Comment by K0balt

+1 on the tarrifs and the cost of living. We actually left the USA and moved to the Caribbean because our R&D was being burned up in tarrifs; actually cheaper to move the operation. It’s stupid to raise tarrifs overnight when there are no comparable domestic alternatives. A 5 year, stable plan to ramp tariffs? Sure. That builds a runway for local supply and transition. Random tariff adjustment between 0-200% changing every month? Absolute poison for innovation, and local suppliers can’t ramp on chaos.

The cost of living, also, needs a reframe. The real truth there is that most people, who live paycheck to paycheck, are half as prosperous as they were a couple of years ago. Think about that. The Majority of an entire country became twice as poor practically overnight. It’s not cost of living rising , it’s standard of living being halved for most Americans. It’s not a small thing, and it will have reprocussions for decades. A population on strong retrograde prosperity does not innovate, does not invent, does not plan for the future. It’s basically terminal cancer.

No doubt innovation will rise once the ashes cool, but that’s more like what we are seeing in Eastern Europe, admirable and significant, but no equivalence whatsoever to the economic juggernaut that the USA once was. (And still is, for now)

Maybe automation will turn that around, but who then is the beneficiary of a fleet of millions (billions?) of corporate owned general purpose humanoid robots? That’s a big part of what my startup is working on ; making that phase generally useful to regular people, not just corporate giants.