The things that are cheaper to make in the US were already made in the US.
Because of the high cost of labor here, we tend to specialize in things where the unit cost is so high that the labor cost doesn’t matter as much and spending extra for educated and skilled workers becomes a cheaper upgrade. Things like jet engine parts, engines, and machine tools.
Also things where you make a lot of them in an automated fashion, like precision screws and nuts or refined petroleum products. We’re probably not making the plastic bags or chairs, but we would be making the giant tub of plastic beads used for the injection moulding, which is then shipped to Malaysia to be moulded, and then back to the US to be a deck chair.

The set of industries that are close enough to the line to make sense to move to the US and can be moved quickly enough for it to matter is vanishingly small.
It’s why most of our exports have been intangible for so long.

I believe it’s paid as part of clearing customs. Since everything is in some capacity inspected (even if that just means checking the weight, container seals, and serial numbers in the freight container), that means there’s some record of what’s coming in and from where. At that point the importer pays customs the various fees and taxes before customs let’s them take the goods out of the port of entry.

The importer would mark it down as part of the taxes that they paid on their purchase, but it would largely only matter so that they can appropriately indicate what portion of the purchase price was taxes that have already been paid so they don’t double pay later.

You get better insurance rates as a large business because you have more collateral and have a larger contract. If it gets the insurance company more net money to give you a lower rate per item insured, they want that extra bit of income. Rather, the person signing the deal wants that extra bit of commission on a large contract.

If what you’re insuring costs more than the contract value, they’ll 100% hike rates to make up for it.
They’re in the business of betting that they’ll make a lot of profit while you bet they’ll only make a little profit. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, they’ll always arrange the numbers so that their worst case scenario is minimal profit.

There’s no amount of money you can pay someone to lose money on a deal.

Hypothesis: you can go to the Great lakes region and just make random noises and people will be like "hey, what’s up?”.

If not having it doesn’t lose you anything can I have yours?

You’re focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn’t have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.

Don’t give him so much credit. Everything he does is credited as an intentional distraction from whatever it is that he just did.

and the rock might have hit someone in the administration and kept them from doing anything else for a few days at least.

I lack your confidence in the racism of the US military. I think it just changes what terms they use to dehuminize anyone they shoot.
It’s not like the US has never invaded anyplace with white people.

I have zero belief that any units will ignore or slow walk any orders. There’s just no history of that happening in recent US military existence to expect it to happen now. Vietnam saw a handful of cases where people likely killed their commanders, but it very plainly didn’t impact the course of the war.

The UN will never determine that the US is engaged in an illegal war. The security council needs to vote on that, and the US gets to veto. The ICC doesn’t apply to the US because we never ratified the agreement. It’s just someone elses laws.

Direct action against the military is more likely to have an effect, but linking arms is not going to be effective. Impeding military production is just going to get you beaten and arrested, at best.
Specifically interfering with military operations is particularly illegal and carries penalties way worse than the usual you get for messing with other businesses.
If you’re going that far, at least do something effective rather than slowing down a truck for a few hours.
Look to the WW1 protests, and what was effective there and what happened.

But that also assumes the US military is unified to follow orders into an illegal war, and that may not be the case.

Curious about why it would be an illegal war. Unjust, immoral, unprovoked, and unnecessary are not actually what makes a war illegal.

The invasion of Iraq was entirely based on false pretenses and the military was perfectly unified. Compared to that, an open war of conquest is pretty reasonable.

So buy a car without those things, or don’t use them. It’s not like you can’t drive my car without those things, and every one of them, barring the camera for obvious reasons, is controlled by a physical button. Better yet just don’t drive. If more people took public transportation we’d be better off.

I don’t particularly want to drive. When I do, I’d prefer to have climate control, not need to crank a window, and for the car to be able to tell me someone is going to clip me when I’m backing up. No matter how small the support bars are, the driver will never have as good a view as the radar sensor mounted on the side of the rear bumper.

Backup cams aren’t a solution to a design that limits visibility, they’re a solution to “most people won’t turn their heads when backing up”. People like their necks more than they like their neighbors kids.

It’s one thing to say that you want a no-frills car, and another entirely to say that car design peaked 30 years ago, and even further than that if you want a car that isn’t impacted by electronic component failure.

Not every car is a piece of shit. Mine has a touch screen for configuring parameters I honestly don’t think you need a dedicated button for, like “lane drift alert volume” and those can only be done when the car is parked.
Everything else either has a button as well even if they had to dig deep into the plausible locations to get there, like “press the button on the end of the turn signal to disable lane centering while adaptive cruise enabled”, or it only allows voice communication while in motion, like the typing based commands for navigation.

I think the only time I’ve wanted to use a setting that didn’t have a button was when I was on a stretch of freeway in traffic where I didn’t feel keen on pulling over if I could avoid it, and I got gunk on one of the radar sensors. Since it couldn’t get a coherent reading it refused to turn on cruise control since it was set to adaptive. I had to drive without cruise control for a while until I pulled into a gas station and was able to clean the gunk. The setting to disable adaptive cruise control was touchscreen only, and locked out when the vehicle was moving.

Right now there are three “biggest powers” on the world stage. US, China and Russia. China has belligerent rhetoric towards a lot of their neighbors, particularly Taiwan. They want the areas they control, but largely stop short of action. It’s why they claim the South China sea, and other nations need to pointedly ignore their claims to delegitimize them.
Russia has been openly annexing, or trying to anyway, their neighbors, and using historical precedent as their excuse.
As the largest power, the US very notably not annexing land nearby shifts the tone way into the realm of it being the norm not to do that.

Annexing, or at least threatening to, nearby land makes it more that all major powers do so, or at least are looking for opportunities to do so.
If cold war schemes give the US historical claim to Greenland, then Russias claims on Ukraine start being less unhinged and more generally expansionist.

The wording is specifically that you need to be qualified to hold the office of the president, not to run for the office.

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

With qualifications to hold the office being:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

So the phrasing of the 22nd created an issue:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once

Elsewhere it talks about eligibility to hold office, but the 22nd only refers to election.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-22/overview-of-twenty-second-amendment-presidential-term-limits

There’s also a similar issue with the speaker of the house, where eligibility isn’t as clearly defined as one might expect.

While the intent of the law was clearly to codify the previous pattern of capping it at two terms (and being spiteful to FDR) it’s phrased with enough ambiguity that it’s clear how they’ll argue it.

Possibly not the greatest example. The whole “Japanese internment camps” thing, as well as the (radically less controversial) suspension of habeas corpus for Germans captured on US soil.

More that it normalizes a return to military expansion of national borders.
Russia is trying to grow their territory by annexing neighbors.
China would plainly like to.
The US didn’t, which made the scales tilt towards Russia acting badly and unusually badly.

With the shift, Russia is just the only one acting on a policy item that all the major powers have.

And like clockwork: https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-arctic-trump-greenland-2dbd00625c2c0c3bd94a2c96c7015b69

“Putin says US push for Greenland rooted in history, vows to uphold Russian interest in the Arctic”

Speaking at a policy forum in the Artic port of Murmansk, Putin noted that the United States first considered plans to win control over Greenland in the 19th century, and then offered to buy it from Denmark after World War II.

“It can look surprising only at first glance and it would be wrong to believe that this is some sort of extravagant talk by the current U.S. administration,” Putin said. “It’s obvious that the United States will continue to systematically advance its geostrategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic.”

The US and Greenland; Russia and Ukraine: it only matters that it’s rooted in history, right?

It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.

Not to specifically defend Apple, but the race demographic issue is slightly more complicated.
The inequality is more systemic. Educational investment and economic inequality means that there’s a difference in educational outcomes for the black population in the US.
Basically, to have representation in line with the population Apple needs to make a deliberate effort to hire in that proportion. Having an unbiased hiring process falls back to the systemic bias that shifted the hiring pool. That 7% is basically the representation of black people in the hiring pool for high tech jobs in the US.

There are still major issues with tech companies and diversity, such as not addressing the issues that created an environment that pushed people out of the sector, but that 5% difference represents a naively unbiased process, as opposed to a specifically biased one.

That tracks. I currently have better regard for Canada than I do the US, and while Canada has problems like anywhere else, they’re not charitably described as “your countrymen elected a felon who already did a bad job” as president. And the healthcare system is just… Better.

“this is the fault of the democrats and Joe Biden. If they hadn’t messed everything up we wouldn’t need to fix it like this”.

They’ll say that and their constituents will listen. Remember, these are people who voted for the guy who wrecked the economy over the guy who made progress improving it because the economy was bad and they wanted it to be better, like what the first guy wrecked.