Making steel is not "cheap" no matter where you make it. Employee wages, in the grand scheme of things, do not demonstrably affect the cost to the end user. Shipping is the greatest cost, raw materials next, and capital investment overshadow both of those. Occupational Health and Safety has both costs and benefits to a company; it is not simply a net outflow of cash, despite what some might suggest. A clean environment is a near necessity when unemployment is low and with very low barriers to employee mobility in the US, workers can choose simply to move to a nicer city and now you can't support full production. As heavy industry goes, steel mills are not particularly pollutive anyway.

That is why large international steel companies, such as Russia-based EVRAZ own steel pipe manufacturing plants in Regina SK Canada (a city with almost no heavy industry; without the steel plant and an oil refinery, none) and Pueblo, Colorado USA because of their proximity to the Oil Patch, even though they could import Russian made pipe if they wanted, which would enjoy most of the advantages you claim represent the difference between North American and non-G7 economy pipe.

The cost of building a corporate head office building and land is higher in San Francisco than in Great Falls, MT, and the cost of an acre of farmland in eastern California is higher than an acre outside of Great Falls MT not because the land or building itself is any different, but because the external forces surrounding that land and building differ. Employees with "good jobs" in each city (say, the people who would construct such buildings) can buy similar amounts of goods and services with their after-tax disposable income (after rents, other fixed costs) even though the actual wages may differ.

None of those things will change unless you change the local external forces that govern them, and those forces are notoriously stubborn and carry remarkable inertia ... governments worldwide have been trying, mostly un-successfully, to turn their Great Falls into San Franciscos for centuries, because when you have a higher cost economy it matters little locally, but you gain a huge wealth advantage versus the Great Falls of the world. Which allows you to do things like import their cheap products and allows them to do things like make more products than they can sell locally.

Probably the effect of the tariffs being "recent".

This causes disruption in the supply chain, as any predictable price adjustment would. What importers do is make large orders based on expected mid-term demand, in contrast to their usual (what business school teaches these days) on-demand or "just-in-time" parts inventory practice. This can stress the financials of the importer, as they have new, unplanned costs (large order financing, new inventory & storage costs, delayed return on investment ... parts will be in inventory, paid for, for a longer period of time before they can recover the cost through sales, versus "normal" import volumes ).

Or Not. It may also be that downstream wholesale buyers will have upped their orders from the importer, eliminating the long term storage and cost recovery period issues but possibly causing shortages (cannot fill all orders completely) amongst businesses that are ultimately competitors. Prices may rise (as they always do to reflect higher demand than supply) out of proportion to the increased import cost. If you have unfilled orders and the price of a part in shortage has risen 400% (even though the tariff might have only increased cost to the importer by 10%) ... what do you do? Allow the buyer to cancel the order and hit your annual bottom line, or pay the 400% and ship the product, possibly at a loss, to keep people working and customers happy?

I would imaging the parts the OP's firm is referring to as increasing product cost would be power supplies typically included with case orders. (Just a guess, I've never looked at their site but if they don't offer PS upgrades, maybe they did deserve to go bankrupt, or at least should have read a book on marketing and business theory). Maybe they also included the option to add things like HDDs or SSDs at competitive prices, which would be dangerously narrow margins.

Regardless, those are all items not manufactured in the USA, so would have to be imported from somewhere; typically Asia as the costs to fill a Bill Of Materials (BoM) for electronics in Asia is significantly lower than in North America. It's even cheaper to buy electronic components in Australia than North America due to it's proximity to the manufacturing sites, not all of which are in China.

Oz (and New Zealand) have surprisingly robust electronics manufacturing industries, despite their first-world economies and small population sizes. Compare that with Mexico, which has comparable labour costs to China ... where is the cheap electronics assembly industry there? Doesn't exist at anywhere near the scale of Asia so obviously there are factors other than labour costs at play in that industry.

There are lots of challenges when a disruptive element enters business planning. Some of it is unpredictable and some of it carries unintended consequences. This is always the case, there is nothing particularly unique about new tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods in that respect. One day we can expect the tariffs will fall or be eliminated (either that, or there is a Hidden Agenda since tariff reduction is the carrot dangled to China should it change whatever the US claims to want it to change in trade practice. Unless China acquiesces, we won't know if that is the actual goal or just a justification).

Perhaps all that is new is that people describe the effects as surprising, or unexpected. They are neither.

Ah, Millennials. Everything started in 2000 by their quaint concepts of history. Sort of like how on television, all the documentaries are about WWII or later, because there is almost no film prior to the 1930's, and about half the film from the 1930's was shot by toadies of you-know-who (or maybe you don't. Some guy with the initials AH).

Perhaps by "over 20 years" you are referring to such things as the Kehin carburetors and Showa forks found on 1970's Shovelheads?

I'm not sue about the Operating Room thing, but I do more than one person who has had a first heart attack, had the operation and (typically) have stints and arteries replaced. They all are i excellent health today; the oldest had his operation nearly 20 years ago and none have had a post-operative attack. So the ER surgeons are doing something right.

With women, Estrogen protects them from heart disease until menopause (typically early 40's to mid-50's) but from that point onward heart disease is just as likely as a male. Women's bodies are survival-tuned so they live longer than males and if they don't have issues in childbirth they have lower mortality until old age.

But, look at employed females. They have a much higher rate of desk jobs than males. Desk Jobs are heart killers. 10 to 25 years after menopause, desk job, children out of the home, so a high likelihood of sedentary lifestyle and no Estrogen protection before retirement. That is plenty of time and lifestyle to introduce Heart Disease. Add in obesity which tends to worsen as someone who tends toward overweight ages, diabetes Type 2 risk (which will kill your heart if you manage to survive the other ways it attacks the body and organs), and the final issue ... if you are elderly and in "perfect" health, you always die of a Heart Attack.

Some of these health risk rates are also suspect. Everybody these days in a modern society gets examined by a doctor when they die. Every doctor is required by law to put in a cause of death. You could be 105 and puttering in the garden, and the doc must put "Heart Failure" as the cause of death, because that's all he's got for a "natural death" and not putting a cause in there is not legal. Since women's bodies are designed for survival, it's the heart that gets them in their 70's, 80's, 90's and post 100's.

This has a side effect of making death stats from heart disease higher than they sensibly should be, and Heart Foundations don't see this as a problem as it helps with fundraising. So you have to take any heart related numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism.

From TFA: (italics mine)
" ...
According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable. [i]Amazon disputes those estimates.[/i]

"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." ..."

"individual products" is equivalent to "certain popular products".

Amazon does not dispute those estimates, at least based on the evidence proposed in the article, which is non-existant. And they confirm that certain products have a higher incidence of fake reviews than the overall marketplace does.

You could put the machine behind adequate defences, and it wasn't 20 minutes (exactly), if you monitored your Intrusion Detection app you'd see a long list of attacks within five minutes of being online (I've seen it). For ordinary users, who would update XP online, it might be exposed for hours to download and install the updates. Naturally no-one who knew what they were doing would update that way, but that doesn't describe ordinary users either.

Sometimes "never" is not an option. One electronic test equipment that revolutionized the industry is the Audio Precision line of Distortion Analyzers. Virtually everyone involved in electronic design, testing or repair owns one, and they are almost hobbyist-priced (a new basic unit can be had for less than $US 10,000). The revolutionary part of AP analyzers is they connect to a PC to do the math.

Now, somewhat on topic, AP is very good at updating their SW interfaces and older machines can use modern versions of the WinOS. They also are not themselves normally required to be connected to outside networks, provided you use a dedicated PC on the bench and not one used for general computing. So much of the problems are solved using good management practices.

If you want to be anywhere near current, you need an AP. I don't own one; I send my stuff to another engineer who does to test, but he charges $200/Hr. He has the most advanced unit, somewhere near or north of $US 20K. Plus a Windows PC and a printer if you want output charts, of course. My Distortion Analyzer is adequate (Keithley, a unit of Tektronix, $US 6,000) but only measures to the fifth harmonic.

It is a standalone device, but unless you want to dig around for an old 70's~80's era machine from HP, Tek, Boonton, a Sound Technology 1700B, etc that pre-date the inexpensive computing power era, the norm these days is software / PC / Appropriate Sound Card for low cost measurement. So now you need, again, a dedicated PC and most hobbyists use the same machine for general computing. But the cost is *way* lower than a standalone machine or an AP.

If you fudge the numbers, it comes down to a classic standalone machine (they still sell for almost four figures and sometimes a couple of thousand) or software like ARTA and a good sound card, maybe $400 worth of stuff total in addition to a basic working PC of some kind. You can fight with your wallet or just give up and go PC-enabled.

I don't know what is going on here, somehow /. has managed to post a topic that is something it's members might actually be interested in, instead of squabble-bait. Mods must be off their meds today.

" ... Posting as AC for obvious reasons. ..."

Oops. I KNOW I checked that box. Oh well.

Posting as AC for obvious reasons.

After the first Obama election, for the first time in nearly 30 years, and something I was until then positive I would never hear, multiple clients of mine, all US citizens, opined that someone should shoot him. The nature of my business was rather remote outdoor recreation, I spent upwards of 50 hours with a client, and aside from the usual common-sense reluctance to discuss religion or politics, sometimes clients would bring it up. The adventures are expensive and virtually all the clients were Republicans, which should surprise no-one. But it was a shock the first time I heard it and a surprise how many times afterward I heard it. So, it's not just Trump that generates strong emotional responses.

Canada has a lower Federal income tax rate on it's highest bracket than the US.* However a simple tax rate is virtually useless when it comes to determining actual tax paid so the comparison is of limited value. Presented simply as a FYI.

With regard to housing, in the US you can deduct the interest portion of your mortgage. Not so in Canada, however there are no Capital Gains on the sale of your home, meaning you can take 100% of your equity and apply it to a new mortgage (or do what many do and retire to a low-cost area and spend the kid's inheritance. Or not ... no Estate Taxes either).

* -----
Unmarried used as it's the generally highest rates; highest tax bracket cited; Federal only:

Canada: Net income after deductions: more than $205,841: $47,670 plus 33% of the portion above $205,841 (Highest Bracket)

US: Net income after deductions: $$191,651 to $416,700: $46,637.72 plus 33% of that portion above $191,651 (Similar to Canada's Highest Bracket)

Net income after deductions: $418,401 or more: $120,903.17 plus 39.6% on that portion above $416,651 (US Highest Bracket)

Well have to use January 2018 numbers here, since it's the most recent with the housing type breakdown I could quickly find (first Google hit, CBC News). 416 Area Code. July 25 Exchange Rate.

Detached home $C $1,283,981 [$US 1,003,219]
Semi-Detached home $C $936,623 [$US 731,816]
Townhome $C 712,186 [$US 556,456]
Condominium $C $543,279 [$US 424,483]

Not quite. As of June 2018 the average selling price of a home in Toronto (according to the Toronto Real Estate Board) was $C $807,871 which is equal to (at today's exchange rate, which hasn't changed much over the last two years) $US 631,218. So less than half the average in SF if we assume your number for that market is correct.

Although I can see a utility argument I do not agree that a library article that "haven't been checked out in 20 years" should be replaced with only fast-turnover articles, or replaced with a digital version (which, probably, would come up against copyright owner issues, whether that be cost or simple refusal to publish in that form, which is hardly unheard of).

A collection of rarely read books is in some ways the fundamental purpose of a library.

I should add that the borrower's risk of repayment is the most important part of all the above. If you don't pay back the loan, the bank has to reduce it's lending because is screws with the 10% or whatever amount is required as deposits. So they literally have to start calling in loans to get more cash on deposit (as many business loans are "demand loans" which means the bank can demand the money you borrowed back at any moment they choose. As long as the loan is out, the business only pays the monthly interest).

Same when there is a "run on the bank" when depositors get anxious and start withdrawing cash. Reduce the deposits and you have to start calling in loans.

Just as loans create money out of thin air, calling in loans reduces the amount of money in the economy. That runs a risk of recession, layoffs, etc.