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Looks like China is having some difficulty in the trade war after all.

Owners say American customers have cancelled or suspended orders​ Factories in China have begun slowing production and furloughing some workers as the trade war unleashed by US President Donald Trump dries up orders for products ranging from jeans to home appliances.

With most Chinese goods now facing US duties of at least 145 per cent, some factory owners say American customers have cancelled or suspended orders, forcing them to cut production.

About 15 per cent of all Chinese exports last year went to the US. In interviews with the Financial Times and via dozens of social media posts, workers shared pictures of quiet production lines or factory suspension notices, highlighting how the tariffs are starting to bite.

Workers said the trade war had prompted the suspension of production for a week or more at plants making products ranging from shoe soles to jeans, electrical outlets and portable stoves. Some factory owners said they were cutting overtime or weekend work.

Wang Xin, head of the Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Association, an industry group representing more than 2,000 Chinese merchants, said many of them were “extremely anxious” and had told factories and suppliers to halt or delay deliveries. This had prompted some factories to suspend production for one to two weeks, she said.

Three factory recruiters in Guangdong who work with manufacturers said more factories were cutting overtime and weekend work with only the most heavily dependent on American orders putting the whole factory on leave.

“Our export orders disappeared so we’ve temporarily stopped,” said a 28-year-old plastics factory worker in Fujian province, who asked not to be identified. Production had been halted for a week so far, she said.

Executives at DeHong Electrical Products in Dongguan, Guangdong province, gave workers one month leave on minimum wage and said the factory was under “significant near-term pressure” after clients suspended orders.

“Management is working hard to find solutions, including expanding into new markets and optimising cost structures, so we can resume normal operations as soon as possible,” DeHong said in a notice seen by the Financial Times. The company declined to comment further.

Hangzhou Stellarmed, a company in Zhejiang province that makes endoscopy kits primarily for the US market, told full-time workers they could use the rest of April to find new jobs and provided them with access to a headhunting agency.

“We don’t know how long this will last,” said Shi, the factory owner, who did not want to be identified by her full name. “We can only wait and see, there is nothing we can do.”

Plastic mould maker Dongguan Yuanguan Technology blamed the tariffs for forcing it to cancel all weekend overtime at its factory, according to a company notice and a worker. Yuanguan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A 26-year-old man in Zhejiang said the toy factory he worked at sold mostly to the US, forcing management to give workers about two weeks off. “It’s not easy at the moment,” he said, asking not to be named.

It is unclear how widespread the factory suspensions are, said Han Dongfang, founder of China Labour Bulletin, which closely tracks Chinese manufacturing and labour. “The rearrangement of China’s manufacturing sector will be a long-term process and workers will be sacrificed,” he said.

China’s electronics supply chain also employs tens of thousands of people, and Washington has exempted smartphones along with some other electronics from the steepest tariffs.

Big tech companies and cities with large concentrations of exporters, such as Shenzhen and Dongguan, are rolling out support programmes intended to “stabilise foreign trade”. Shenzhen last week unveiled subsidies for companies to participate in foreign trade shows and said it would expand export insurance to help cover cancelled US orders, among other policies.

A manager at Ningbo Taiyun Electric said they had suspended production on April 12, but had since restarted reduced output of electric hair straighteners and curling irons. “We still have some orders from Europe, we’re trying to get more,” said the manager, who asked not to be named. “Hopefully the US will change its policies.” The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

China, which reported a record trade surplus of nearly $1tn last year, has responded to Washington’s tariffs by imposing an extra 125 per cent levy on imports from the US. While Trump has repeatedly said he wants to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping to resolve trade issues, Beijing appears in no hurry to request a call between the two leaders.

Previously TSMC had delayed their expansion plans for US plants, but now has advanced their schedule.

What's trump going to do about egg prices?

Hey conservatives, you were super mad at Biden about egg prices right? You must be SUPER mad at Trump not fixing egg prices in less than the time it takes for a chicken to grow up and start laying eggs.

Youre probably burning your trump hat right? I saw a reddit post about conservatives were burning their trump merch. Because of the egg prices. They can't wait six weeks for him to bring down the egg prices.

What an ineffective president, taking a whole two months to bring down egg prices.

Hey conservatives, what about the egg prices??? Feeling smart now???

Source for the graph (about egg prices)

Sauce is 2.5D Seduction

I haven't! But it is tempting me because JA2 sure was cool...

No, I didn't see any "pedos" in the thread, but all the upvotes comments were against the changes and i suspect that's who is being referred to.

I haven't been able to create a community using the create community page. Is it bugged, or do we have to request the community to be made somewhere?

I saw there was a "community requests" community, but I can't find the exact community address now that I'm thinking about it (search tool is not great either...) and I'm not sure if that was an official thing or just for people who don't want to be saddled with moderating a community.

Use it if you want! Grabbed it from wayback machine.

Crazy to think that this stuff can potentially end up tied to your identity and used for advertising, or even (in theory) other purposes like credit worthiness or a job suitability assessment.

"For example, a recently patented profiling method uses play traces to de- termine whether a user is frugal (e.g., indicated by saving in-game money even in the face of attractive spending options), fiscally responsible (e.g., indicated by investing carefully and focusing on strategically important purchases), or wasteful (e.g., indicated by taking financial risks, spending money quickly, and buying items not relevant to the goals of the game) [19]. The method also aims to evaluate whether a player is “trading-conscious”, i.e., fit for certain finan- cial trading products, and to detect an “eagerness to go after new products or services” based on how players develop their in-game character. Even non-financial aspects of a game can allow insights into a user’s money- management style. The above patent, for instance, proposes to assesses a user’s level of frugality based on ammunition expenditure patterns in first-person shooter games (e.g., rate at which bullets are fired, percentage of hits, pre- cision shots and controlled bursts vs. wasteful use of ammunition) or based on the user’s performance in driving games and flight simulators (e.g., aggressive driving, overspeed, crash frequency) [19]. Such links between gameplay and real-world spending behavior have also been reported in the scientific literature. Correlating the results of an online survey with log data from the popular sandbox video game Minecraft, for ex- ample, Canossa et al. [37] found that money-conscious players tend to build fewer sleeping accommodations for themselves and prefer to use cheap in-game materials, such as stone, sand, and iron instead of precious materials, such as diamond"

Disclaimer: I cannot into code and I don't even have a test environment set up.

How would people feel about a feature which hides communities from the front page for users who are not subscribed to them? I think it would work something like this:

-Instance admins have a "hidden community" list

-Instances can be flagged hidden as well

-Communities can flag themselves to he hidden on local, or all external instances (which would only work for instances which respect these flags)

This would give instance admins a little power to curate what new users are seeing without having to defederate. It would also allow communities to be a little more insular and avoid traffic from the front page if they wish to do so. I think it would be good for circumstances where:

-Instance operators want maximum comparability without actively promoting stuff they dont like (EG lemmygrad, right or left politics, weird porn)

-New users who turn on NSFW aren't shocked by gore, weird porn, or other things on the front page. (See for example, the post asking to defed from burggit)

-The site can just more easily host communities which don't get along with each other

The downside would be that some admins might not like "hidden" communities growing under their nose, or communities might feel like they're "soft banned". But overall I think it is worthwhile. A lot of sites which host both normal and weird porn force users to opt in manually to see the weird stuff, for example, and this keeps criticism away from front page users. I think being required to see stuff you don't want to see, and then manually opt out of it, is too much for some users. It could also help keep down stuff that will be used to criticize lemmy in general.

In effect, it should be similar to the ability to hide NSFW, but more granular without demanding a complicated tag system.

I do not think this would be difficult to implement. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow, I might even start from zero and try to learn enough to add features. But, how do people feel about this feature? Would you want to be available, and use it if it was?