[Lendal]

The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.

[diego_moita]

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry".

They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.

The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.

This dumb idea expired in 1992.

[m4rtink]

I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.

[diego_moita]

Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).

[giantg2]

Are phones an exception? I've heard Brazil is a very mobile-first market.

[tdeck]

What is Brazil's computer hardware industry like now? Are there any companies manufacturing in Brazil?

[diego_moita]

They're mostly assemblers of parts. They buy most parts from China and assemble the computers in the country.

[InsideOutSanta]

I read somebody point out that the cold war roles have reversed. Now the US is protectionist and isolationist, and the likely eventual outcome will be the same for the US as it was for the USSR.

[logicchains]

It will harm it even more by not subjecting it to competition, so it becomes bloated and uncompetitive like the US car and shipbuilding industries.

[mapontosevenths]

Sure, our technology is worse, but at least it's expensive.

[KennyBlanken]

Oh, Intel is way ahead of the curve there, friend.

See: broken cablemodem chipsets, poor performing cellular modems, multiple generations of desktop ethernet adapters that don't work properly, uncompetitive processors in all but some very specific markets, CPUs that literally fry themselves to death because they couldn't keep up with AMD's advances so the just just kept cranking the voltage and clock speeds...Intel has been a bucket of Fail for a decade and a half.

And now the US government owns a not-too-shabby chunk of said Winning company thanks to a Very Stable Genius...

[kotaKat]

This is just a false-flag campaign planted by the UAW to ensure the slovenly can keep their jobs another couple years instead of actually be held to task for poor American manufacturing build quality. ;)

[anticorporate]

When you can't blame the machines, pretend the workers on the lowest rungs are machines and blame them instead.

[999900000999]

America doesn’t know how to do anything well aside from manipulate imaginary numbers.

Companies buying themselves over and over again.

How much of our so called economy is just moving money back and forth…

[godwinson__4-8]

By sue you mean bribe to get an exception, correct?

[esbranson]

> Companies will now have to sue

Yes, that is covered by Annex A titled "You have to sue". Which is interesting because longstanding law says the US cannot normally be sued. Surely you're not be hyperbolic.