Well, when the entire economy is crashing, no one has more money, other than the corpos, who will only use that money to figure out how to make everyone else have… even less money.
I guess it depends on if by end of the world, you mean closer to: dramatic shift in social norms and living standards… or… earth gets eaten by a black hole.
Sounds like a new achievement for Factorio or Satisfactory.
Possibly Dwarf Fortress? RimWorld?
“Wormwood, Blight the Sea.”
All good lol!
But yeah, this… bodes very badly for anyone who wants to repair or modify basically any electronics.
Almost none of that shit is made in the US … been a while since RadioShack was a thing.
Maybe we will eventually get a domestic mfg base and supply of such repair parts…
But I don’t know enough about the specifics to give a … financial viability or timeline estimate.
I also know that the vast majority of US ‘Custom PC Assemblers’… basically are already absurdly overpriced and inefficient, with very manual processes.
I dunno. Maybe somebody in a laptop repair shop somewhere will figure out what types of little connectors and doodads can maybe be actually made here?
Why repair?
Just toss that shit in a landfill and buy another one!
Hooray for literal dumpster based consumerism and a capitalistic production paradigm.
EDIT:
Perhaps amusingly, I have a cheap massage gun that uh, the head got wobbly, starts knocking around off the center line.
Solution?
Fucking duct tape, just basically narrowed the uh… neck hole? of the thing? I dunno what to call it, the aperture for the massage head.
Doesn’t knock around near as much now lol.
I was able to get the parts in time… but uh, 3d printer?
Not unless your 3d printer prints PCB computer boards, as well as injection molded gel and plastics, screws, springs…
You could maybe 3d print uh… possibly the back and faceplates for a Deck, maybe the L/R 1/2 triggers bumpers, maybe some other of the buttons?
But they’d be rough, low quality, you’d have to sand them and such afterward.
Maybe clip on grip embigenners for those with larger hands might be a reasonable use case for 3d printing Deck stuff? Kickstands/Non electronic docks?
But uh generally speaking, 3d printing … it has its use cases, but its far from a cure all multi tool for producing everything that you’d likely need to replace on a Deck, or many other things.
I don’t think you can uh, 3d print hall effect joysticks, lol.
This may sound stupid and petty/personal given the very large scope and seriousness of this, but whoo boy when I first saw this news a couple of days ago, I finally jumped on buying new sticks and button pads for my Steam Deck.
I’ve been using it a lot, and the sticks were drifting, buttons/dpad got mushy… so yeah, pulled the trigger on getting replacement/upgrade parts (hall effect sticks with more resistance, ‘clicky’ button boards and replacement gel pads) that are only made in China, arrived a couple days ago.
If the de minimus exception is fully going away, I think the import tariff/shipping fees on these would… be more than the ~$50 cost of the actual things.
But anyway… yeah, this is uh… very, very bad for everyone in the US who is used to buying … anything not made in the US… which is basically everything.
Back to Great Depression style re-use/repair everything, or die broke and starving.
Online stores like Amazon, other large e-tailers like Walmart… they’re still gonna have some stock left in their domestic warehouses… but that won’t last probably more than about a month, depending on the kind of product.
See also:
Complex systems collapse theory/paradigm.
Societies throughout history more or less accrue complexity costs in a similar fashion as big, poorly managed software projects accrue technical debt.
It all keeps working untill it doesn’t, and then, rather rapidly breaks.
If you do not actually maintain and preserve the integrity of foundational systems, and build a more extravagant/expansive set of systems atop that foundation… well, castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually.
That model keeps getting tweaked and rerun, as others have mentioned, its from 'The Limits to Growth, otherwise known as the ‘World 3 model’.
In this one, instesd of measuring ‘pollution’, which was…fairly difficult to get accurate data on… they just used CO2 instead.
Pretty much same result, we are pretty much at the peak of modern civilization right now.
IIRC, thats a screen grab from Paul Beckwith, a pretty well renowned climate scientist… he has a youtube channel, he puts out like a 20ish slide powerpoint recapping other recent climate studies every week or so …
Basically we are fucked, all our climate models from 5 or 10 years ago were actually too optimistic, we already blew through 1.5C, the SMOC, the Anatactic part of the thermohaline cycle, already collapsed a decade ago, and we did not notice untill the last few months.
We are tracking closer to the ‘8.5C by 2100’ level of climate sensitivity models than anything else.
Insurance companies are basically already abandoning roughly the lower third of the US, too much climate disaster danger, can’t afford to insure homes and neighborhoods.
UK Society of Actuaries recently put together their own risk assessment, from the ground up instesd of top down as the World 3 model… they are also predicting massive losses, economic damage, begging governments and insurance companies and banks to adopt mitigation strategies.
sigh
Dustin’ off this one, out from the fucking meme archive…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Millenials:
Time for your third ‘once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren’t in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them…
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
… and you just give up?
You are not ‘unemployed’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a ‘discouraged worker’, who is also ‘not in the labor force’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
…
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and… you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely ‘underemployed’.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs… you may also be ‘overemployed’.
…
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers… did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn’t.)
You’ve also got measures like LISEP…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are ‘functionally unemployed’, by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure ‘doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job’.
…
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of ‘did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?’ would be ‘are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?’
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
… do you know anyone I can sham marry?
Basically not joking.
I am currently disabled, basically broke, all I can do is PT full time untill I recover more, and yeah, if disability benefits get slashed, I’ll be homeless and dead in about 3 months…
Or possibly interned in some kind of camp.