Nilay Patel's conversation with Evan Smith, CEO of supply-chain intelligence firm Altana, published by The Verge, arrives the same week that the Framework Laptop 13 Pro went up $800 in price due to what Antonio Di Benedetto is calling RAMageddon: tariff-driven memory component price spikes hitting the consumer before they hit any factory floor.
RAMageddon and the Distributed Cost of Policy
The Framework laptop story is instructive because Framework is explicitly the anti-disposable computer company. It sells repairability, longevity, user sovereignty. Tariffs designed to pressure manufacturing geography instead hit the exact product category that was trying to reduce consumption. The policy's actual incidence is inverted from its stated intent. Smith's point to Patel is structural: supply chains are not geography. They are information networks. Moving a factory doesn't move the knowledge, the tooling suppliers, the trained workforce, or the logistics infrastructure that makes the factory viable. A 2026 arXiv paper by Xu, Cheng, and Sun on LLM audits of building decarbonization disclosure found that AI tools cannot reliably assess complex institutional claims from documentation alone. The same epistemic problem applies to supply-chain policy: the official story and the actual flow of goods and value are not the same document.
Amazon Satellites and the Next Supply Chain Layer
While the semiconductor supply chain buckles under tariff pressure, Amazon is filing FCC applications for a direct-to-device LEO satellite network targeting 2028, per Stevie Bonifield. This is the next layer of supply-chain infrastructure: connectivity that bypasses terrestrial carrier dependencies entirely. The political framing of tariffs is about jobs and factories. The economic reality, as Smith and the Framework pricing both demonstrate, is that value in manufacturing is almost entirely in software, design, and logistics intelligence. Amazon is building the logistics intelligence layer from orbit. The jobs are not coming back to the factory floor. They moved to the satellite trajectory.