Friday Feedback

Tariffs

I work with people that are dealing with tariffs. I needed to update a custom web application which handles purchase orders, inventory control, warehousing, sales orders and a bunch of other things.

The owner explained to me how tariffs were going to affect them. I gave some of that in the Thursday’s post.

What does it come down to?

American goods are becoming competitive in other countries. As more than one person has pointed out, there are no American-made cars on the road in Japan. The cost of the tariffs into Japan are high enough to alter consumer choices.

As other countries lower their tariffs, they are lowering the prices of American-made goods, this in turn increases demand for American-made goods.

The price you pay for goods is based on what the market will bear, not on the cost of production. Every leftist will tell you that when they talk about pharmaceuticals. “It only cost them $15 to make this, and they are charging over $1000!!!!”

When they are talking about tariffs, they are talking about tariffs on the $15, not on the $1000.

Pricing Goods and Services

The boss calls in his best salesman and yells at him costing the company money. He is selling widgets for less than it costs to make them. How the heck does he expect the company to make any money!

The salesman beams, leans in and says softly, “I’ll make it up in volume.”

In a different situation, I once listened to the CEO of Cray Research give a speech. He was telling a humorous story about how he was out selling a super computer to Apple that was designed on Apple computers.

He and Cook got a chuckle out of it. They were then discussing their income streams. Cook mentioned a number and our CEO was happy to respond with “That’s just about what we made last year.”

Cook looks him in the eye, “I’m talking about per quarter.”

Cray sold million dollar computers, Apple sold thousand dollar computers. They sold so many more that they were making more than Cray.

Every businessman attempts to set their prices to get as much as the market and their conscience can bear.

That elementary equation is Price*volume. My profit on a sale is price-cost. If my profit is $1000 per unit and I sell 10 units, I make $10,000. If my profit per unit is $100 per unit and I sell 1000, I make $100,000.

The price you see is always profit + cost. In most resale stops, the profit is multiples of cost.

It costs $0.50 to make a glass of lemonade. You don’t sell it for $0.75, you sell it for $5.00. If your costs double, to $1.00 per glass, you can still keep your price at $5.00 and advertise your sacrifice selling more.

So here is the dirty secret, spelled out, again. If I am assembling a computer with parts bought in China, my price will be multiples of what I paid for those parts, and the tariffs only apply to my cost of getting the parts.

Typescript vs. JavaScript

The power of a scripted language is that you can see the results of your changes instantly. In 1976, I was writing code on an PolySci 8080 computer. I think I got that name right.

The language was BASIC. As I typed each line, the computer told me if the syntax was correct. Instant feedback.

I moved to assembly language. That was done in an instant assembler on the Apple II. Again, instant feedback on syntax errors.

As I moved forward, I learned different languages, PASCAL, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN V, COBOL, Compass, C and some other assembly languages.

These separated the process of creating a working executable into: Edit, Compile, and Link. You could then execute (run) the resulting “binary”.

Compile times for even small programs took a noticeable time. I wasn’t aware of how long it took until I wrote my first test program on the Cray X/MP.

Same edit process. Then I ran the compile and link process.

The time it took was so short that I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

The power of most of the languages above, outside the Assembly languages, was strong typing and good structures.

It was worth it to have slower test cycle times to have those features.

Then came some more modern languages, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, and others. These do not have strict typing. JavaScript being one of the worst.

Consider the following, what is 10 + 100? The answer is logically 110. What is 10 + “100”? Logical, 110 is the answer. Except that in JavaScript the answer is “10100”.

What we want or expect is for the language to convert the string “100” to the value integer value 100. Then we are adding the integer 10 to the integer 100, resulting in 110. But JavaScript says that adding the integer 10 to the string 100 requires converting integer 10 to the string “10” then concatenating “10” with “100” resulting in “10100”.

TypeScript is simply adding strong typing to JavaScript. Then a TypeScript transpiler/compiler writes the code out as pure JavaScript. The original C++ did a similar thing. The C++ “compiler” translated C++ to pure C. Then it used the C compiler to create assembly code which was linked to create an executable.

The process is going relatively smoothly. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not my favorite language, see “no typing and weird implicit type conversions” above.

This means that I’m having to learn a new workflow. I’m getting there.

Question of The Week

What is the most outrageous lie you’ve heard from a leftist political leader, this week?