GrindingGears

Inflation's "sticky". It took 5 years to get rid of COVID-related inflation, and it went up for quite a while before starting to go down. This is quite a bit more substantial, and it will take a long time for the effects on the overall broader economy to recede. The inflation itself will take about 1.5 years to fully work it's way through the system, but there's also going to be a larger scale contraction on GDP, which will very likely put the US and many of it's trade countries into recession as well. This will likely have a negative impact on wages. The US is also very much going to have a supply problem, which is going to then also put upward inflationary pressures on a lot of products.

Anytime a government interferes or puts in measures that affect trade, positively or negatively, it throws everything out of whack.

Nothing to do with the fact there's three Funko pops to every game for sale, and they price their used games pretty much as high as new ones. Not to mention every time I've tried to buy a new game there, they then try to sell it to me without the wrapper taking the disc from who knows where.

Facts, amiright!?

It'll be unplayable. GTA Online as it is, is barely enjoyable and mostly unplayable.

The Chyna flu

I undervolted my 5800x3d (each core individually) and it cut the temps by quite a bit, without affecting performance. Actually if anything you could say the performance arguably increased because it was no longer the hot little hog it was ootb.

No doubt we have a lot of production capabilities, and you are right, I'm sure you could piece most of the rest together. The marketplace is the biggest conundrum, I would propose. All those manufacturing facilities are in SW Ontario, so the only way to get them to other markets (which is going to be necessary here, because the Canadian marketplace isn't big enough), it is going to involve ocean liners. Which is feasible, but your margins are going to get cooked here. There's too much risk.

This ain't the industry Canada needs to double down on, in a suddenly protectionist world. It's natural resources, and maybe service related. And hopefully all sorts of other industries that we aren't even thinking about.

I'm worried too. I was born and raised in SW Ontario, so most of my family and friends work in some sort of auto manufacturing or automotive-related industry. It's already been pretty bad the past decade or so, this will likely be the death knell if it grows legs.

Fun fact, did you know that there was actually even electric cars made in the late 1800s? Some even in Canada. Car companies in this era all eventually failed though, or merged into other companies. There wasn't ever really any production volumes in auto until Oldsmobile and Ford came onto the scene, especially with the latter who established the golden standard of auto production lines.

I wasn't guessing. I cut my teeth in automotive. I have an education in automotive engineering, amongst other things, and I have extensive working experience at both the retailer, and Tier 1 and 2 manufacturing experience earlier in my career. Not proclaiming to be the end all be all, or the smartest person in the world, or that I know much of anything, but I'm also far from being the village idiot on this topic.

It ain't happening bud, I'm sorry. There's not enough marketplace to recover the costs, it would be complicated to transport finished goods to other markets, especially considering that most of the manufacturing facilities are located in southern Ontario. Which means you'd have to pretty much stick everything on a ship, and that adds costs, versus trucking to the states. It obviously can be done, easily enough, but it cuts into margins at higher production levels. Margins aren't high in this industry, and the labour is mostly unionized, or very quickly will be if it's not, and that adds a dearth of costs. Volatility in commodities pricing alone would be enough to knock something like this into non-profitable territory. It likely wouldn't be profitable for a decade either. Even look at something like Tesla, it took them 17 years to turn a profit, and it actually doesn't really turn a profit from its cars, it's actually from the sale of environmental credits.

If you are going to see any automotive investment and new OEMs, something like a new Tesla or whatever, it's almost certainly going to be in Europe, not North America. Donald Trump has all but guaranteed that there's not going to be one dime spent in deepening or expanding automotive manufacturing capabilities spent here, for quite a while, likely a decade or more if he keeps it up. Canada has learned its lesson here, and I would imagine if anything happens in the automotive sector, it'll be a contraction, not an expansion. Even as close as four of five months ago, there have been new plans launched for factory expansion and construction of tier 1 suppliers in Southwestern Ontario, but I would bet you that'll be off now. We'll have to wait and see though, only those closest to the projects will know, and nobody else's crystal ball can predict the future.

And let's not even begin to consider that China is foaming at the mouth to dump mostly state backed, very viable electric cars here, for a fraction of the price tag that we've been paying. We aren't going to be able to block that off forever, they'll find a way around the tariffs eventually. How are you going to compete with that?

Yeah I don't know about it being fact that we are that much smarter. Polls aren't yet going to be a good predictor, we are too far out from the election. It can only take the temperature of the mood in the past, not at present moment or in the future. This election hasn't even really actually begun yet, this is just the circling of the wagons phase.

Sure hope you are right on that last paragraph, but I've lost a lot of hope these past few years.

Sure, and me too, for sure. The issue is, unfortunately, the greater electorate has issues with allowing the opposing parties to twist it around and use it against them. A lot of people only believe what's put in front of them. All it takes is a pieced together YouTube clip of him saying this with some other point they are trying to make, and it can be incredibly damaging.

Australia had automotive production. They don't anymore, because it wasn't viable.

South Korea is definitely an exporter of automobiles. Thing is it took them about ~40 years to get to the point where they caught traction with it. The early Korean exports were pretty low quality and sort of unreliable (different people had different experiences). It took time for their R&D to work it out, and for economies of scale to develop.

It's not the belief that we need to sell to the United States that would be stopping us here. It's that they are right next door + 100 years ahead of us on R&D and progress, not to mention having long established integrated facilities and economies of scale. You'd have to enter the global marketplace with a car company built from scratch, that would need billions if not even maybe hundreds of billions dumped into R&D, design & development, which takes time. You would need manufacturing facilities that would be huge, that would also probably cost tens if not hundreds of billions to develop. Where is your steel going to come from? How are you going to stamp it? Where's all the parts coming from if you don't want to work with the US, and then how are you going to get them on a timely basis if they are coming by ship? Not to mention the zillion other questions one would need to figure out. It would take ~a decade to get this all sorted out. And godless sums of money. All to then compete in a global marketplace with international companies that have centuries of experience.

Magna would be the only developed enough option where this could even be feasible, but even they've sort of poked around looking at developing a product in the past, and the absence of said product in the marketplace kind of tells you everything you need to know about the viability of it.