray at particular points in the negative (‘pixels’, in our terminology) are captured as combinations of holes punched into a paper tape. The completed tape is sent to the cable office where it is transmitted using standard cable transmission equipment..simultaneously punching a duplicate tape at the other end of the cable. The received tape is then run through a device which recreates the original picture…with quality limited by the density of pixels and the number of shades of gray that the equipment can handle.

In its original 1924 released form, the Bartlane system contained no electronic components at all–it was strictly mechanical, electrical, and optical.  How did that work?

Like this…

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The Tesla Takedown

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So general thoughts:

The first is that our public discourse is media-driven.

The second is that we do not value empiricism as a public good.

Yesterday was supposed to be the “Tesla Takedown” with mass protests at hundreds of Tesla locations across the country. Were there protests? Sure. Were the size of the protests commensurate with the hype and months of build-up that Elon was some sort of crypto-Nazi helping Trump end democracy? Please. The Tesla Takedown is the “Snow White” of political action.

Now in fairness this may be the start of something bigger in the future, but they have been building this for weeks now. You have to ask, this is all they got?

We have been here before. Leading up to the 2024 election, the Left was quite vocal in stating that Trump was a modern-day Hitler (or at least Caesar) who would end democracy. Given the displays of power the Left showed in 2020, I expected something along the lines of a post-Election color revolution with massive civil unrest; swarms of green-haired librarians and school teachers with a dash of AOC and Anttifa. Nothing happened.

So that leads to the second thought from above, why did nothing happen? Why didn’t the dog bark?

The ability to reflect is a key civic virtue. The use of reason in the form of empiricism, to use experience in order to modify our mental models and understanding of the world us is not just a life tool but a necessity for any functioning society.

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