The factory gets paid in step #1 (many can accept direct wire transfers or have Hong Kong/Singapore/ or even New York banks). Sometimes a deposit is made to start an order and the final amount is paid to release it from the factory after inspection.

There are agents who can handle funds on your behalf and when you work with a new factory or it is a super large order, it is common to use a service that will escrow the funds until the goods have been inspected and released.

Sometimes we even have our own staff monitor the assembly and packaging inside the factory to be sure the quality of parts we ordered are actually going into each piece. This is normal every day in Chinese factories, they know the game.

Here’s how tariffs work (I import stuff from china)

1. I find a Chinese manufacturer of widgets and negotiate with them. One of their first questions is, what incoterms do I require? I tell them EXW which makes their quotation the easiest to provide.

EXW means that once the goods are ready, I’ll send my shipping agent to go get them and bring them to me in my country.

2. I call my agent and tell them to get the goods. They ask a lot of questions about the contents of the goods and figure out which HS code to use, which is a classification of what the goods are (such as bicycle tires, or unfinished lumber, or whatever).

3. The agent prepares an assload of documentation for my shipment. They send a truck to the Chinese warehouse, get the stuff, load it into a container, take it to a shipyard. It’s loaded, boat moves to the US, boat is then unloaded, and my container is put into an inspection queue.

4. The shipping agent forwards the documents about my container, which has not been released, to US customs. US customers decides if they want to manually inspect it or not, and then issues an invoice for the taxes. My agent calls me and says Mr. Nucleative, your customs bill is $9,845.50.

I pay them, they pay the US customs office. Customs releases my container.

5. The truck is cleared to pick up my container and drive it to my warehouse.

6. Now I unload and sell the goods to my customers.

Did you notice in step #4 that I paid the import tariffs? Now my cost to get the goods to my customers went way up. My margins are pretty thin, so I can’t do this business unless I charge my customers more or else I’m running a charity. Now, my customers have to pay me more. That money goes straight to the US government.

Hypothetically now it’s less unattractive to set up a factory in the USA, encouraging more local jobs. But damn, did you know we also need to import rubber, and metal, and machine parts, and cardboard for packaging, and all the other raw supplies either way? The local factories, if there are any, can probably not increase production to meet demand anyways, at least not in a month or two. Does anybody remember what happend when demand outstrips supply?

There is no rocket science here, just people learning from the wrong people.

Get a supported version of Linux on there, give it a static IP on your LAN, install Pihole by following the guide at

https://pi-hole.net/

Update the DNS ip that your router gives out to the IP of your netbook, and voilà, most ads can’t load any more.

Even mobile phone apps that have ads won’t show the ads when you’re connected through your home network.

Pihole

I too have a nearly perfect replica of this piece. I’m selling each piece, which is part of an extremely limited run of 1000 pieces in total produced this week on demand, signed and sealed in a Tupperware container for freshness, for $2,990 each, worldwide shipping is just another $299.

The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)

They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.

That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.

Me too but here’s one useful function:

Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.

Those kind of things have to be done in every single district and costs millions of dollars. Unless there’s a probable chance, it’s probably better to save the cash and use it for something that could get results in the future

I think there are two answers to this. First, there is a long standing tradition in the US that the new guy doesn’t put the old guy in jail.

Look at so many other countries and so much of world history to see how that style of governing is problematic to the transfer of power from one regime to the next and why it causes its own set of problems.

The second, and arguably the most important, is that the American people as a whole can elect whoever the fuck they want to be president, no matter what any mid level beurocrat, judge, lawmaker or even current president or other official says about the issue, even if said person is in jail at the time.

The law and its punishments should still apply to all, including the president and former presidents, however.

Especially if you did it only 45 times or so at $45 invested and got $26,500 back a day after the election

So Musk’s investment in election interference of what, a million bucks a day? towards bribing people to vote now looks like an utter pittance relative to what he made back in just one day.

Of course these guys know that investing in elections has a good ROI.

He seems to lack competence in many ways, but some of the guys around him are a whole lot more conniving and potentially effective.

It’s also not likely Trump feels any urge to hire a somewhat moderate(ish) cabinet of professionalls like he did last time. I assume he learned his lesson given that they all eventually turned on him.

So let’s see. I think he’s spent the past 4 years surrounding himself with some bad hombres, to borrow a saying, and now he’s ready to act with fewer guardrails.

You were told this?

I really wonder how they get a representative sample these days. I haven’t answered my phone for years and I’m surely not the only one.

Do they only call, or do they send DMs on TikTok or what?

And if you work for a company that supports causes you don’t agree with… Move on.

I could lend out my old computer with old games installed to somebody else to use, right?

What if instead i lend my hard drive, is it still the same thing? Or what if I lend out my remote access screen sharing password to my old PC. Still the same?

Maybe the legal workaround is to game the system here a bit - forget downloading executables which feels a lot like pirating and just lend access to a system that is legally running the original license.

You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.

A long time ago his clan beat out some other clans so that makes him king.

I’m pretty sure anyone is welcome to challenge his assertion of authority at any time by the same means.

Dear higher power:

Please cause this guy to profoundly lose the election so there is absolutely no further attention given and the media networks can finally lay off the stories because all issues have become moot.

Ramen.

It’s important to realize that in most democracies this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the system. The founders of these systems wanted to ensure that major decisions were deliberated, not rushed into, and that there wasn’t a lot of room for an executive power to make snap choices that would determine the future of the nation.