The US has no real exports. All of its economic might was because it has its top tier market, and all that wealth is essentially from its soft power and position. The more you peel off that soft power, the weaker that position especially as wealthy and educated people leave.
I don't agree that the US won't be relevant, it's more like the US will resemble the position of Russia in the next decade than the position it is in right now.
The US exports aircraft, vehicles, and medicine, and the rest of the exports are just raw stuffs, like oil or corn. How's Boeing looking these days? Is the US auto industry where exciting new technologies are coming from? Unless the US is going to be great because we export more coal, then I too expect some decline.
The last big round of global innovation was internet services, of which I'm pretty sure (not having looked it up) that US exports represent the majority of world exports.
Apple keeps half the sales price of every iPhone whereas the last I saw Foxconn gets only a few dollars per phone for the final assembly. It used to be that most of the expensive components (display, memory) in the iPhone were supplied by Japan, S Korea and Taiwan, but I admit that that might have changed over the years.
It looks like cell phone exports are about 30 billion dollars, which is 1% of the 3 trillion dollars mentioned earlier. I'm surprised it's so low. (I'm open to corrections on these numbers.)
Here's my estimate, taken mostly from figures from Apple's 2024 annual report (as reported by Gemini Flash).
Apple's total worldwide revenue for fiscal year 2024 was $391.035 billion. The Americas Segment (which includes the US) represented $167.05 billion of that, leaving $224 billion for the rest of the world.
Apple reports that their cost of goods sold was $210.352 billion, leaving 180.68 billion as so-called "gross profit". The majority of this gross profit will be used to pay salaries and other expenses (e.g., office space) of having employees, most of which goes to Americans. (Most of the rest will be "retained earnings", which means it either goes back to investors or is used to try to generate new streams of revenue.)
But only some of that gross profit will come from exports. Let's assume that exports are as profitable (per unit of revenue) as US sales are, which seems reasonable to me because competition (mostly from Android) would be the main thing keeping gross profit low, and Android is a major competitive force in the US market, so estimated gross profit derived from sales to the rest of the world would be 180.68 * (224 / 391.035) == $103.5 billion. That is revenue from all products and services, and Apple reports that revenue from the iPhone is 0.5145 of all revenue (worldwide) or about $53 billion per year flowing from the rest of the world to Apple (and to governments in the US in the form of taxes).
To be clear, that's assuming that zero of the hardware (more precisely, zero of what accountants call the "variable cost") that goes into an iPhone is bought from US suppliers (which seems a reasonable assumption to me).
"Exports" is hiding a lot of complexity here. Some export statistics might add the entire price of an iPhone to the export figure for China because that is where the final assembly is done even though (like my previous comment shows) about half of the money from that sale ends up in the hands of Apple's investors, US-based employees of Apple and such US-based suppliers as the companies that built Apple's headquarters and the companies that supply Apple's offices and data centers with electricity.
If we go away back the argument was that the US has no real exports. You've been arguing that phones are an export, but you admit those are built by other countries. It seems fair that the country that makes a phone and then exports it would be given credit for that in the statistics.
I'm not sure what the point of this thread is anymore, so I'll stop here.
Sure, but how are you and I supposed to know which country will win the export market for the next big thing?
We could guess, but there's been a lot of guesses (confidently made out to be facts and inevitabilities) made in this thread so far. I'm trying to ground the discussion in actual facts.
I think they all have something they want to do with it and just don't see how to accomplish that with the trees there. I know some people just don't like how trees feel (my mom is like this for example, something about growing up in the midwest I guess) but I think for most people it's just because hired labor and machinery can't fit between them.
I've only scanned the abstract but the conclusion seems too weak given the other stated findings. Sure given different metrics (air temp vs radiant heat) may give different stories for different trees, but that wouldn't lead me to conclude it needs to be evaluated on a "case by case basis" more so than the metric depends. That is not the same thing as "case by case basis."
They should be more proud of their findings. Why insult it out of the gate?
Once again, all the hypsters need to explain to me how than just programming yourself. I don't need to (re-)craft my context, it's already in my head.
pg said a few months ago on twitter that ai coding is just proof we need better abstract interfaces, perhaps, not necessarily that ai coding is the future. The "conversation is shifting from blah blah to bloo bloo" makes me suspicious that people are trying just to salvage things. The provided examples are neither convincing nor enlightening to me at all. If anything, it just provides more evidence for "just doing it yourself is easier."
Along with the push for ending birth right citizenship and detaining citizens the goal is a white ethnostate. I doubt Trump is that cognizant of that but Stephen Miller definitely is pushing for that.
Yeah, I mean, what was that whole we’re going to bring white South African immigrants here and kick brown ones out?
MAGA is a white supremacy movement, but calling this out in America is like trying to tell your best friend her husband is cheating on her. It’s going to be an ugly reveal and difficult conversation, but the facts are the facts.
It's enshrined in the constitution. You're welcome to try to ammend the constitution to make it a white only nation. Good luck with that. I guess upping the bribes to certain scotus justices also works.
This meme "what about cancel culture" is no longer an interesting point anymore. Certainly online, most of Trump's fans don't care. Just stop taking these kind of conservatives you don't know personally seriously and just assume bad faith by default.
So, I understand that this is supposed to be a broad comment on society and romance in 2025 but it's very clear this also a piece of catharsis on the loss of a potential romantic interest of the author. That's fine, personal experiences can inform our view of more society wide trends, but they can also be somewhat of an extrapolation. For example, women dining alone at the establishment detailed at the beginning of the piece might not all be going out after being stood up, perhaps people are now just able to eat out on their own comfortably without feeling social pressure to be on dates for the sake of appearances.
At some point people just want their code to work so they go back to something that just works and won't break in a few years.
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