The thing is, people often switch providers due to poor network speeds, overprovisioned resources, and outdated hardware. Budget hosts use older hardware and whatnot to keep prices down, and premium hosts use newer hardware to justify a higher price.

If regulations come in that cap certain costs, it’ll likely devolve into a race to the bottom per unit, with larger companies generally winning because they can get better deals on hardware due to hulk pricing. I imagine it could kill segmentation as well.

Maybe it would be okay. I’m just not very confident in my government to craft sensible policy that doesn’t just benefit the largest lobbies, as in, the largest providers.

It all depends on how long the tariffs stay and what deals other countries make. A huge stock downturn can cause economic issues, but usually it’s the other way around.

When I posted, I was under the impression tariffs were ~35%. Retail tends to be around 50% markup over BOM, so that should mean only a 10-20% price increase to keep the same profit per unit, depending on how much of it is sourced from China.

With 100% tariffs, that’s more like a 50% markup, not 3x.

So far, we’ve only had one or two deadlines come from outside the dev team, and up until this year, we got close to that 20%. So hopefully it’s a temporary change due to our new CEO trying to catch up to our competitors in a few areas.

Right, basically renamed. Trump wants the for credit. His opposition to Obama and Biden isn’t over policy, but that his name isn’t on it.

Similar message, very different song:

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?
Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor? Why do they always send the poor?
Why they always send the poor?

Definitely Tom Brady.

What, some weird fanfic of You’ve Got Mail?

Probably. It’s also reality in China.

If it’s imported, there’s a tariff.

Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.

Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.

I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.

Understanding Trump is simple: he’s a narcissist. For example, if the CHIPS act succeeds, Biden gets credit, so it’s bad. It’s really quite simple.

Fortunately, my boss is sympathetic, but unfortunately, our stakeholders aren’t. We are given time for tech debt (10-20%), but that hasn’t been achievable recently due to a huge focus on delivery. We just reorged, and we’re trying to get a bunch of people new to our business unit on-boarded w/ our product, and they have a variety of requirements that we need to meet for that to happen. Things should settle down in a few months, but in the meantime, I try to fix some low-hanging fruit that directly improves morale for the team.

My org is better than most, I think, but it’s still an issue here. It’s absolutely crazy the difference between prioritized and unprioritized tech debt. For example, our architect wants a thing, so it gets done same day. Our dev team wants a thing, and it takes months, if not years. It’s getting better, but like anything, it’s two steps forward (finally got to trunk-based dev) and one step back (other teams whining about changes).

Sure, but how does that compare to all the plastic crap people buy? Or electronic waste from consumer goods? Businesses keeping offices open when WFH is a thing?

I haven’t looked up the supply chain stats here, but I imagine it’s also relatively small potatoes when compared to other 500 pound gorillas in the room.

We should certainly deal with it, but it should be much lower priority than the larger sources of pollution.

Exactly! I have the same, and sometimes I’ll sneak in some fixes I have pending when I get the time to properly test it (usually in a boring meeting).

As a lead, I’ve recently started finding time to make progress on a lot of this, because a lot of the stuff I’ve seen over the years has just never been prioritized. Over the last few weeks I have:

• dramatically reduced load time for a resource our support team uses
• significantly cut resource wastage for devs on a handful of our microservices, with one small change
• fixed a huge gap in test coverage on code that’s >5 years old, and fixed a couple bugs at the same time
• cleaned up a bunch of small tech debt nonsense

You can do this as well. The problem is that I don’t get any recognition for it, so this is completely driven by me making time for it and slipping it in w/ other changes. I document the more important ones, but I’m taking a risk w/ these fixes since any bugs I create in the process will not look good.

Whenever someone else on the team does something like this and is keeping up w/ their work, I try to lavish praise on them in the hopes that maybe they’ll do it again.

Wow… that sounds like a whistleblower type situation. Unfortunately, whistleblowing doesn’t pay the bills…

with the economy cratering

The economy isn’t cratering, the stock market is. The stock market is all about where investors think future profitability will be, whereas the economy is about jobs and consumer spending behavior. They’re related, but different concepts. Hopefully the economy weathers this nonsense.

They wouldn’t triple, they could increase by like 10-20% though.

Virgin Islands certainly would, and American Samoa might.