White House SLAMS Amazon on tariff gimmick - Tech Tuesday 4-29-25

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tack into the latest in tech and how it affects
you and your world. This is tech Talk Tuesday on
Wood Radios, West Michigan Live. Welcome on our good friend
Trent can Affordible Live store like this should drive and
stand out, and of course the folks at Grand River
Tech standing by to help you. If you've got a
device issue on your side, personal issue, well, you might

(00:21):
have a personal issue altogether. I can't help you in that,
and Trent probably can't either. Maybe he can tell you
put you in the right direction. But you got a
personal device issue, they'll help you to help you at
Affordable Eye Store. If you've got an issue with your business,
or your church, your organization, whatever it might be, they
can help you at Grand River Tech. Trent, Well, come in.
Appreciate you being here with us today morning. Justin big

(00:41):
day today, we just heard some big news. In fact,
out of out of uh, out of Amazon, Jeff Bezos
put a little sticker on things online. Gonna gonna put
that tariff cost, they say, onto the onto the website.
So when you go online, you'll have to you'll have

(01:01):
to click that stick You'll see it and you'll say, okay,
this is how much I'm paying for now because of
you know, for whatever Chinese junk that you want to
buy on Amazon. Now, I'm not you know, look, I'm
not completely innocent. I buy Chinese junk every now and
then too. Unfortunately, that's just the way of the world
that we're in right now, where you know, a lot
of the stuff we buy is made in places that unfortunately, uh,

(01:27):
they've kind of got off a little bit over a barrel.
But also in some ways it's made slave labor. And
there's Trump says, you know, look, we gotta we gotta
stop doing not only is this a bad idea for economics,
but also it's a bad idea for you know, for
the country national security, and don't forget the slave labor
part of it. They were asked about this sticker in
the press conference this morning, a.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Perfect crystal clear demonstration that it's the American consumer and
not China who is going to have to pay for
these policies.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
I will take this since I just got off the
phone with the President about Amazon's now this is a
hostile and political act by Amazon. Why did Amazon do
this when the Biden administration height inflation to the highest
level in forty years fair question. And I would also
add that it's not a surprise because, as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon,

(02:17):
Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm. So this
is another reason why Americans should buy American. It's another
reason why we are on shoring critical supply chains here
at home to shore up our own critical supply chain
and boost our own manufacturing here.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
It's not just Amazon, by the way, it's the Amazon
equivalent overrun the China in China, China timu is. You
know they're going to be in a pickle as well
with these tariffs. Obviously, anything coming from China, specifically any
of the junk coming from China, China you're gonna have
You're gonna have issues with trent and you know we've

(02:56):
already seen prices and some of these sites come out
to be pre hefty. But this is something that can
easily be wipe out if China negotiates, they come to
the table.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Justin there's very interesting. There's two sides this. Obviously they're
doing this because they want to show people the cost
increase so they don't get upset with Amazon. And remember
Amazon makes billions of dollars in profits on this stuff.
So they're trying to use this as a campaign to say, hey,
the cost are rising and this is all to blame

(03:29):
on the tariffs and obviously to stick that on Trump.
There's another way to look at it. If they weren't
so scared of the tariffs, they wouldn't be doing this.
So obviously these tariffs may work and may put people
push people to buy elsewhere, such as local places, American
made places. Now. Granted, like you said, it's difficult to

(03:50):
wean ourselves off the China supply chain there, but if
this was a non issue, they wouldn't be doing this.
So there is some positivety there that we can read
into this. They're truly scared of tariffs because their business
model is based on massive amounts of cheap goods coming
from China that they're reselling at very high profit margins.

(04:11):
They might not have that same business model if majority
of their stuff was sold from US, maybe from other vendors,
maybe direct sales from a local company's website, as opposed
to dealing with the Amazon model. So that's some interesting
take on that.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, and we're going to see more of this manufacturing
over time. Look like they want to bring it back
in and see more of an over time in some
ways move back here. So that is the effort, that
is what's underway, whether or not how fast it is.
In fact, we'll hear more about auto tariffs, probably a
little bit later on this afternoon, as President Trump makes

(04:47):
his way here to Michigan in that one first one
hundred days rally that's expected happen later this afternoon. That'll
be a big one, particularly, I think, because he is
going to talk little bit about that and what he's
trying to do. How they described it this morning as
they asked about tariffs and secretary was sent to Treasury
there they said, well, we've heard some rumors that you

(05:10):
might be easing some of the auto at a Stitut said, well, listen,
the idea is President Trump is on the phone. He's
talking to the auto the Big three, some of the
auto manufacturers, and he's hearing what they have to say.
And the idea isn't to wipe these people out. The
idea is to give them a path forward that makes
it easy, that makes it efficient for them to start

(05:34):
making things here in America and hopefully Michigan again.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Justin there's been announcements every day. It feels like on
the news there's major announcement. I just saw IBM one
hundred and fifty billion dollar investment in manufacturing here. As
long as those things continually pour in, manufacturing can and
will be done here. And the differences in the past

(06:02):
is the past. We needed tons of manual labor. Now
with machinery, with robots, that manual labor situation is not
gone entirely. But we can do mass manufacturing with the
assistance of robotics and AI machinery that just simply couldn't
be done twenty years ago, where China totally had the

(06:22):
market cornered because they had that cheap, often slave labor. Sadly,
so we can do this. We just need to have
the incentive, the push, that the unity to do that.
And I hope through this tear of confusion and difficulties
we can unify together and see that we have to
work together locally to make the stuff. We can't be
relying on another country to make the medicine that keeps

(06:45):
us alive. The insulin that keeps my daughter alive, can't
come on a container ship from China. If that ever
gets shut off, humanly speaking, she's gone. That's a problem.
We have to fix that massive.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
And I had great conversations last week in DC talking
with people, not only to go to the White House,
but I got a chance to talk with other people.
RFK met RFK out on the street as we were
walking to dinner in Georgetown, and I had a great
conversation with somebody who's very key expert. He was given
a talk at Georgetown about tariffs and what the goals are,

(07:19):
what they're trying to do in one of these big issues.
Pharmaceuticals very very important. A lot of the not just
the actual pharmaceuticals themselves, but the key ingredients aren't here
in America. We've got to turn that around for various
different reasons. Number One, I think it'd make it here,
would help us quite a bit in a number of

(07:40):
ways with supply chain and some of those other issues
that you just mentioned, But for national security reasons alone,
as you just mentioned your daughter. And by the way,
we've had plenty of time, folks. We saw what happened
in twenty twenty. We know where we're at here. There
really should be no excuse at this point. A big

(08:02):
bill just passed the House. Not the big beautiful bill
that one big, beautiful bill that they've been talking about, well,
one of them, quietly in the background. Milania has been
pushing for. It's a bill to ban this fake deep
fake AI revenge pornography. Now everything, unfortunately is this way AI.
You can make some great things, you can do some

(08:22):
real good with it. It sounds like you can also
do some real evil with it. But this is a
bill that she's been championing behind the scenes. It looks
like they just got it passed in the House last night.
Explain what this.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah, this is long long overdue. Many other countries have this.
US is of major countries, one of the last to
sign on to this. But this is basically saying if
somebody has inappropriate content that was not consensual, that you
did not consent to posting online intimate images, you know,
things of that category. They're saying that that the platforms

(08:58):
have to remove it that content and can get into
big trouble if they don't. The reason why this is
so important because this is not just for revenge pornography.
This is the stepping stone for pretty much putting the
systems into place to hold Internet companies, Internet people that
host this kind of content accountable. Where if there's inappropriate content,

(09:21):
there's a system and process to help remove that. It's
be very difficult to implement. It's going to be very
hard to implement this, but it is the beginning. It
is very necessary as anybody can post just about anything
right now online and there's almost zero way to pull
that back. So very good that they're doing this. It's
going to be very difficult to implement. I hope they

(09:42):
can fully implement and hold these Internet companies accountable and
that this is a huge help, hopefully to stop this
inappropriate content revenge. And it's not just people physically doing
this to harass a spouse or an x or something.
There's AI systems that do this all on their own,
just to extort people for money, so this is not

(10:04):
just a people on people kind of situation. This is
also going to help stop those AI platforms from doing that.
So hopefully this works and helps the Internet of things.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
I got a whole list of things that unfortunately we're
just not going to have time to get to today,
but we have this story. It quietly happened behind the scenes,
and no on the international front. It was a much
bigger story, but we have it here. And I know
you wanted to talk about it today. Gold This is
wild Spain, Portugal. They've been offline. They had a big

(10:35):
power outage just I guess it was this weekend. Anyway,
we found out what caused it, and it's almost as
ridiculous as a squirrel and a transformer kind of thing.
I mean, this is massive blackout that that that coused
lines at grocery stores and they just had no clue
for the longest time. Turns out it was all because

(10:58):
they went Just just days ago, they had this massive announcement.
By the way, Trent, this is this is incredible. You
can't make this up what I'm about to show you.
Just days ago, April twenty second, here you go, Spain
rags about hitting one hundred percent renewable power, and then
days later, April twenty eight, Spain has the nation's largest

(11:20):
blackout in history. You can't make this stuff up. It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, justin they said that their solar system solar generation
systems failed, so that the interesting part is it'spent twenty
four hours. They lost sixty percent of their power supply,
which essentially chain reaction took down their entire grid into
several countries actions that feed off them, France, Portugal and
some others, and that took that entire system down. The

(11:52):
issue here is simple. They restored the power, okay, but
they're not telling us exactly what went wrong in the
solar grid. Was it that hardware, was it bad equipment?
Was a computer hack? What was the problem. To restore power,
you have to fix what's broke. If a line is down,
you fix it. It's not hard to report in what
you fixed. I think the key here is what's not

(12:12):
being reported. That's what I'd love to know what really
took the grid down here. It'd be good to learn
from that so we don't make the same mistakes here.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Uh yeah, well, let's just back out altogether. I don't
know that we get a lot of sun here in Michigan.
Days like today maybe, but most of the year it's
it's pretty well gloomy and doomy and snowy, and there's
just no way that you can power wind solar and
unicorn fards here in at least Aaron, Michigan as they'd
like to do. Oh dag you, I know, Greta. I apologize,

(12:43):
but that that just well, we're just scratching the surface
with some of these stories, but we're bringing you up
to speed the best we can do with our Tech
Tuesday segment. Always a pleasure, my friend. Thank you so
much for being here with us.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
Thanks Justin, have a great day, Trey.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Can it be afortile Lized Store, Lake Mish, can Drive
in Standdale, and Grand River Tech as always Grandivertech dot
com