Check the Price of ACM before you bid

[TimToad]

I'm no fan of tarrifs, I know who pays the final bill. However, we can't all be short sighted by focusing on the cost of one product or one industry. Ultimately, private American companies are losing a vast amount of sales opportunity to China and the world due to their aggressive sales tactics, denial of imported American goods, and UN violations of copyright law.

Yes the tarrifs are bad, but sometimes you accept the lesser of two evils. In America's case, our politicans have recently just been too cowardly or too paid-off to do anything about it.

We even see problems in our own industry. Chinese printers and software completely ripping off copyrighted designs without any respect to international agreements on patent law. Eventually that is going to hurt us here too.

If American corporate leaders are losing all these sales opportunities, how is it that our GDP has remained fairly steady year after year since globalization has started even though our percentage of the global GDP has steadily dropped? Its probably because they have their fingers in so many multinational subsidiaries that money and capital really doesn't know national boundaries anymore. With headquarters, banking, investments, etc. located around the globe, there really are very few truly "American" large companies anymore.

The genie will never be put back in the bottle and you aren't going to reverse trends now being buoyed by the buying power and influence of 2 billion newly conscripted mass consumers in India and China.

Its an interconnected world and none of us individually are responsible for the long term trends occurring here and abroad. Collectively though, our buying habits, apathy, ignorance of economics and our political choices have enormous influence on these issues. Where this whole exercise breaks down is in the rapidly destabilizing effects of extreme income and wealth inequity here in the U.S.

During the 50's-70's when our global dominance was unquestioned, top tax rates were in the 75-90% on very high incomes above the first several million earned, union membership was substantial and the ratio between executive and average worker pay was roughly 30 to 1. Now its 400 to 1 and both corporate taxes and high income tax rates are a fraction of what they were during that greatest era of economic expansion. Rebalancing those factors will only do so much before more automation and he climate crisis makes us all rethink what "work" actually is.

 

[LarryB]

I’ve been paying the same price through Reece Supply in Houston the past 6 months.

 

[Johnny Best]

The Genie could be put back in the bottle if they stopped the abusive practices in finance and used a drastic simplification of finance.
Take the largest telecom-equipment manufacturer company in the world like Huawei, run by the Chinese government. They have stolen all the intellectual information from companies like Apple and Nokia. They go into places and cut costs and sell their wares to countries cheaper than other companies. They are not allowed to operate in the US. Canada deals with them. Right now the US has had Canada arrest the female CFO in Vancouver on conspiring to defraud banks causing them to violate American sanctions on Iran. She has been released on 7.5 million dollar bond.

This is way off the subject of the ACM being more expensive but after reading Toad's post above and pushing his ideas on magic Genies and my apathy and ignorance and then ending up with global warming, well I just got down on the floor under my desk and clasped my hands over my head. Maybe my robot friends who work with me, Michael Mutoh and Sammy Summa will save my butt from the doomsday.

 

[Clair]

Working it back to automation, within the next 50 years, we'll likely have the technology to implement a lot of really efficient automation. The question will be: Are we better off because of it? If you have a plant full of robots replacing 500 employees and you just have 50 support staff, unless you have jobs for those other 450 people, you're likely not making a good choice. It's going to be a similar situation to the "should we outsource or keep making in America?" question we faced in the 70's. There is no clear answer one way or another, but there is a general consensus that the majority of Americans aren't happy with the end result of that decision. Approximately 40% of the population want to rewind the clocks to a time where the American worker was valued and had a job and career that allowed them to provide reasonably well for their family. The "other" 40% of the population doesn't want to rewind the clock, but is equally dissatisfied with the end result as they believe while outsourcing may not be a bad thing, we did not do it responsibly so that the working class can also benefit from the massive savings the ultra wealthy and major corporations have. Essentially 80% of the population agrees that we screwed it up, but sadly we can't agree on much after that

Nowadays almost everything needs to be automotized, as we saw during the pandemic, it really helps. So even a table tennis trainer can be replaced by a ping pong robot, so no surprises

 

[CanuckSigns]

What bothers me is as the price of import aluminum keeps going up due to the tariffs it was supposed to make domestic aluminum more competitive right? But they keep increasing the cost of domestic material along with the imports so its always way more than import even with tariffs.

My understanding is that the US doesn't have the ability to produce enough domestic aluminum to meet demand, and as a result has to import most of their aluminum, mostly from Canada. When the aluminum tariffs were announced, most of us up here were scratching our heads, why would you tariff something you can't produce domestically. But then I remembered it came from the same person who declared Canada a national security threat and it all made sense...

 

[DPD]

Just sold a bunch of 4x8's and went to order a bundle of 10 panels only to notice the price jumped about 20%. ... and no more quantity discounts from NGlantz I guess.

Just a reminder to check prices of your staples before jumping in...

I've noticed prices are going up on product also. Additionally, mfgs and suppliers have cut back on their time guarantees. Hyperinflation here we go!!