[HN Gopher] Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and...
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Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more
monopolistic?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-09-16 02:29 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| [deleted]
| quantum_state wrote:
| Based on my observations, lots of the traditional large companies
| are quite feudal ... lots of "yes" people ...
| mrkramer wrote:
| Nobody is forcing them to work for large companies. There are
| thousands of jobs available at small and medium sized
| businesses.
| dzonga wrote:
| > more unicorns are becoming public. but what's not spoken about
| a lot is how most of these companies are running on fumes. read
| any tech company s-1 that's posted on hn these days, high chances
| the company is cash flow negative. which means if investors
| withdraw funds the company goes belly up in a day, leaving the
| regular employees i.e holoi polloi holding the bag.
| Notanothertoo wrote:
| This is often intentional for tax reasons, see palintir and
| Spotify.
| dangus wrote:
| > if investors withdraw funds the company goes belly up in a
| day
|
| Investors _can 't_ withdraw funds from companies by design.
| When you sell shares in a public company it's another investor
| buying it from you.
|
| Runway is runway, it can be looked as a glass half empty
| ("running on fumes") or half full. If a company runs out of
| time/funding rounds it can cut costs. It's easier to make a
| profit when you have high revenue, brand recognition, fewer
| competitors. That's why growth companies run for years on
| losses.
| dzonga wrote:
| pulling funds, as in the 'cash from financing activities'
| yeah that can be withdrawn. shares are different, in that
| investors can sell the shares at a loss.
| jlos wrote:
| FYI its "hoi polloi":
|
| - Hos is the Greek definitive article (i.e. "the")
|
| - Pollos is a Greek word, most generally, meaning "many'
|
| - They are used with the nominative plural ('oi' ending)
|
| - In Greek, the article delclines with the noun so "hos" ->
| "hoi"
| matttproud wrote:
| You just noticed?
|
| Snark aside, this trajectory has been clear as day since the
| 1990s (for anyone willing to broach this question) and brazenly
| undeniable since the early 2000s.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Idk about America but The Economist is getting more boring each
| day.
| bsenftner wrote:
| The 90's was their integrity apex, and it's been downhill
| since.
| seaourfreed wrote:
| $3.5 billion a year go to Lobbyists to corrupt congress. We have
| mass crony capitalism (on top of the healthy capitalism). That
| drags the USA down. It needs to be solved.
| [deleted]
| zz865 wrote:
| One thing is the rest of the world has caught up with America.
| Imagine in the 60s, 70s much of the world was communist and
| closed, dirt poor or isolated. Now living in
| Korea/Poland/Mexico/Turkey people have cars, TVs, cellphones
| access to travel like most Americans.
| herbst wrote:
| Cought up is relative, they developed their own way of living
| and sometimes highly surpassed US living standards years ago.
| zz865 wrote:
| Definitely I've noticed free public healthcare & education
| makes people less stressed and better QOL.
| Frost1x wrote:
| The US thrives on a precariat class now, though. General
| safety nets that allow people to contribute a reasonable
| amount and still live comfortably doesn't create a class of
| people desperate to do any work to survive, ripe for
| exploitation.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Well, duh, yes!
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.vn/I1Mq4
| baybal2 wrote:
| America is becoming more isolationistic, in everything, but
| economy.
|
| The manufacturing is unfortunately not only not returning to the
| US, despite efforts of 3 previous administration, but is leaving
| at the accelerated pace, faster than even at the "peak
| outsourcing."
|
| Having no real economy, but banks, and McKinsey, while being in a
| such dependency on imports is a recipe for nothing good. US trade
| deficit has passed $70B, and we are on the route to see it pass
| 100 this decade because of enormous government borrowing to fight
| covid, and stimulate the economy.
|
| Why it is so bad? Because, it tends to spiral out of control,
| when your only means to pay for basic living necessities is to
| spin the printing press, and kill the economy even more,
| precluding any chance at repayment.
|
| People wee saying that US is facing the worst balance of payment
| crisis in eighties, when it just passed $10B, and the White House
| was in total panic. Now, fancy economists are now coming, and
| saying "nah, $70B is normal, we can always print more"
| mjevans wrote:
| On-shore manufacturing, automation, and making more than just
| ideas to sell the rest of the world does seem like a good
| thing.
|
| I wonder why we can't seem to invest in the future (in the
| USA).
| baybal2 wrote:
| As a man who worked in OEM electronics for 10 years, I can
| say, automation will not help USA a dime.
|
| There are far richer Asian countries than China, business
| people with far more capital to buy fancy tooling. You think
| they never tried that? They did, and it didn't work largely,
| or the impact was minimal. Look at Malaysia, or Taiwan.
|
| Hopes on robots, and automation as an economic "Wunderwaffe"
| is plainly silly, and are largely coming from people who
| haven't put in a single nail in their life. Don't listen to
| these men who say that.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| 100% agreed, as someone who's automated manufacturing
| lines, the problem of automation is beyond just robotics.
| It's automation with high reliability, yield, less
| downtime, high throughput, low costs and have to beat
| humans in the long tail of weird situations. The reason why
| your home printer can separate sheets of paper and only
| pick one sheet at a time is nothing short of a miracle
| backed by thousands of hours of engineering and years of
| failures. That said, some applications are very easy and we
| could automate effortlessly (Pick-and-place tools for
| example in PCB manufacturing).
| herbst wrote:
| I don't know about robotics and manufacturing. What i know
| is that I saved thousands of work hours for different
| companies by just a few lines of code in the few years I
| worked in this field.
|
| I don't see how automation will save anyone's economy, but
| it surely will put a always growing dent in the economy
| rory wrote:
| Electronics are a particularly complicated thing to
| manufacture, though.
|
| I know an engineer who started a small business (in the
| USA) that makes specialized types of plastic-coated copper
| wiring. The process is 90% automated and runs around the
| clock. He keeps two employees on at all times, but they
| basically just change spools and then hang out and watch
| the machines.
| [deleted]
| gethoht wrote:
| "enormous government borrowing to fight covid and stimulate the
| economy" is by no means the reason the trade deficit is what it
| is or what it will be. The trade deficit is the product of 40
| years of policy that promotes outsourcing and does little to
| nothing to protect domestic manufacturing. The only thing that
| is protected is shareholder profit and tax schemes that protect
| it at the expense of the rest of society.
| iammisc wrote:
| Well we saw last election how even mentioning the idea of
| preferring american business makes you apparently a Nazi. For
| the past forty years, almost every single american president,
| regardless of party, has been more than happy to sell out the
| country's manufacturing base and the media applaud and reward
| them for it.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| Not sure to what you are referring, but Biden's "Buy
| American" executive order gives preference to American
| companies.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-sign-
| buy-...
| iammisc wrote:
| I'm talking about how for the past four years, import
| tariffs, which are the same.as bidens executive order
| were castigated simply for the crime of having been
| initiated by a republican
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Could you provide a citation for your first claim?
|
| Definitely agree with the second, and you can add "CEO" as
| well.
| iammisc wrote:
| My citation for the first claim is the trump campaign.
| Trump made china's trade with the us a centerpoint of
| both his campaigns and was called a racist for it. We
| were told it's just a dog whistle for white supremacy
| with little evidence, and we saw this line of reasoning
| continue through the covid pandemic, when reasonable
| theories, like the lab leak theory, which painted china
| in a bad light also earned mr trump accusations of
| racism.
|
| The media cannot stand it when china is criticized. They
| have a long history of this, like how they hid he one
| child policy from Americans for years, and then openly
| persecuted the grad student who uncovered it
| rchaud wrote:
| > The media cannot stand it when china is criticized.
|
| The same media that has been reporting on Chinese
| suppression of Hong Kong protests and Uighurs in Xinjiang
| for several years? That media?
| iammisc wrote:
| Yup tbat media. The media with a _vested_ interest in
| ensuring there is always sensational news, but absolutely
| no interest that its own coverage ever lead to better
| outcomes.
|
| The media has a vested interest to not only portray china
| as evil, but to make sure china stays that way, and to
| thwart american presidents from doing anything to limit
| china's growth, so that the American media has a powerful
| short-term source of profits for its owners.
|
| This is not rocket science. Notice how the Hong Kong and
| Uighur stories are just designed to provoke outrage. The
| moment anyone suggests a solution or a potential action
| the US can take, the media fall silent or starts
| attacking, depending on how likely it is for that action
| to work.
| baybal2 wrote:
| You are mistaking a cause, and effect here.
|
| 40 years of "misplaced policy," were a 40 years of actually
| very deliberate, and well placed policy called "monetary
| expansion."
|
| Everything to facilitate the sale of US debt around the
| world, probably including a conscious effort to open door to
| foreign creditors at the expense of US industry was taken.
|
| Chinese call this schema "You make all the work, and I make
| all money"
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > foreign creditors at the expense of US industry was
| taken.
|
| Inbound capital transfers aren't "at the expense of US
| industry".
| baybal2 wrote:
| Loans, are not capital, by the definition.
| mc32 wrote:
| America Inc., riffs on the now dated "Japan Inc." But... other
| than cute, it's a poor take.
|
| Japan Inc was Japan Inc _because_ much of their economy was
| capitalistically centrally planned. The central Gov 't would have
| monumental plans and would greatly incentivize their keiretsu to
| follow and undertake such monumental tasks. There was METI at the
| center making policy for an export driven economy.
|
| That is in no way a parallel to what we are seeing in the US. In
| the US we are seeing companies become _more_ influential and
| powerful than the central government and implementing their own
| policies (Uber in transportation, Facebook /YouTube in content
| censorship). That is no USA Inc. It's Incs in the USA with global
| projection. Very different.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Ten years ago, Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee,
| wrote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads. That sucks."
|
| Look at the big names now. Google, which did most of its best
| work in the early days. Facebook, which is part of the problem,
| not part of the solution. Amazon, which has figured out how to
| exploit workers. Microsoft, which is still trying to sell Windows
| N+1. And the gig economy crowd, which has figured out how to pay
| below minimum wage and not pay benefits.
|
| What don't we have?
|
| - Really good battery companies. Tesla just packages Panasonic.
| GM just packages LG. They're not making batteries from raw
| materials.
|
| - Progress in aircraft. Boeing is still flogging variants of the
| 737, which first flew in 1967.
|
| - Semiconductors. Does anyone in the US still make commodity RAM?
|
| - Electronics in general. There are few US sources left for small
| components.
|
| - Telecom. The US no longer has anybody who makes telephone
| central office equipment. The US can no longer make smartphones.
|
| - Power. The US does not make many large power transformers.
|
| - Appliances. Few US manufacturers remain.
|
| - Manufacturing engineering. Who gets a degree in manufacturing
| engineering today? Who knows how to lay out a production line?
| random314 wrote:
| Would you rather watch cabletv or YouTube?
|
| Would you rather fish out a map and look for directions or
| simply ask your car for navigation directions?
|
| Would a cancer researcher use his library card and read
| literature or simply Google it?
|
| Would you like to solve the protein folding problem?
|
| All of these have been paid for by advertisements.
| echelon wrote:
| Outside of protein folding, each of these has been solved for
| 15+ years.
|
| And protein folding isn't _exactly_ solved.
| random314 wrote:
| YouTube was solved 15 years ago?
| echelon wrote:
| > February 14, 2005; 16 years ago
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
|
| It had a lot of content back then.
|
| Work since has gone into scaling and transcoding, but
| much more work has gone into ads, platform stickiness,
| music rights management, abuse detection, etc. Not really
| solving problems at the forefront of humanity.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Would you like to solve the protein folding problem?
|
| Isn't Deep Mind a british company that Google bought it?
| Seems to me that most of the credit should go to UK
| society/education and just a bit to advertising industry.
| random314 wrote:
| What was the endgame for Deepmind, a company with no
| revenue stream? Geoff Hinton was also hired via
| acquisition.
| simion314 wrote:
| I do not know, but let's give the credit to the
| educational system and country of origin too , I see a
| lot of people give credit to US or SV for shit that is
| bought by the giants.
|
| Or I see arguments like "why there is any non US company
| for X ?" and the implication is that SV is the best where
| in fact SV has the money to buy anything that is
| promising and sometimes kill it but sometimes like in
| DeepMind case managed it good enough ot to waste it.
| random314 wrote:
| The point is, ads engineering is about 10% of Google's
| engineering workforce. The 90% remaining are producing
| products like organic search, YouTube, maps, shopping,
| picasa, gmail, deepmind, Google brain, voice recognition
| that actually works, self driving, automatic translations
| and captions etc. Google produces the maximum amount of
| published research by far.
|
| How do you think these free products get paid for? By the
| 10% of engineering that does ads. The engineers
| optimizing ads are actually getting everything else in
| the company funded, including revenue less Deepmind,
| which would have folded years ago unless it was purchased
| by Big Tech.
|
| Sure give credit to the government and educational
| system, but what is the point of denigrating ads
| engineers who are funding all of these while also
| optimizing ads results so that they are relevant to
| users. Would you rather have them work on cancer
| research? Do you really think cancer research is
| desperate for machine learning engineers to help them
| out?
|
| Or would something like DeepMind, Google brain, automated
| medical report analysis, smart search of medical archives
| help them better?
|
| Edit: as an aside, its presumptuous to say that the best
| minds of our generation are ML and systems engineers. ML
| engineers are good at math, programming and optimizing
| models. This doesn't automatically make them great
| biologists, oncologists, physicists or even
| mathematicians.
| simion314 wrote:
| I could imagine an alternative universe where big
| companies would pay fair taxes to UK and then those taxes
| would have paid more research into protein folding.
|
| I don't have an issue with a honest ad, what I have an
| issue is on team of people focusing on manipulating
| others to watch more videos, or stay more on a page, or
| write a giant comment so they can place more ads(or
| similar with shitty video games). Money from this evil
| operations are dirty. You could have won this money in a
| better way in a better world, we should strive for that
| better world and at least we can do is give the credit
| properly.
| random314 wrote:
| From Deep Mind wikipedia
|
| "Major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and
| Founders Fund invested in the company,[18] as well as
| entrepreneurs Scott Banister,[19] Peter Thiel,[20] and
| Elon Musk.[21] Jaan Tallinn was an early investor and an
| adviser to the company.[22] On 26 January 2014, Google
| announced the company had acquired DeepMind for $500
| million,[23][24][25][26][27][28] and that it had agreed
| to take over DeepMind Technologies. The sale to Google
| took place after Facebook reportedly ended negotiations
| with DeepMind Technologies in 2013"
| goodpoint wrote:
| The following technologies have been researched between 1900
| and 1990 almost entirely with *tax money*:
|
| Semiconductors, computing theory, GPS, GSM, satellites,
| airplanes, X-ray, optical cables, analog radio transmission
| and spread spectrum, industrial chemistry, solar power,
| nuclear power, vaccines, genetic research, and much more.
|
| Private companies putting together a search engine or uber or
| deliveroo are sitting on the shoulders of giants.
| jauer wrote:
| > - Telecom. The US no longer has anybody who makes telephone
| central office equipment. The US can no longer make
| smartphones.
|
| Adtran (Huntsville, AL & just acquired ADVA), Infinera (fab in
| Sunnyvale, CA). Both make optical transport systems. Adtran
| also makes access network systems (POTS, DSL, PON, Ethernet).
| Adtran has (or had) some manufacturing capability in Alabama.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > - Manufacturing engineering. Who gets a degree in
| manufacturing engineering today? Who knows how to lay out a
| production line?
|
| Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, all have engineering centres
| in China.
|
| When Zuckerberg was flying to suck up to Xi Jinping, he didn't
| fly there in hopes of getting Facebook.com available in China.
| What he got from Xi is a permission to setup an office to sell
| ads, and hire cheap Chinese engineers.
|
| Apple famously tried to conceal even the fact of the existence
| of their RnD office in China, claiming that they don't have
| "design centres" outside of USA. Up to some point, people
| working in Apple RnD centre in China had _a contract clause
| prohibiting them from posting the fact of their employment
| there on their LinkedIns._
|
| Google... almost the same story as the two above, it almost
| felt as if they felt "beshamed" to admit that they were opening
| an RnD shop in Shenzhen. "A small auxiliary office" that takes
| a few floors in Shenzhen's biggest building.
|
| Amazon started their Echo, and Fire RnD in USA, and then sent
| it off to China after a few releases, and repeated flops of
| Fire.
| echelon wrote:
| So when does the US collapse for not knowing how to do
| anything anymore?
| Animats wrote:
| Around 2030-2035, when China gets annoyed at the US over
| something and just stops shipping tools and componenets.
| Consumer goods shipments continue, but nothing that would
| allow the US to make anything.
| echelon wrote:
| 10-15 years to re-industrialize or shift to other
| countries.
|
| Not going to happen.
|
| Why doesn't the US try to onshore critical manufacturing?
| This is braindead stupid behavior. Existentially risky.
| tbihl wrote:
| We don't onshore because we are higher up the economic
| food chain, and can do more specialized work. The people
| high up that chain in the US are the same class who
| conceive of minimum standards for living quality for the
| whole country, effected by things like minimum wages,
| welfare, and all manner of government safety regulations.
|
| All of those things make a very small overlap between
| people who need to work such low value manufacturing jobs
| and those who have the skills and personality to do them.
| In essence, we've settled in to enormous wealth and
| safety by cooperating with other countries, and you are
| proposing that we should cooperate less and be poorer.
|
| I'm not convinced that you're wrong, but that's what
| you're propounding.
|
| Update: In other words, you're asking the national level
| version of "why don't we move back to the land and become
| self sufficient and steer clear of industrial ag and make
| our own food?" Same answer: we like our wealth, comfort,
| and safety where we are, thank you very much.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Labor costs are too high. Look, once you spend decades
| paying pennies on the dollar for labor, it's very hard to
| go back. It's the same when people discovered free music
| via p2p and YouTube. How do you dial that back?
|
| Nothing short of global war will fix this. Enter war with
| China where all trade is halted, and I promise you we'll
| figure out how to on-shore manufacturing in a jiffy. A
| terrible price, but the only solution.
| pm90 wrote:
| > Nothing short of global war will fix this. Enter war
| with China where all trade is halted, and I promise you
| we'll figure out how to on-shore manufacturing in a
| jiffy. A terrible price, but the only solution.
|
| Yes, let's start a global military conflict between
| nuclear powers in the hope that an economic activity
| that's no longer feasible maybe becomes feasible.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| In part because we've spent the last two generations
| scrubbing ourselves of the intellectual capacity to have
| a coherent dialogue about industrial policy.
|
| Also in part because much of our leadership isn't
| composed of Americans working for American national
| interests, it's composed of humanists who perceive
| themselves to be global citizens and believe in a
| worldwide frictionless marketplace operating under a
| universal liberalism that incidentally control American
| resources.
| pm90 wrote:
| Leaders who act against the interests of their
| constituents get voted out. I can't imagine a majority of
| US politicians holding the thought that American jobs
| must be sacrificed for the good of the world. The less
| convoluted reason is that Corporations make a ton more
| profit by manufacturing overseas and have directed their
| lobbying dollars into either making politicians look the
| other way or prohibit them from taking meaningful efforts
| to save domestic manufacturing.
| esyir wrote:
| When there's the "America is the cause of all evil" guilt
| (slight exaggeration), you can. A belief that what you do
| is moral can get people to align against their own
| interests.
| pm90 wrote:
| Just because it's a possibility doesn't mean that it's
| actually happening. If it was this would certainly be
| covered by the media, Politicians would have a policy
| platform to address this etc. There doesn't seem to be
| any evidence to indicate that's what's happening.
| jmeister wrote:
| Imagine reducing Amazon to "exploits workers".
|
| For starters, what about all the startups powered by AWS?
|
| Amazon lets my programmer cousins in India buy the latest
| technical books in days, while my generation used to torrent
| and print 15-20 years ago.
| zachguo wrote:
| Well, SpaceX is in the U.S.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah, and who knows, soon might even manage to get to the
| moon, something we already did in 1969. But now better and
| cheaper (with tech made 50+ years after the last mission, it
| would a challenge not to do it better and cheaper - but is it
| half a century worth of better and cheaper? Considering the
| dreams then was a moon base and mission to mars coming in the
| next decades, something that never came to be).
| tbihl wrote:
| The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle
| that government spending can accelerate technological
| progress in particular fields by raining money on those
| fields. The progress puts it way ahead of what could be
| expected and occurs to the detriment of sectors from which
| the money was taken.
|
| We now have a good understanding of just how far ahead we
| pushed ourselves beyond what market forces were going to
| pursue: 50-60 years, which is pretty cool.
| c54 wrote:
| I agree with your point, and it makes me really sad.
|
| Let me try to make some optimistic spins?
|
| - Intel is hopefully turning their foundry business around. I
| think this will be a slow (1-2 decades?) process but will pay
| results.
|
| - Tesla and SpaceX are actually really positive spins, though I
| agree Tesla isn't completely isolated from the rest of the
| eletronics world. It's what we've got and it's not half bad.
| SpaceX in particular I is world-class at this point and
| hopefully will continue to get better
|
| - Toyota makes more cars in the US than not. Worst case, these
| are still functioning production lines staffed by good workers,
| that talent and working knowledge (hopefully) doesn't just
| disappear
|
| - A lot of your examples are lower down the value chain, for
| instance Intel doesn't produce commodity RAM since they
| famously got out of that game in the 80s(?) to focus on the
| higher margin CPU business. Maybe this is good?
|
| Ultimately though, I agree that working in ads or finance is
| largely flat or negative sum to society (as someone who has or
| is in both). It's worse than that, too. People actively look
| down on manufacturing, as somehow less exciting and less
| complex than finance.
| baybal2 wrote:
| USA sells quite a lot of cars to China, out of all places...
|
| But these are not American cars, these are German cars made
| in America.
|
| Americans I meet are always surprised when they see how close
| are manufacturing jobs salaries in China, and US.
| dragonelite wrote:
| I was surprised when I discovered that the VW group sells
| like half of their inventory in China and ASEAN region.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If they're German cars made in America, what about all the
| American goods made in China?
| pm90 wrote:
| That's a little naive. No political entity in history has
| been able to reverse economic decline by looking at what it
| did best in an earlier age and try to do that again.
|
| There are other countries that are simply better than the US
| at doing certain things. I don't understand why Americans
| can't just accept that. Embrace the things we're really good
| at, work with others to get from them the things they're good
| at.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's arguably a strategic need to keep at least some
| expertise and a minimal operational capacity even for
| things that are cheaper to import[0]. COVID-19 demonstrated
| how fragile supply chains are, and that was _just_ a global
| emergency, and not purposeful economic warfare.
|
| America is good at things at the edge of the value chain.
| High-end goods. Services. Demand manufacturing[1]. Things
| that have value during good times, where the earlier links
| in the chain are healthy, and consumers have plenty of
| money to spend. In times of crisis, all this can evaporate
| quickly.
|
| Also, I feel it might be that the kind of jobs America is
| good at are different from the lower-level jobs in ways
| that are not conductive to having a healthy middle class.
| I've read some convincingly-sounding arguments going in
| this direction, but I can't recall any right now, and I
| haven't thought about this topic hard enough to come up
| with one myself.
|
| --
|
| [0] - This is not an unprecedented idea. See Boeing as a
| point of comparison. From what I read, the company would've
| been dead long ago if not for government spending. This
| spending looks wasteful if you look at what gets produced,
| but not when you realize it's really a way to ensure that
| manufacturing plants and people knowing how to use them are
| available in case they're needed for war production.
|
| [1] - Without being too bitter about it in this thread, I
| feel quite a lot of ways US brings in money are fads and
| artificial scarcities, created using marketing and
| intellectual property laws.
| pm90 wrote:
| I agree with your assessment but I don't think the
| solution is to try and artificially shore up domestic
| manufacturing capacity to the extent that it was before.
| There also isn't any reason to believe that those that
| supply us with what we want desire the kind of economic
| warfare you're describing.
|
| As for the middle class: I do agree here, we made a huge
| mistake gutting the manufacturing sector too quickly. But
| I suspect where we failed was in providing assistance to
| the affected communities rather than artificially trying
| to prop up manufacturing. The increased savings from
| manufacturing abroad could have been used to fund better
| healthcare and educational opportunities. Provide some
| kind of unemployment assistance. Instead all the rewards
| disproportionately went to a small minority of the
| owner/shareholder class.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I don't think the solution is to try and artificially
| shore up domestic manufacturing capacity to the extent
| that it was before._
|
| I agree that fully internalizing this kind of
| manufacturing is counterproductive. I feel that the
| optimum level is a limited capacity that could be scaled
| up quickly in an emergency. It's less efficient short-
| term, but resiliency always has some costs.
|
| > _Instead all the rewards disproportionately went to a
| small minority of the owner /shareholder class._
|
| I feel there's some confusion in the way offshoring
| savings were, and are, being talked about. Possibly a
| purposeful confusion. The way I see it, one can't say
| "we're saving money by offshoring", where "we" means "our
| country/our economy". It's the _private owners
| /shareholders_ that are saving money. The country only
| saves if they get to appropriate those savings, e.g.
| through a tax. If companies start to offshore and the
| government doesn't adapt taxation, then the country is
| actually losing on this.
| pydry wrote:
| >There are other countries that are simply better than the
| US at doing certain things. I don't understand why
| Americans can't just accept that.
|
| This is essentially a reworded version of the "ricardian
| law of comparative advantage" which was treated as gospel
| as an economic theory in the 1990s-early 2000s.
|
| It's almost dead today. The widely believed built in
| presumption that comparative advantage was static and
| unchangrable essentially led to American manufacturing
| being siphoned off overseas to countries that did not share
| this view.
|
| Almost all policymakers are now starting to treat this as a
| geopolitical threat.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| To expand a bit - Ricardian comparative advantage
| argument relies on the following assumptions:
|
| - no transportation costs
|
| - no unemployment
|
| - barter economy
|
| - 100% fungible labor - farmer, teacher, chemical
| engineer, doctor - they're all the same and can switch
| between jobs instantly, and immediately attain the level
| of productivity within that sector
|
| - prices are 100% determined by labor costs
|
| - demand for various types of items is static, and never
| changes
|
| - the demand structure is the same across all countries -
| i.e. if British prefer tea to coffee, we assume all
| countries prefer tea to coffee
|
| It's not just a "spherical cow" theory, it's more akin to
| "if a spherical cow rolls frictionlessly down a valley
| described by a parabola, then it will oscillate forever".
| True, but useless.
|
| Keynes, as usual, is ahead of the pack - calling out the
| theory's unrealistic assumptions, and predicting (in
| 1930s) that not the production, but the interest rates
| will do the adjustments - leading to persistent trade
| imbalances and move the economy further from full
| employment. Which is exactly what happened
| germandiago wrote:
| I recommend a read of the Austrian School of economy.
|
| Not as influential as Keynes since he is at the top. But
| for me, the most correct theories (without being an
| expert in the matter) come from there.
| imtringued wrote:
| The Austrian School of economics is just bad. Everyone
| knows that Keynes' policies are bandaids that make the
| wound recover faster. Meanwhile Austrian economists
| believe that people must let the wound heal as slowly as
| possible because of a tendency toward masochism and
| sadism.
|
| The truth lies in neither. The biggest economic problems
| stem from rigidity. Money has such an extreme degree of
| rigidity, it is capable of traveling through both space
| and time unhindered. It's a time machine and massless
| particle all in one.
|
| The reason why Austrian economics appeals to some people
| is either because they have an anti government axe to
| grind and want more trivial reasons to blame the
| government, they want to be on the receiving end of a
| regressive money system (gold bugs), macroeconomics are
| often abandoned in favor of microeconomics which hides
| the fact that local decision making can still result in
| seemingly coordinated failure and finally because they
| have mistaken moral beliefs about an amoral system most
| notably the myth of the protestant work ethic and the
| belief that the promise of work is their own personal
| property and it should be their right to delay redeeming
| that promise for all eternity.
|
| I will repeat it again. There are no morals in economics.
| Anyone who worships savings and frugality in monetary
| terms is worshipping poverty in real terms. Eat your
| economic cake, it will be bigger tomorrow because of that
| and when somebody needs you to show restraint and want to
| borrow your slice, they'll tell you.
| germandiago wrote:
| Ehat you are saying is not correct.
|
| You are missing that growing in permanent debt has
| consequences. Some countries have been ruined by external
| debt. We are on our way.
|
| We people do not manage wealth like that. A call for
| poverty is to live over our real outcome permanently
| (this does not mean we cannot invest and have debt as
| long as we are able to pay and as long as it has expected
| return in controlled ways).
|
| Eventually you go bankrupt. What is being poorer than not
| being able to finance your basic services?
|
| And yes, I admit to hsve become somewhat antistate.
| Because it is a scam, basically, to monopolize services,
| offer them more expensive, without the innovations that
| markets could provide you mich faster and on the way
| saying you are ok thanks to them and that you owe the
| state everything.
|
| I can deal with market prices and free choice and save a
| bunch of money, which is MY invested effort, so it is me
| who should manage it.
|
| States do not give me anything except poor justifications
| for their existence. The only exceptions could be (and I
| am not convinced either) security and justice.
|
| I really think they are way more correct than the
| alternative: that we must be forced in groups under the
| decisions of ellites. This is not morally right. And,
| BTW, a higher goal for the sake of others under coaction
| lead to fascisms and communism. Little by little we lose
| our freedom. Not a good thing.
| pydry wrote:
| Comparative advantage (or rather, the fallacious notion
| that it is inevitable/static) is still weirdly treated as
| gospel by the Austrian school. E.g.
| https://mises.org/library/ricardian-law-comparative-
| advantag...
|
| Austrians are a crotchety bunch and a bit stuck in their
| ways. They never really tried to explain the rise of
| China and are still somewhat in denial about it.
| germandiago wrote:
| The rise of China. Well. Taking into account that they
| adopted a somewhat economy market in many areas and that
| when there was more pure communism the economy was
| worse...
|
| I would say they did not get here faster because of too
| much intervention honestly...
|
| Nothing is pure capitalism or socialism. As you open the
| economy the cash flows more. That is what happened...
|
| BTW, I do not consider China a success since they are
| like one century late from America and on top of that
| there is no regike that has killed more than the Chinese.
| Do you really think it is a success? Well... I would say
| despite of the people managing it, not because of them...
|
| That said, I am not meaning austrians got everything
| right, just that I find them relatively convincing in
| many areas. Of course, they are subjrct to criticism, as
| everyone else.
| pydry wrote:
| The problem with ascribing China's success to being a
| market economy is India.
|
| India shared similar population size, geography and
| wealth to China initially.
|
| India had something closer to a market economy that was
| less interventionist/communist _and_ for far longer and
| yet it has grown at a far slower pace.
|
| Austrian predictions from the 90s presumed that China
| keeping tight control of the economy/currency/inward
| flows of investment and high level of state ownership was
| shooting itself in the foot.
| germandiago wrote:
| I am not an economist to analyze this in-depth. And very
| likely you have your point.
|
| However, for me the discussion is also ethical: I do not
| find a reason to have an ellite forcing on all the others
| through coaction what to do. Whether it maximizes economy
| or not. In other words: peopke are ends not means for
| others. That is the fundamental point in my view.
|
| I would not take a regime with over 60 million deaths
| (big leap forward, Chinese cultural revolution, etc.) as
| an example of something ethical by any measure.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's the damn point. Backwards governments can still
| succeed precisely because of the opposite, they can
| become (reasonably) good governments.
| germandiago wrote:
| China is a reasonable government that has over a million
| Uyghurs muslims in concentration camps.
|
| The history of a reasonably good country that had
| successes as the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Cultural
| revolution and now the Uyghurs, among many others.
|
| You know, Chinese government is not reasonably good at
| any level by any moral assessment.
|
| Capitalism has been superior in every aspect: as a proof,
| migration flows went from socialists to capitalists
| countries, being East/West Germany just one example.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Which standards judge the backwardness, and what a good
| one?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Long before we were born, our parents and their parents sold us
| out. This is just the lingering remnants, the propaganda for
| what was never accomplished, America only produces the carrot
| as a lure for a nation of endless corruptions.
| dluan wrote:
| The truth is that we're always in late stage capitalism, except
| for when we can creatively destroy something well enough to
| keep our minds off of that reality.
| postmeta wrote:
| Tesla has their own battery factories too, one is already live
| at Kato in California:
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/tesla-4680-battery
|
| Tesla is also working with Panasonic and CATL to implement
| their own factories for 4680 cells and scale production.
| rektide wrote:
| even within software, it feels.like their is so much room &
| space for new ideas, innovation & novelty. but the best minds
| are all paid to captivate attention for big systems, or manage
| various well established rent-seeking comluter offerings.
|
| it slays me that the engineers, the techies, have never had our
| day. we havent gotten good. we havent started new things,
| havent been augmenting & enhancing the world: we've been well
| paid to do the opposite, to capitvate & control & take
| technology, to dollop it out in little well managed productized
| offerings. the whole culture of innovation has dried up. i
| think of tech as still having so much prowess, skills,
| potential, and power, but wow, it is so squandered. it is so
| hard to break off on our own, to step away from the giant
| faucets of money & to start pursuing the radical, the good, the
| possible, the exciting. the potential.
|
| and what possibilities do arise, they seem so very quickly
| picked up, bought out, folded in to the mass corporatized
| system. comoetition & competency & novelty keep dying before
| they really get a chamce to bloom. it's the Thiel'ian advice to
| Facebook to sell, to take the money, get rich now, rather than
| keep working & trudging on, hoping.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'd say open source software and business models around it.
| Being a developer today and starting a company is so much more
| dynamic and accessible today than 20 years ago.
|
| I'd also say the creative works has seen a massive revolution
| from technology. Anyone can make professional
| video/audio/graphics today and distribute it.
| bobbytit wrote:
| This has been a deliberate destruction of a once great nation
| since the moment Kissinger sold the US out to Chairman Mao. The
| world is now China's bitch but just have woken up to it.
| [deleted]
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I'd contend NAFTA was the kiss of death for the US. It's what
| turned on the country to cheap produce out-of-season, and it
| got us addicted to cheap electronics. People forget that shit
| like tape decks and the like used to be prohibitively
| expensive in the 70s/80s. Nowadays we have people working at
| McDonalds with $1000 phones in their pockets. I don't think
| these devices were meant to be had by all. You should have to
| work for them. Commoditizing electronics looks great from a
| human rights perspective, sure, but it's proved ruinous for
| the planet.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > McDonalds with $1000 phones in their pockets. I don't
| think these devices were meant to be had by all. You should
| have to work for them.
|
| Aren't they working for them?? At McDonald's?? And honestly
| they're probably working harder than me, a software
| engineer, who also has a 1000$ phone. But I also have
| healthcare, and never have to put up with mopping any
| flooring.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| My point is that electronics should be prohibitively
| expensive. They have a lot of expensive parts in them.
| Today's budget iPhone should be something like $2000.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Actually there are less expensive parts. The parts are
| more expensive per unit mass but I bet an iPhone consumes
| about 1/10 of the raw materials as a early 70/80s
| entertainment boxes. It still just plastic, metal, glass,
| etc. The old electronics probably used worse chemicals in
| production as well. The lithium ion battery is probably
| the one outlier in that it's unique to mobile electronics
| but old portable electronics would use dozens of non-
| rechargeable batteries every year.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _The lithium ion battery is probably the one outlier in
| that it 's unique to mobile electronics but old portable
| electronics would use dozens of non-rechargeable
| batteries every year._
|
| Sure, but devices with replaceable batteries are
| theoretically easier to use longer. The average person
| buys a mobile phone every other year and discards their
| old ones. Practically every consumer electronic out there
| uses rechargeable batteries now which puts a limited
| lifespan on them.
| bitcurious wrote:
| That's an opinion; not a point. A point would be some
| justification for _why_ you think that.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I said it: they have lots of expensive parts in them.
| They rely on expensive rare earth metals that require
| lots of capital to extract, and leave wakes of
| destruction on the landscape. They require lots of
| plastics that remain inert for thousands of years. If one
| is spending thousands of dollars on these things, then
| they better last a long time. Instead we throw them out
| every other year and begin the cycle anew again.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This has been a deliberate destruction of a once great
| nation since the moment Kissinger sold the US out to Chairman
| Mao.
|
| Nope. What has been going on over the last decades is simply
| the consequence of unregulated capitalism - by design,
| capitalism seeks to eliminate or reduce cost to increase
| profit, and China (as well as India and Vietnam) were/are the
| most cost-efficient locations to produce goods and provide
| services.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The need for people to have a villain in their stories
| always disturbed me. I guess it gives people a semblance of
| control if they "know" something, rather than acknowledging
| the innumerable causal factors intertwining with each other
| to create an unknowable future and unattributable past.
|
| I am sure Kissinger played a part in many things, but he
| seems small pickles compared to labor costs (and hence
| quality of life) in the US being multiple standard
| deviations above the mean compared to the rest of the
| world.
|
| How long did people expect that arbitrage opportunity to
| not be taken advantage of?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The only reason that this could be taken advantage of in
| any real sense, was the removal of capital controls,
| which was very much a political choice.
|
| Also, adding China to the WTO was probably a bad thing
| for the lower half of the income distribution in the
| developed world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Unless your nation is self sufficient, there are always
| costs to capital controls. The choice is not let everyone
| live happily ever after and restrict trade. Tradeoffs are
| made to remain competitive on a global playing field.
|
| If China and other countries are bringing 1B+ people
| online to make products at a fifth of your wages, then it
| is only a matter of time before the buyers outside the
| country start buying from them.
| [deleted]
| germandiago wrote:
| It is true. Capitalism by design seeks that. And you too.
| And each of us. We seek to live in better conditions.
|
| The side-effect of it is that technology that the day back
| was not reachable for most is now available for everyone:
| phones, cheap clothes, cheaper food, hot water,
| electricity, railways...
|
| BTW I have lived in VN almost 10 years. It is true that VN
| has factories and workers are much cheaper.
|
| Jobs move there. People buy cheaper products (automatically
| people that did not have access to something have access to
| it by the cost reduction).
|
| Workers there get 4 times more of what they would get on
| their own and an insurance they would not have and do not
| need to work god knows where, probably selling in the
| street drinks or similar stuff.
|
| I think that with all its imperfections, capitalism is the
| better alternative.
|
| Btw we have never had unregulated capitalism... if we had,
| we would have worse salaries probably but more people could
| earn a life by themselves. Our friends the politicians are
| always there to tell you that you have to pay and shut up.
| For the good of all... lol. I do not buy that.
| imtringued wrote:
| When it comes to globalization the problem lies in
| imbalanced trade. If there is no imbalanced trade
| whatsoever, then globalization cannot cause problems.
|
| Trade surplus nations work more than they should. Trade
| deficit nations work less than they should. That has strong
| implication on where "all the jobs" end up.
|
| My favorite example is Greece. "All the jobs" have moved to
| Germany.
| kcb wrote:
| > Tesla just packages Panasonic. GM just packages LG. They're
| not making batteries from raw materials.
|
| That's not really true. Tesla and Panasonic jointly developed
| their cells. And the latest 4680 cells are fully designed by
| Tesla. Tesla also seems to be going independent for production
| at future factories.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Don't have semiconductors? News to me. I bet if you studied CS
| and you know any electronics engineers (who should be not too
| far from your department) they'll know wafer fabs in the US. I
| haven't been in uni for ages and I know like three fabs in
| Colorado where I don't even live.
|
| In fact, there are like famous semiconductor companies that
| make their stuff in the US. Makes me suspect the rest of the
| list as similar doomsaying.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > - Semiconductors. Does anyone in the US still make commodity
| RAM?
|
| Mikron Technology Inc
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > Who gets a degree in manufacturing engineering today?
|
| https://www.engineering.txstate.edu/Programs/MFGE.html
|
| https://mime.oregonstate.edu/manufacturing-engineering-under...
|
| Or anywhere that offers both an IE and ME degree, you could
| likely build your own.
| baybal2 wrote:
| You will be surprised to see where you see _American_
| process, and manufacturing engineers today.
|
| We had not a few 6 year degreed engineers from USA working in
| China full time.
|
| Similarly in semiconductor manufacturing, quite a lot of US
| semiconductor process engineers were working in Taiwan, with
| its really low salaries, long before the TSMC made advances
| into the US market.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's _Where_ or _How_ , not _Who_.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Typically, degree programs don't exist without students. ;)
| [deleted]
| fourtrees wrote:
| I'd disagree with aircraft. The modern 737, the NG or the MAX,
| is a world apart from the plane that first flew in '67. Almost
| everything except for the seating configuration has been
| upgraded or changed on the plane. The type-rating laws also
| provides Boeing with an incentive to keep the plane just
| similar enough that a crew can transfer from one class to
| another without too much training. It's also not Boeing's fault
| that there's a huge international market for a plane of that
| size and range.
|
| Boeing does have its faults though.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Trimmers auctioned by wires and pulleys, requiring more brute
| force than a fit male pilot, that is not modern by any
| standards, it is backward compatibility for profits.
| swlkr wrote:
| Micron makes RAM in the US
| Frost1x wrote:
| Mushkin used to, but I suspect it stopped quite awhile back
| now browsing their website. It's apparently now owned by
| another company as of 2013. I used to exclusively purchase
| Mushkin memory for systems prior to transitioning to laptops
| where I rarely swapped memory out. Good to know there's at
| least something left at Micron.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads. That sucks."
|
| I noticed this around the same time. It was 2010 and I was
| still in grad school, my lab mate and I used to poke fun of
| what we called the "Twitter researchers", who were working on
| what we perceived to be very boring projects (i.e. figure out
| the optimal ranking of N articles on a page to maximize some
| objective function). They also didn't like the research, but
| Twitter/Facebook/Microsoft/Google was paying for their tuition
| and stipend, so they didn't have much of a choice. When the big
| grant funding agencies are funding projects at a rate of around
| 20% - 25%, if you're a researcher hurting for federal dollars
| then that big tech money looks really good. I can only imagine
| this dynamic being replicated at universities across the
| country, how many young minds are wasted on this pursuit. And
| for what? So Google can sell more ads and become even richer?
| So Facebook can suck all of your attention just to make you
| depressed and suffer from body dysmorphia and an eating
| disorder?
|
| I'm in the robotics field, and in our lab we used to draw a
| clear line that whatever we worked on would not have a direct
| military application, because we couldn't stand the thought of
| our work being used to kill people. Obviously the line is
| blurry (will my localization algorithm be used on a predator
| drone?), but there was always at least an eye toward ethical
| considerations in our research group. We always asked ourselves
| "How could this be used to hurt people?" It was in our culture,
| because our work had such obvious evil implications. Just watch
| pretty much any sci-fi movie ever, there was no shortage of
| ideas about how robotics research could go wrong.
|
| But there's not a lot of sci-fi source material on how page-
| ranking algorithms can destroy society. These "Twitter
| researchers" as I called them never really had a notion that
| their work could be used for evil purposes, and who could blame
| them? In 2010 it seemed so benign. But looking around at the
| state of social media, maybe there should have been more
| conversations early on about the ethical implications of the
| research they were doing.
| germandiago wrote:
| Unfortunately every thing has a bad use. Even the knife I am
| using to cut meat. That is not a reason to forbid it...
|
| Forbiding is not the way to go. The way to go is to make
| people aware of the dangers and implications of their choices
| and convince them why we should avoid damaging others.
| Empathy is key here: just do not do to others what you do not
| want for you seems to me like the most basic of the rules.
|
| Imposing a view of what others can or cannot do is absurd,
| harmful and also we can miss all the good things we can do
| with things that can also be misused.
| ModernMech wrote:
| No one is talking about banning anything, at least I'm not.
| Yes, everything can be misused, which is why it's important
| to at least ask the questions about how and in what ways.
| When some technology can be so badly misused, more so than
| a knife, it's important to have a culture around the proper
| handling of that power. Take nuclear energy for example.
| Yes it can be used for great evil, but we should not ban
| research into nuclear energy because it can be used for
| good as well. Nonetheless, there are still grave ethical
| considerations that go into producing this research. The
| greater the ethical considerations, the more thoroughly we
| need to consider all the implications of this technology,
| good and bad, rather than "move fast and break things".
|
| Social media is one of those things. It doesn't present
| itself with the same raw force of nuclear power, but it has
| proven to have an undeniable power over the human mind.
| Despite the evidence we have now, though, it still seems
| that ethical considerations of social media are not being
| taken seriously enough by the people with the most power of
| social media platforms, and this worries me.
| germandiago wrote:
| > there are still grave ethical considerations that go
| into producing this research
|
| I would like to know which ones. If you do something to
| not harm, why do you have to be blamed because other
| misuse it? I do not think this is the right line of
| thinking if you mean that we should not do it just on the
| basis that "someone evil could misuse it". Of course, as
| an individual you can refuse to research if you think it
| can yield those results, but never blame it on a
| researcher that someone else misused their invention.
|
| Social media is a fight because there is an obsession for
| censorship from some interested parties, in part. That is
| why.
|
| I do not believe in those super powers as much in the
| sense that you can always stay away from it as much as
| you wish. It is a matter of self-discipline also, even if
| it is indeed a "powerful weapon".
| ModernMech wrote:
| What I have in mind is not refusing to do the research at
| a society level. That's what I personally chose to do,
| but others may see it differently. The research will get
| done if it's valuable.
|
| What I'm talking about is twofold: a cultural recognition
| and appreciation of the ethical issues, and secondly
| appropriate safeguards to prevent maluse of said
| technology, where appropriate.
|
| Take nuclear weapons for instance. I personally wouldn't
| have involved myself in building them, but others did and
| here we are. We as a society don't just let that
| technology run amok though. There are laws about their
| proliferation, organizations dedicated to keeping their
| use in check, and a society-level understanding that
| their use have such terrible consequences that they can
| never, ever be taken lightly.
|
| With this environment, so far we've averted armed nuclear
| conflict. But it's important to realize this is a
| purposeful thing. People dedicate their lives to this
| pursuit. It takes _effort_ to build this shared
| understanding of their dangers.
|
| I agree with you that an individual researcher is not to
| blame if they are doing careful, considered research. If
| the attitude is "the implications of my research are not
| my concern. That is for someone else to worry about" then
| I do have a problem with that. And yes, that is a real
| opinion I have heard expressed by a researcher in deep
| fakes, and it deeply dismayed me.
| petra wrote:
| Ethically , are robotics a good idea ? Who knows. People do
| need good jobs, or even just jobs, and it doesn't seem more
| robots are going to help with that.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Depends on the robot really. Robots that help the elderly
| manage their dementia and loneliness? Great. Robots that
| help wheelchair bound people navigate? Great. Robots that
| help clean up nuclear disasters? Great.
|
| What would not be great is if we just allow a handful of
| people to own all the robots in the world (and their
| output), just as we allow a handful of people to own all
| the capital producing equipment in the world. Then we're
| just where we are today, but even worse off. This is
| actually my nightmare, and partly why I don't do much
| robotics anymore these days...
|
| Remember, people only need jobs because we as a society
| have decided if they don't have jobs, we will allow them to
| go hungry and suffer exposure of the elements due to
| homelessness. This is perhaps necessary when there's so
| much work to be done you want people working instead of
| idle and comfortable. But if the robots can do all the
| work, then why do people need jobs? Only if the benefits of
| that work accrue to a handful of people rather that society
| as a whole.
| germandiago wrote:
| If robots are expensive at first, some people will have
| them first. This is a basic law of economy (scarcity).
|
| It is interesting about peoplr must havr jobs or not. If
| you do not provide value and someone has to pay those
| costs with their work, is that fair? Even if we have
| robots: who maintains them, manufacture, program the AI?
|
| You want tha some people work doing that and the rest
| enjoy a life as good as the ones who work hard and people
| who benefit from them just be privileged?
|
| Something does not match well here.
|
| You do your contribution and find a place in society. If
| your contribution is not great, I do not find a reason to
| be in exactlythe same position as others. Yes you have
| the right to live and so on. But do not expect a Ferrari
| at your door and a luxury life.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Robots are a fantastic idea. It's the journalists telling
| society everyone will be out of work that is the source of
| society stress - that and the billionaires driving
| capitalism into the dirt while ignorantly driving the
| ignorant society they engineered for their benefit to a
| violent revolution that will destroy them and their
| children.
| Atreiden wrote:
| This is the argument for UBI. Robots _will_ displace human
| workers. They already are. We can either capitalize on all
| of this human capital by offering basic income, or we can
| let income + wealth inequality slowly destroy society by
| rendering the bottom X% (where X is modeled by an
| exponentially increasing function) destitute.
| germandiago wrote:
| wealth inequality is natural by definition, whether you
| like it or not.
|
| And imposing others share the fruit of their value,
| unethical.
| imtringued wrote:
| > wealth inequality is natural by definition, whether you
| like it or not.
|
| Considering the huge variety in "natural by definition
| wealth inequality" across countries it feels like we have
| enough freedom to choose how much inequality we want.
| What we definitively know we is that we can make wealth
| inequality much worse than it has to be. Just take a look
| at South Africa. 30% unemployment by nature. Thank god we
| chose a different "natural by definition wealth
| inequality". What your argument also fails to consider is
| that wealth inequality is getting worse over time
| implying there must have been a natural shift rather than
| a political one.
|
| >And imposing others share the fruit of their value,
| unethical.
|
| If you refuse to share work, then you must share income
| by definition.
|
| Consider a society that only needs a 4 hour work week.
| One person decides to work 8 hours because they like
| their job and talk about how amazing work is and people
| should work more. One person no longer has to work. The
| hard working person will then look at the unemployed
| person and then tell everyone how lazy he is.
|
| Before you invoke the lump of labor fallacy, you have to
| realize that the argument relies on Say's law which
| assumes that the hard working person worked because he
| wasn't satisfied with the products and services one can
| obtain in a 4 hour work week, essentially that all the
| money that person earns will be spent and therefore
| generate demand for the person that is unemployed. The
| truth is far more pessimistic.
|
| The hard working person will insist that he should keep
| his money even though he has no intention to spend it,
| essentially denying that say's law even exists (empirical
| evidence shows it's being broken all the time). This
| insistence is what keeps the lazy person unemployed. That
| unemployed person still needs 1 hour of services and
| goods (housing and food). The bandaid answer is to tax
| the hard working person and transfer the bare minimum to
| the unemployed person and it works because making
| everyone spend all their money is never going to happen,
| there are too many morally inclined people on this planet
| that insist on a oddly specific and harmful form of
| saving.
| germandiago wrote:
| It is natural that if it takes you half a life make
| incomings you are careful how you spend them... I do not
| find the problem there.
|
| There are plenty of people that take bad decisions or
| take jobs with lower income or no jobs at all and they
| try to blame the rest. I do not feel responsible for the
| bad decisions of others. I am not morally forced to help
| them.
|
| You can be sure that if they are people I know and I know
| their stories I could help. But that is very, I mean,
| VERY different from being morally responsible for the
| failures of others.
|
| Saving harmful? First, it is good in that it will lower
| the inflation lolol. But leaving that apart... so it is
| bad to not spend the money so we must force them?
| Seriously, I do not understand anything.
|
| In order to make money u mist provide services or goods.
| If u have money is bc ur service is serving others, at
| least in a free market... so tell me why those people
| that took yhe trouble to serve others and take risks
| should be penalized. Do not tell me they do it for money
| not for serving others... that is not important. The
| important thing is that the side-effects is satisfying a
| demandand that u bought either bc it is better than the
| competition or cheaper.
|
| In my view it should be much more penalized a person that
| does not want to work bc they say those jobs are all shit
| and expects the welfare to rescue them.
|
| Sorry to be so harsh with the topic, because I know that
| there are people who are not like that. But the problem
| is not helping itself, it is systematizing it. At that
| point people abuse it.
| germandiago wrote:
| > Consider a society that only needs a 4 hour work week.
| One person decides to work 8 hours because they like
| their job and talk about how amazing work is and people
| should work more. One person no longer has to work. The
| hard working person will then look at the unemployed
| person and then tell everyone how lazy he is.
|
| This is difficult to say: you mean a person that works
| has exactly the same skills? In the case they have, you
| still can have a 4h/day person that is more skilled. That
| person will still have a job.
|
| And yes, if a person works harder, it will get more from
| it. They cannot be blamed for working I think. In any
| case people should be blamed for not wanting to work and
| wanting to live from others. I do not find a problem with
| the reverse reasoning. Just my opinion, I understand your
| point, though.
| yifanl wrote:
| What percentage of their value do you think the average
| worker currently makes (Pick any specific occupation
| you'd like, if this is too vague)? If its less than 100%,
| how would you propose they petition to increase it to be
| 100%, as ethics would dictate?
| germandiago wrote:
| You are telling me your employer must give you 100% of
| the profit? What about:
|
| - building the business
|
| - maintaining it healthy (this can incur additional
| expenses at unpredictable times)
|
| - the jobs it generates (that never mind, they are bad in
| your mind I suppose or they just do it to earn money!
| They do... but you also pick the job in the first place
| to make money!)
|
| - the expenses they have to pay in case of firing someone
| if it does not produce.
|
| - social security they pay and contribute for everyone
| (at least in the spanish system)
|
| Do you find ethical to just ask for more money go and
| leave them bankrupt, without any regard of how they coud
| survive, when you just went pick up a position when much
| of that business was built? Really? I find it unethical
| also.
|
| Get your best deal, with your employer, they will give
| you what they think they can or _want_ , but by mutual
| contract. If you do not like it, go move to the next
| chance, it is not anyone's fault. Nothing bad into it. It
| is how you do in life: you choose what you drink (and
| what you do not!), who you join, where you go... nothing
| different here.
| yifanl wrote:
| The employer is absolutely a force multiplier, which is
| why I say value and not revenue generated.
| germandiago wrote:
| Ok, then I see we agree on something: you work for your
| employer because it is your best alternative.
|
| Otherwise, the logical consequence would be that we would
| not. I believe in win-win deals. The voluntary ones are
| by definition like that. You can take a bad decision,
| yes. But still, you get my point.
| scatters wrote:
| And what if it's greater than 100%? Should it then be
| decreased; what do your ethics say in that case?
| yifanl wrote:
| That feels like it'd be a small minority of cases,
| because the person who determines how much value an
| employee provides usually is incentivized to minimize how
| much to pay that employee.
| germandiago wrote:
| If you pay too little to an employee he will just go
| somewhere else. The magic of the market! That is why I am
| all for free market (real, free market) with minimum
| regulations. Because employers end up fighting for the
| workforce and it benefits the workers.
|
| This depends on more variables, but the goal is to avoid
| barriers and regulations so that the wealth increases,
| since these break monopolies or de-facto monopolies (via
| absurd regulations).
| golemiprague wrote:
| If you use the military to protect yourself why don't you
| want to sell them products to help them do their job? Are
| those people below you just because they do a job you don't
| want to do? Or do you think you don't need the military?
| adwn wrote:
| You make a valid point. I understand why ModernMech doesn't
| want their work to be used to inflict harm on others, but
| at the same time, they're enjoying the freedom afforded by
| the military that protects them.
|
| The sad truth of our reality is that as long as there are
| people willing to inflict violence against us, we need
| people who can plausibly threaten to inflict violence in
| return. It is hypocritical to condemn your country's
| military in general, while depending on said military for
| protection. [1]
|
| [1] It isn't necessarily hypocritical to condemn _certain
| militar actions or policies_ , though.
| Jesus_piece wrote:
| Agreed completely. Crazy to see this endless iteration on ad
| optimization and maximizing screen time has made
| disinformation, polarization, and conspiracy so common.
| Really destroying society from the bottom up IMO
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Crazy to see this endless iteration on ad optimization
| and maximizing screen time has made disinformation,
| polarization, and conspiracy so common. Really destroying
| society from the bottom up IMO
|
| I'd argue the technology that did most of the heavy-lifting
| for disinformation, polarization, and conspiracy was AM
| radio, followed by cable TV. Smartphones, the web and
| social media were not the cause, but a natural progression
| of, and an amplifier of a pre-existing trend.
|
| There are no technological solutions to the human
| condition, but technology amplifies aspects of it.
| germandiago wrote:
| Instead of whining it would be a good idea to make people
| aware of the stuff we care about and help them take better
| decisions.
|
| I have available weapons and drugs. zmI do not use either.
| I am convinced it is a bad decision except in probably very
| extreme conditions.
|
| We cannot be blaming others just for doing ads. No demand,
| no offer. Got it? Easy as that.
|
| We all like a world we do not have, we always find
| problems. But that is not a reason to say what is bad or
| good. The market will decide :D
|
| I do not get stressed at all with all these Betting houses
| (now fashionable in Spain) or drugs or anything: just need
| to be responsible.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > We cannot be blaming others just for doing ads.
|
| We regulate gambling and tobacco for the same reason we
| should regulate this. Google and Facebook ads have been
| scientifically tuned to hijack your brain chemistry for
| money. This isn't blame, or whining, it's simply
| acknowledging that these companies weaponized visual
| stimulus and data collection to sell ads on the internet.
| No amount of personal responsibility is going to solve a
| human society level problem.
| germandiago wrote:
| I would like to see those reports. Are there any links?
| Not because I do not believe you, but because I am
| genuinely interested.
|
| That said... well, I still think that at the end, nothing
| can beat having good information. Close Facebook, Google
| and put ads blockers.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| What reports? A simple search will provide you with all
| the info you need on any of those topics.
|
| And again, the whole thrust of my argument is that
| telling people to close Facebook is the same as telling
| them to stop smoking. It's naive and ignores the reality
| of brain chemistry and addiction.
| germandiago wrote:
| ah. So if I have all the information known for years from
| tobacco and I smoke and get into trouble, then I blame it
| on not having regulations?
|
| Seriously? I was not taught like that at my home sorry.
| It is not the way it should.
|
| You do something and, unless fooled or cheated, you are
| responsible for the consequences.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| That's a really weird (borderline bad-faith) way of
| reading what I wrote, and it kind of explains your
| viewpoint.
|
| > So if I have all the information known for years from
| tobacco and I smoke and get into trouble, then I blame it
| on not having regulations?
|
| If you, as a fully-informed, grown adult in 2021 make
| that choice, then no. In the real world, that's not how
| people get addicted to cigarettes. People generally get
| addicted when they are young, uninformed, and highly
| susceptible to the marketing aimed at them. Plenty of
| people living today remember doctors recommending
| cigarettes for pregnant women - it's silly to assume
| every person is going to know the risks of these things
| from the very minute they decide to engage in them. Just
| look at how quickly Juul took over high schools - you are
| really going to tell me that a 15 year old trying to fit
| in is making a full informed, long term decision about
| tobacco usage? Absurd. Or the Oxycotin epidemic - all
| those people were addicted to drugs because of Sackler's
| marketing and the corruption of their doctors - how does
| one take personal responsibility for following medical
| advice?
|
| Social media is now where tobacco was in the 70s and 80s
| before all the information was released in a narrative
| form that the public could easily digest. All that
| knowledge about the risks comes from the process of
| bringing that information into the public light.
| germandiago wrote:
| Do you see 10 year old people smoking? Usually no.
| Teenagers? Probably they start there. Then, when do you
| think they should get that information in education? It
| is a real question.
|
| That would prevent way more I guess. Of course, in our
| law, trying to sell cigarrettes actively to underage is
| illegal and I find that regulation reasonable.
|
| But trying to protect adults from their own
| irresponsibility is a totally different story. It is
| their problem.
|
| I get your point and in some way you are right also. I am
| just advocating for little regulation, but, of course, I
| am talking also about adults here.
|
| I did not mean underage people. If you target underage
| for gambling or any addiction in bad faith, that is an
| attempt to cause damage and punishable.
|
| But that does not mean that the most important thing is
| to have the information there and decide. Again, I am
| talking about adults.
|
| By the way, talking about regulations. In my country you
| can open a university only if it has 8 or 9 degrees
| offered. If I want to open the best CS degree in the
| country as a University, I cannot. Do you find it
| reasonable? Do you think this goes in the interest of
| consumers? Do you think the state abuses its position by
| doing so? (Clearly yes). That is why I do not want
| regulations. You give them the power and they end up
| regulating even your position to go to the toilet. That
| said, I find under/overage, even if it is arbitrary
| (there are teenagers that are responsible people),
| reasonable, to protect them from unscrupulous people.
|
| But I do not need my life to be ruled in the name of so
| many things, that is bad and it goes against us if you
| think of it carefully.
|
| But you will always have responsible teenagers and
| irresponsible adults. We should not help people that do
| not want to be helped.
|
| The same way we should help people that have trouble. We
| should, I think, honestly, but... that we should does not
| mean we should have that responsibility unconditionally
| and coactively.
|
| You know what? It can look selfish to you but you are
| going to have way more autonomous, responsible and self-
| sufficient people if you apply this rule. A good outcome
| IMHO.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| With planes the 737 upgrading is a feature, not a bug.
|
| It is extremely costly to develop a new airplane and to train
| staff on it, at the price point and fuel efficiency for
| airlines to sell ever cheaper tickets. Airbus is doing the
| exact same with its neo models. Bombardier and Embraer were
| driven into the arms of the duopoly because they cannot afford
| to develop new aircraft. Russia, China, and Japan have all
| tried their hand at pumping billions of dollars into commercial
| aircraft manufacturing and haven't been successful.
| torresmo wrote:
| You seem to be describing the low hanging fruit case
| mentioned in the article.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Yes, but come on. 1967. We surely have made a lot of progress
| since then. 50 years of holding back is a bit much. Are we
| going to still hear "but retraining is soooooo difficult" in
| 2067?
| gruez wrote:
| maybe we reached peak aircraft? After all, we don't
| complain that we're using a knife design from a few hundred
| years ago.
| jessaustin wrote:
| While this is plausible for aircraft in general, in the case
| of the 737 Max it clearly isn't true. Boeing would have been
| better off not killing hundreds of passengers and losing
| $20B.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The US no longer has anybody who makes telephone central
| office equipment.
|
| You don't need that kind of equipment any more since the advent
| of VoIP and software-defined radio/networking.
|
| > The US can no longer make smartphones.
|
| Apple is US-based as is the world's leading provider of mobile
| communication chips Qualcomm (and for what it's worth I
| seriously believe Apple is going to go vertical on that part
| too!), and with Google you have a second US-based vendor of
| operating systems.
|
| Or are you referring to the capability of produce _all_
| components of a smartphone on US soils?
| orangepurple wrote:
| "America Inc" properly referred to as the United States, a
| federal corporation
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| I don't know about "America Inc" but as an expat American living
| in Asia who recently visited after not having been back for a
| couple of years, I didn't leave with the view that things were
| improving. To the contrary, while I do think that the massive
| "stimulation" of the economy has made things seem less worse,
| America today seems a lot less healthy than the America I left.
| matttproud wrote:
| The same. I left the country about a decade ago. I don't
| observe much positive dynamism when I return: grinding morass
| and retrograde motion. Reactionary politics, regulatory
| capture, graft, and naive faith in the market hold such a
| disproportionate sway on the levers of power. What is big is
| too damned big, and it crowds out everything else. The
| exceptions to this don't outweigh the general trend.
| Consolidation in the private and underinvestment in public
| goods are the most striking.
|
| From a raw cultural perspective, it strikes me how commercially
| uniform the country became: outside of enjoying differences
| topography and pre-homogenization (what remains of walkable old
| towns), I deeply don't find much of a compelling reason to
| travel within the country due to how damned cookie cutter it
| feels.
|
| I am sufficiently concerned about this trajectory (among a suit
| of other more significant concerns) to aim to get a second
| citizenship for my family.
| defterGoose wrote:
| Whaddya mean? _Everybody_ loves Chipotle! /s
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| While I do like Chipotle, a lot of homogenization is simply
| the result of efficiency. Cookie cutter succeeds because
| cookie cutter is what people want.
|
| The pace of homogenization might have increased because
| technology greatly enables it. If you want a product just
| type "best whatever's" into Reddit or wire cutter or
| consumer reports and you can have thousands of people's
| experiences distilled down within minutes. Same thing for
| food and travel.
|
| Do I want to take chances on various stores owned by
| various owners sourcing goods from various places?
|
| Or do I want to get my sister a gift from Target, where if
| she does not like it, she can go home and return at the
| Target near her home.
| fearfulofview4 wrote:
| Trillions of flies eating feces doesn't make it haute
| cuisine.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > From a raw cultural perspective, it strikes me how
| commercially uniform the country became: outside of enjoying
| differences topography and pre-homogenization (what remains
| of walkable old towns), I deeply don't find much of a
| compelling reason to travel within the country due to how
| damned cookie cutter it feels.
|
| If you love nature, America is still one of the best
| countries to travel in. It has some of the most magnificent
| natural places and is massive, so even if you're driven away
| from popular parks because of overtourism, there are many
| less popular places that are amazing.
|
| Unfortunately, the camping plans for my visit were severely
| hampered by wildfires, which looks to be a permanent fixture
| of the American west going forward.
| bricemo wrote:
| What are some things you saw that made you feel it wasn't
| improving or less healthy?
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| Economically, it seems like the disparity between the haves
| and have nots has increased significantly. Price inflation is
| not an illusion. In the Bay Area, it felt like no matter
| where I ate a meal, it always cost at least $20.
|
| The supply chain issues are also real and seeing bare
| shelves, empty car lots, throughout the duration of my visit
| was disturbing.
|
| I noticed a significant decline in the quality of service at
| many businesses. The labor shortage is apparent, and many
| service workers seemed not to care about their work, which
| reflected in their attitudes towards customers.
|
| On a personal level, I felt that people were less friendly
| and, more worryingly, less respectful. The public cursing
| everywhere I went was really unattractive.
|
| I'm sure some of this is that I have been changed by living
| in East Asia, where people tend to be more polite (if not
| friendly) and focus less on the individual than the group.
| But I don't think it was just me 100% either. I believe the
| increased politicization of just about every subject is a
| part of this.
| Vadoff wrote:
| Did you visit during the pandemic?
| refurb wrote:
| Well if your sample is limited to "SF bay area" then I
| could see why. Quality of life has definitely been
| degrading in California.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| I spent time in Oregon and Washington too.
| silksowed wrote:
| cant point to anything in particular but this just seems off.
| ravenstine wrote:
| When it is stated that the American economy is "free-market", I
| find that to be a non-starter.
|
| Yes, a certain amount of the price of goods and services is
| determined organically, but the market is by no means "free" in
| the way that people think it is. It's heavily regulated,
| influenced by powerful industry lobbies, and substantially
| dictated by how the federal and state governments want to trade
| with other nations. It might not be overtly communistic or
| totalitarian, but that doesn't make it Laissez-faire, and it
| never really was in the first place.
|
| If we had a free market, then we wouldn't be allowing a small
| number of corporations to drive down prices, invite regulation,
| and collude with the press so as to snuff out meaningful
| competition. Some would argue that this is indeed a free market
| by the virtue that it is what the market has chosen, but not
| really. It's hardly different from feudalism.
| germandiago wrote:
| True.
| mtberatwork wrote:
| Eh, this argument often crops up in some variation. It's
| essentially the "No true Scotsman" argument for the free
| market. _The free market hasn 't failed it just wasn't "free"
| enough!_ ... and so forth.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Monopolistic... you miss Chiba sharp power and more net power.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Chibas are a huge problem. Who thought it was a good idea to
| breed Chihuahuas and Shiba Inus?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > If true, that would be bad news for the spiritual home of free-
| market capitalism
|
| I'd question the premise that the US is the land of free-market
| capitalism. America is the home of Hamilton's American system, of
| the Rockefellers and the gilded age, and of monopolistic
| competition (now Bezos and Amazon).
|
| Startups like to describe themselves as free-market oriented but
| they're either giants-in-waiting or dead. There's no equilibrium
| of middle-sized, free market startup capitalism. That
| Jeffersonian ideal you're more likely to find in the artisanal,
| small and debt avoiding family business in the German Southwest,
| say.
|
| Same goes for trade. With trade volume only constituting a
| quarter of the GDP[1] the US is one of the most domestic
| economies in the world. Compared to France and the UK at 60% or
| Germany and South Korea at 85%. It very much explains America's
| bipartisan streak for protectionism compared to much of Europe
| and Asia.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-
| to-...
| iammisc wrote:
| This is true... But only on the coasts. In the majority of this
| country, the people there don't care about silicon valley and
| many people own businesses.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But they operate on extremely low wages supplemented by
| government transfer payments.
| iammisc wrote:
| I imagine many would say that's due to the inflationary
| pressure of living in a country with wealthy coastlines.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| But they all shop at Walmart.
| iammisc wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure what this has to do with business
| ownership.
| herbst wrote:
| From a outside perspective this free market thingy was never
| more than a movie plot in the US
| gverrilla wrote:
| I think you're making it smaller than it really is. At this
| point, it's part of a world religion A LOT of people live by,
| it's taught in schools and universities, it's made premise
| for a lot of fake science, etc. Predicted precisely by Guy
| Debord, 50y ago - but you won't see it being studied in
| universities because it hurts how they earn their bread :/
| herbst wrote:
| I really don't know. As mentioned I just see it from the
| outside. Our schools don't make America today a example for
| a great free market, the opposite might even be true. In
| fact the US is sometimes portrait as a danger to our 'free'
| market.
| imtringued wrote:
| The fact that there is even the idea of a global reserve
| currency shows that the free market isn't as prevalent as
| people think. In principle people should be free to pick
| whatever currencies they want to conduct trade with.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > With trade volume only constituting a quarter of the GDP[1]
| the US is one of the most domestic economies in the world.
|
| Because _net_ trade volume is massively and surrealistically
| _negative_ and has been for a very long time, assuming the fact
| that exports being small in relation to total domestic
| production means that Americans consume an unusual proportion
| of domestic products is not a good assumption.
|
| Especially when you bring up Germany and South Korea, who are
| massive exporters with huge trade surpluses.
| bell-cot wrote:
| IANAL (...not a linguist) - but to me "spiritual home of free-
| market capitalism" very much emphasizes that, while many in the
| U.S. may _talk_ big about free markets, the current reality is
| quite different.
| HPsquared wrote:
| There's a word for these German businesses:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
| twofornone wrote:
| I very much agree with the assertion that our economy is getting
| less dynamic, in the sense that everywhere you go in the US it
| seems like everything, and i mean everything, is being
| steamrolled by bigger and bigger corps and morphed into a bland,
| dumbed down, mass appealing corporate monoculture, designed
| (probably by MBAs) exclusively with profits in mind and no actual
| interest in developing any sort of soul or true differentiation.
| Random example, walk into a hardware store (everywhere you go its
| either lowes, home depot, or maybe ace, cross country) and tell
| me if there's a real difference between any of the tool
| manufacturers. On the one hand, the convenience of cheap and
| fairly durable goods is great. On the other, it seems like
| everyone is afraid to stray too far from what works to really
| innovate or compete. Most cars look pretty similar. The same
| restaurants exist literally from coast to coast, everywhere you
| go the US is starting to look more and more generic.
|
| Mostly it probably has to do with economies of scale, but at this
| point I'd rather spend an extra 10%+ on goods and services if it
| meant a return to true differentiation and a wider variety of
| consumer culture.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| This reflects one of the greatest dissatisfaction I have with
| touring the United States, which is the ubiquity of franchises.
| I can tour cities across the country and I always see the same
| companies: Starbucks, Target, 7Eleven, Panda Express, Petco,
| etc. It doesn't matter if I go to Salem, Austin, or Los
| Angeles. I see the same stores with the same shopping centers.
| There is a lost sense of culture.
|
| The same goes for billboards. It's always the same companies
| marketing: Ford, McDonalds, etc. Why do we hardly ever see
| small brands marketing? I'd be inclined to keep billboards if
| small brands utilized them to help their business, but that is
| rarely the case. Given this, why do we still tolerate
| billboards to the same mega-corporations? Everyone already
| knows they exist and what they sell. How much more exposure do
| they really need at the expense of the natural beauty of our
| towns and our own mental state?
| megaman821 wrote:
| I can't say I have too much trouble going to interesting
| eateries and coffee shops around cities in America. I agree
| with you the retail shops are pretty much the same
| everywhere.
|
| I see (and have bought from) small brands online (especially
| ones that advertise on social networks and podcasts). In my
| circles a lot of other people have to. I just assume that
| these advertisements are a lot more effective than
| billboards, so billboards are left to the larger companies
| doing more brand marketing.
| LamdbaMamba wrote:
| I'm seeing more and more discussion on a stuck mono culture,
| and I have to say I agree with it. This is an interesting write
| up on the phenomenon.
|
| https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/is-culture-stuck
| oenetan wrote:
| https://ghostarchive.org/archive/bUsjL
|
| https://archive.is/GOYrX
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The whole world, not just a nation.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| America was built in the last century. New high tech cities are
| being built all over the world now. They are paying top money so
| getting top talent and top firms to work for them. America is
| getting left behind, and routed around when needed. The
| corporations have left their home base for greener pastures.
| kcb wrote:
| > New high tech cities are being built all over the world now.
| They are paying top money so getting top talent and top firms
| to work for them.
|
| Where? China, who has effectively no immigration? Definitely
| not Europe.
| herbst wrote:
| I am not sure what qualifies as high tech city. But we have
| all the big names plus a healthy startup culture here in
| Switzerland. Adding the good wages, low taxes, the high
| living standard and the stable society it's obvious why we
| draw in tech talent from the whole world and only very few
| are leaving.
| vgatherps wrote:
| China has a billion people and is a major top-talent provider
| to the USA. They can source internally and/or provide
| enticing alternatives at home for talent who might otherwise
| leave for the US.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| Any specific cities you want to mention?
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Dubai is one I visited personally. But there are other middle
| east cities with tons of money. Many cities in China, South
| Asia and Europe are growing and modernizing too. Even former
| Eastern Block countries are going through a building boom.
| Some of these places don't really need America for anything.
| They can trade between each other.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'd say Shenzhen is one of these. Went from a provincial
| small city to a global powerhouse in twenty years.
| hikerclimber1 wrote:
| Hopefully Boeing fails and hopefully the western us burns.
| bonnie76 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210916034205/https://www.econo...
| hikerclimber1 wrote:
| yes.
| orionblastar wrote:
| People are refusing to work minimum wage jobs and causing small
| businesses to shut down. My relatives have a Japanese Steakhouse
| with Sushi and they are short people working. Meanwhile Covid
| means reduced hours and mask wearing.
| toofy wrote:
| Often, not always but often, owners of businesses are refusing
| to run a business at a more reasonable personal salary.
| Sometimes owners should temper what they personally expect in
| monetary returns.
|
| We would never expect a business owner to work for less than a
| livable wage and we definitely shouldn't expect its employees
| to either.
|
| If a business can't provide both its owner _and_ its employees
| a livable wage, then it should probably go under since it would
| seem that either it's product isn't valuable enough or it's
| being mismanaged to the point that it can't provide a livable
| wage to anyone.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well then obviously they need to be paid a bit more than
| minimum wage? If you can't fill the jobs at that price, you pay
| more, surely?
| gethoht wrote:
| It's a very very good thing that people are refusing to work
| for minimum wage. You want employees worth a damn? Pay for it.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| What's the relevance of mask wearing when it comes to business?
|
| Never heard anyone complaining about business being bad because
| people have to wear shoes.
| snakeboy wrote:
| It's less pleasant to work in a mask, especially anything
| involving manual labor or a hot kitchen.
|
| Shoes are a bad comparison. The vast majority of people have
| always lived in a society where wearing shoes is the status
| quo. This is not the case for masks.
| wnevets wrote:
| why haven't they tried paying more than minimum wage?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Because a lot of businesses, mainly small ones, can't afford
| to.
| wnevets wrote:
| Why not? Being short staff implies there is more business
| than the current staff can handle. There are tech startups
| (aka small businesses) that would kill for that problem.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because the business owners took out loans assuming x
| labor costs, and now that labor costs are y > x, they
| would need to default on the loan.
|
| No reason to not let them suffer from their erroneous
| assumptions though. But politically, I expect them to be
| bailed out.
| wnevets wrote:
| >No reason to not let them suffer from their erroneous
| assumptions though.
|
| Why not? If we were talking about a tech company, would
| you feel the same way?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Why not?
|
| The feedback mechanism for identifying errors is failure
| as is the incentive to correct them. Otherwise, we end up
| in a privatize the profits, socialize the risks
| situation. As we currently are.
|
| For example, I bid for land for commercial real estate. I
| have been outbid by another developer who assumes they
| can pay more for the land because their labor costs will
| be lower for the business. They want to bet they can get
| away with paying bottom tier wages, whereas I want to pay
| higher wages. Or have more redundancies or use higher
| quality materials. Of course, the land gets sold to them
| at the higher price, they get to build the business.
|
| Why should they get bailed out? They wanted to take on
| more risk, in the form of not allow much wiggle room for
| labor costs or using subpar materials. That is their
| fault, and society benefits from the market sending a
| signal from that developers failure to better allocate
| resources.
|
| >If we were talking about a tech company, would you feel
| the same way?
|
| Yes.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Charge more
| josephcsible wrote:
| The loss of sales will hurt more than the extra revenue
| per sale will help.
| dunco wrote:
| what is your evidence for this?
|
| High wage countries don't seem to have a shortage of
| places to eat. if competitors are subject to the same
| labor market, all prices should go up together which
| would not give you a competitive disadvantage. certainly
| a lesser disadvantage than not being able to open because
| you are unwilling to pay the market labour rate.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > what is your evidence for this?
|
| That's a textbook example of price elasticity from
| economics 101. You can also think about it this way: if
| that weren't the case, they would have already raised
| their prices even before there was a labor shortage.
|
| > all prices should go up together which would not give
| you a competitive disadvantage
|
| Not a competitive disadvantage, but still a disadvantage.
| Take restaurants for example. If every restaurant in the
| world raised all of their prices by the exact same amount
| at the exact same time, they wouldn't lose any business
| to each other, but they'd still lose a bunch of business
| to people eating at home.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That's the theory, but is it true in practice? How do you
| KNOW for certain that if they raised their prices by X,
| their revenue would fall by > X?
| kingTug wrote:
| If your business can't survive without an army of minimum
| wage slaves it doesn't deserve to be in business to begin
| with.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Unless they get seed money
| colinmhayes wrote:
| How can you possibly be confident in what it means for a
| business to deserve to exist? If they're not doing
| anything illegal and they're not losing money they
| deserve to exist, beyond that there's no way to say.
| truckerbill wrote:
| Laws don't dictate our collective ethical code fully.
| They are more like minimum requirements for the state to
| maintain order, with some hard won ethical mandates
| thrown in. It's easy to justify that statement on ethical
| grounds IMO
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| An increasingly popular response to this that I've seen is
| "Then they shouldn't be in business"
|
| I find the argument irksome, as it ignores a lot of the
| peculiarities and variances between markets, but at least
| it's an interesting perspective.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Especially considering this was caused by the government
| passing out money for too long in addition to telling
| everyone to not bother paying their rent. Plenty of
| places have been offering $15-$20/hour and have struggled
| to find help since why would you work when unemployment
| pays more?
| sangnoir wrote:
| A _lot_ of people used the time they were involuntarily
| let go to up-skill into better-paying careers. This
| resulted in a labor shortage in minimum-wage jobs,
| regardless of unemployment benefits (that have since
| lapsed in a chunk of states). Market forces are at play
| here, there 's no reason to special-case labor when small
| businesses can handle increases in the other costs (gas,
| lumber, aluminum, steel, etc), the only reason I can
| think of is because they think they can bully the
| suppliers (of labor), or lobby the government to do that
| on their behalf.
| defterGoose wrote:
| What's irksome about it? It's an indicator that
| inflation/prices have outpaced wages. Should we no longer
| be concerned with livability? Only with returns on
| capital?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The response is in context of someone complaining they
| cannot afford something.
|
| If I am complaining that I cannot afford a private chef
| in my home, then the answer is for me to figure out how
| to earn more. Or go without a chef.
|
| It is the same thing for a restaurant. Either figure out
| how to make more money (even if it means closing the
| business and changing your line of work, or figure out
| how make do without the chef).
| Germanika wrote:
| They can't afford not to. The alternative is shutting down,
| no?
| phaemon wrote:
| You mean people like you? Or are you working there for minimum
| wage?
| m12k wrote:
| I mean, IP is by its very nature designed to be monopolistic, and
| with the decline of manufacturing and the rise of tech, IP is
| making up a bigger and bigger part of the US economy. So of
| course it's becoming more monopolistic.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| IP is designed to allow a certain subset of solutions to be
| monopolize by inventors for ~ half the life of the inventor
| (although most patents are abandoned after a few years). It
| shouldn't, ideally, block all possible solutions.
|
| In my experience (have applied for over 50 patents), the act of
| understanding and inventing around other peoples patents has
| very often lead to brainstorming resulting in superior
| solutions (this was an unforeseen advantage of good US IP law
| that other countries are trying to replicate).
|
| I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not
| bits :)
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| Looking at the US Constitution, IP law should be designed to
| heavily encourage innovation. I would think that the actual
| details of law would reflect that rather than maximizing the
| value of an idea to it's owner.
|
| To be fair, the current results should have been predictable.
| A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually
| defeat an unruly mass.
|
| >I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and
| not bits :)
|
| Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly
| tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about
| the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy'
| even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the
| news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and
| surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for
| those segments.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Of course, a downside is a person can set out to invent
| something entirely on their own, succeed in doing so, and
| then find out what they've done is illegal. That's a big
| downside.
|
| Paul Graham said if you're successful you will be sued by
| patent owners. How many are discouraged from even trying?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is where experience comes in, and the need for good
| mentors. In many cases, you can explicitly define your
| solution with certain key differences relative to prior
| work.
|
| That is why it is wise to have good patent lawyers on your
| team. You may still get sued, but your likelihood to
| prevail can be increased.
|
| Companies know this, that is why it is often cheaper for,
| say, Apple to purchase entire start ups than to sue them.
| The inventor still benefits in this case (actually, they
| can benefit more than typical inventors when this happens).
| ramblenode wrote:
| > this was an unforeseen advantage of good US IP law that
| other countries are trying to replicate
|
| More common, from what I've seen, is smaller countries
| reluctant to adopt liberal US-style IP law and being
| pressured to do so by the US State Department as a condition
| in trade negotiations and foreign aid. The US delegation was
| the principal pusher of IP reform in the TPP, and this
| evaporated when the US left.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The benefits of strong IP law are not apparent at first. It
| happened in the US through trial and error during both
| world wars and then up through the decades, e.g.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
|
| I only know this due to some policy courses I took during
| IAP when I was at MIT.
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| The decline of industry/manufacture is largely a fake thing
| American politicians pushed over the decades to enrich their
| overseas partners. It will definitely come back, especially
| with the rise of ESG where environment concerns means _short_
| supply chains, not shipping everything across the pacific and
| polluting the crap out of planet unnecessarily.
| Notanothertoo wrote:
| The gov has subsidized it at every level, including making it
| cheaper to send to shenghai than new York.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Who wrote this article? Can't tell.
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "... and Apple is reportedly building a search engine."
|
| Often Ive wondered they dont build a social network.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Because building a social network is _hard_. Not
| technologically, any half decent coding school grad can put out
| a basic Twitter clone in a week worth of coding... but you have
| to spend _lots_ of money to get users (either via advertising
| or via developing features no one else has), and the larger you
| get the more you _have_ to spend on moderation.
|
| Apple markets itself as family friendly, which _directly_
| collides with the tendency of people to post copyright-
| protected content, abuse of all kinds, pornography and
| similarly disgusting content, and not to mention consumers of
| CSAM who will invade _any_ new platform that crops up to avoid
| getting booted off in seconds.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The reason why I pondered this question is the "disagreement"
| between Zuckerberg and Cook. Apple could capture some of
| Facebooks market if Cook was so inclined.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| They already have a social network. It just requires a hardware
| purchase to actually join it.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Thats more or less what Ive thought about. But then there was
| this bit about opening up FaceTime to people who dont own
| their hardware.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Thats more or less what Ive thought about. But then there was
| this bit about opening up FaceTime to people who dont own
| Apple hardware.
| thehappypm wrote:
| They sure do have a social network! iMessage, FaceTime, etc.
| Even email is a social network. It doesn't need to look exactly
| like Facebook to be a social network.
| lupin_sansei wrote:
| They've tried a couple of social networks around iTunes but
| they failed.
| silvestrov wrote:
| They don't (want to) understand that social network means
| that users talk to each other.
|
| The iTunes stuff was unidirectional from 'artists' (i.e. ad-
| agencies) to users.
| sangnoir wrote:
| MobileMe included user-to-user communication (iChat), as
| well as a Gallery that could host publicly-accessible
| pictures. If you squint a bit, those were social network
| features. Unfortunately, MobileMe bombed pretty badly - and
| very publicly.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > They don't (want to) understand that social network means
| that users talk to each other.
|
| No, I think they perfectly understand that. The iPhone is
| their social network. You can use it to manage your
| contacts, call, send messages(both long and short), share
| photos and videos, and video chat. What more else do they
| need that they don't already have?
| sho_hn wrote:
| Doesn't feel like that would be in Apple's DNA at all. A lot of
| their brand identity is a certain Disney-like pristine
| safeness, and they use it to sell lifestyle products that allow
| customers to associate with and embody that identity. A social
| network is all about self-expression and human mess.
|
| Just compare customization/personalization options in Apple
| software and other software, historically. MySpace it ain't.
| Apple products are not the ones you import your personality
| into.
|
| They've certainly dabbled in social features here and there,
| but none of them have been useful enough to be a hit with
| customers, I'd argue because what they're willing to do within
| the limits of their brand guidelines doesn't make for easy
| social success. Unclear if a working formula exists somewhere
| in that space on the spectrum.
| [deleted]
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I think they do have one, it just doesn't look like a feed. It
| is "built in" across a number of apps on Apple devices like
| iMessage, Photo Streams, Memojis, Calendar, and Facetime.
| They're even adding Status to iMessage in iOS15.
| netcan wrote:
| _Testing prevailing hypotheses,_ in this sense, is a treacherous
| game. Number of business starts, IPOs, patents and most attempted
| refinements of such measures are very crude measures.
|
| For example, Cowen later softened some of his positions on
| learning how much of the data he commented on was retail driven.
| Retail is relevant, but he was accidentally modeling the retail
| market where he intended to model the economy.
|
| Besides crude metrics, there are always implied assumptions
| connecting new business starts, IPOs or unicorn milestones to the
| bigger picture.
|
| In short, this is rhetoric. Hypotheses testing is fine
| figuratively, but let's remember where the pitfalls are.
|
| IMO, it's worth noting where a lot of this is coming from: market
| caps. These are very much monopoly-related. The bull case
| expectation for a 2020s Great Company is 25-40% profit margins,
| double digit growth or potential for such. This is possible
| because Alphabet, FB, Apple & such do not need to borrow or raise
| to grow.
|
| This fuels a fire of speculative startup investing at the lower
| tiers, the only place where capital _is_ required.
|
| The problem is, IMO, that there's almost no relationship between
| FB's size and gross economic output, productivity, economic
| utility, etc. Online communication is great, but online
| communication isn't better because FB is 10X bigger. Google's
| freeware is great, but we were getting search, gmail, etc when
| Google was 10X smaller.
|
| Where's the relationship between aggregate revenue (nevermind
| profit) at JPMorgan, Alphabet or FB and economic utility?
|
| IMO Cowen, The Economist and much of this cohort/generation of
| economists have an economic worldview that totally lacks an
| adequate model for market structure/maturity and such. This has
| led to a lot foolishness.
|
| If you are Ford in 1921, the world is young. You get more
| efficient each year. Cost per car decreases, but you can outrun
| this by making more cars. The market is growing in both dollars
| and number of cars. If you are intel in 2021, same game. The
| world is young. Moore's law only tells half the tale. Transistors
| halve in price and size every two years, but the number of
| transistors produced increases by more than than. The more they
| make, the more we want. Gotta mine that crypto, train GPT-N, etc.
| We need more chips every year, and the cheaper they get the more
| we need.
|
| If productivity keeps goes up, but we don't need more and more
| cars... the market contracts and this is now a different game.
|
| If $Nbn worth of grocery shopping that once happened in
| supermarkets now happens on amazon, the markets value this is a
| net capital gain, because $Nbn at amazon is presumably more
| profit generative in the long run. That doesn't society bought
| more groceries, or received much more value.
|
| This is not _that_ hard. Look to the largest companies. What are
| they outputting? How much of it? How good is it? What changed? I
| get that it 's harder to add up than the number of cars coming
| out of factories but, it's still less abstract than viewing the
| world through a purely financial lens.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a fundamental problem with corporate accounting.
|
| In the real world externalities have real effects, whether
| they're ecological costs or business losses created by
| monopolistic growth.
|
| That's not even counting second order effects like loss of
| experimentation and fundamental research - not packaging
| existing tech, but inventing completely new and unimagined
| classes of tech through (ideally) genius math, but next best is
| original blue sky research.
|
| On Wall St externalities are ignored. The show only continues
| because it's fundamentally and polemically about _denying
| reality_ in favour of an entirely imaginary world of financial
| story-telling.
| netcan wrote:
| Sure, but i'm not even talking about externalities or 2nd
| order effects. I'm talking about first order effects.
|
| Google, FB, JPM, etc. achieve 350% growth over 5 years. OK.
| Does that mean they produce 350% as much utility?
|
| If these were Tesla, we'd also count the number of cars and
| the conversation would be a lot more grounded. We'd quickly
| realize that the market values Tesla's future in a certain
| way, Ford's another. We wouldn't accidentally conclude that
| the economy is suddenly making way more cars.
|
| What is it that the economy is doing more _of_?
| gethoht wrote:
| This is a big fat "Duh". Capitalistic monopolies also largely
| explain a majority of the supply chain issues we've been facing
| for the past few years, largely driven by "Just in time"
| production.
| Frost1x wrote:
| There's this idea that resiliency and efficiency aren't trade
| offs and I agree some times, they aren't always direct trade
| offs, but they seem to be a lot of the time. Efficiency usually
| means cutting redundancy and redundancy is exactly what creates
| resiliency (backups, parallel paths, so on).
| sbt wrote:
| yes. lol
| rundmc wrote:
| You mean that isn't the plan?
| nottorp wrote:
| Judging by my limited knowledge of US industrial history, that
| title needs an "again" added at the end.
|
| I vaguely remember Edison fighting AC solutions (as opposed to
| his DC solutions) by spreading FUD instead of attempting to
| compete on technical merits. So, no news here?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Are you over a hundred and forty years old? The 1880's-90's is
| when this took place. To vaguely remember, you'd need to be at
| least a teen during the era...
| nottorp wrote:
| Vaguely remember READING about it. If you actually need that
| spelled out.
| pm90 wrote:
| 2008: Worst economic recession in a generation
|
| 2008-2020: 3 Presidential terms with pretty lax antitrust
| enforcement.
|
| That's a long time for the monopolistic tendencies to bloom.
| Which is to say, yes, it is more monopolistic now (but doesn't
| need to continue being that way).
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Yes. It's impossible to do battle with an entrenched industry.
| Just don't. That's why every startup these days is trying to find
| a niche the entrenched industries missed.
| cheriot wrote:
| > since the start of the covid-19 pandemic America Inc has been
| anything but stagnant. Applications to start new businesses have
| soared. In the first six months of 2021 around 2.8m new
| businesses were born, 60% more than in the same period in pre-
| pandemic 2019
|
| When people have something to fall back on they take more risks.
| Kind of like how the most successful large companies are in tech.
| Those founders had less downside than someone opening a
| restaurant.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| That's one thing to see from all of this, but another that
| shouldn't be ignored is when cash is cheap in an economy people
| engage in businesses that are not otherwise viable, which leads
| to asset bubbles among other things.
| orangepurple wrote:
| 2.8m new businesses were born but how many had revenue over
| $50?
|
| Probably only tens or hundreds of thousands
| newsclues wrote:
| Lots of new businesses are MLM, or dependant on government
| funding without any plans for sustainable business
| chrsig wrote:
| I mean...lots of businesses in tech are dependent on VC
| funding without any plans for sustainable business.
| stanfordkid wrote:
| pretty false... a lot may stay dependent, but all need to
| present plausible plans for generating revenue.
| bricemo wrote:
| This is the opposite of what the article is saying. The economy
| was getting scary so people headed out on their own. Did you
| mean to say "when people have _nothing_ to fall back on"?
| cheriot wrote:
| I mean the extended unemployment and stimulus checks gave a
| some people room to try new things. A lot of people
| struggled, but there's a reason some are reluctant to return
| to their shitty old jobs.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| How much was the stimulus check for an average income
| employee ?
| NationalPark wrote:
| The median US income is about $30k, so most people were
| eligible for some if not all the money. But everyone
| (that was laid off) was eligible for the $600 per week
| unemployment benefit, and the expanded child tax credit
| also provided a lot of cash. Child poverty in the US was
| cut in half by some metrics over the last year - these
| were very impactful programs for most people.
| cehrlich wrote:
| People who have a lot can afford to gamble.
|
| People who have a little can't afford to gamble.
|
| People who have nothing can't afford not to gamble.
| zpeti wrote:
| So why are the majority of entrepreneurs in their 20s? Why
| doesn't the rate of entrepreneurship increase with age?
| EliRivers wrote:
| _Why doesn 't the rate of entrepreneurship increase with
| age?_
|
| I thought it DID increase with age. A quick search
| suggests that to be the case, but I stand by to be
| corrected.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/693467/rate-of-new-
| entre...
| [deleted]
| HPsquared wrote:
| They're the ones with nothing, I guess.
| input_sh wrote:
| Cause it gets more difficult to gamble when you have a
| child to support. You're more likely to look for a cushy
| job when it's not just your life at stake.
| andyferris wrote:
| Kids means you are less free to gamble?
| Frost1x wrote:
| In my perspective, yes. A child has needs and there's a
| baseline cost in resources to supply those needs, not
| just material needs like food, clothing, shelter but more
| integible needs like time with their parent. As a parent
| you have responsibility to meet that baseline and should
| do so with as little risk as possible to provide
| stability for the child who is dependent on you and has
| no other options.
|
| If you can meet all their needs, then whatever you have
| in excess certainly can be gambled if it can improve both
| of your odds, but only beyond that baseline threshold.
| That resource threshold for a parent is going to be
| higher than for a single person in the same situation, so
| you inherently have less resources to gamble than someone
| without a kid.
|
| I would consider less resources as being less free to
| take unneeded risk, although it really just means you
| have less you can risk not that you have less ability to
| risk (unless of course you're already at or below that
| child's baseline needs where you're making sacrifices of
| your own needs for them). You could make further
| sacrifices on your own needs to gamble if that doesn't
| effect the child but chances are, it's going to effect
| both of you.
|
| Theres an absolute magnitude of wealth/resources one
| needs to exceed before they start playing the capital
| gamble gamble, at least when your risk has significant
| effects on someone else, _especially your own child_.
| panxyh wrote:
| Yes.
| [deleted]
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "2018 research published in the Harvard Business Review
| found that the average age at which a successful founder
| started their company is 45."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-
| age-of...
| ashtonkem wrote:
| "Successful" is quite the qualifier. Are more 45 year
| olds starting businesses, or are they more just more
| effective when they do it?
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Did you mean to say "when people have nothing to fall back
| on"?
|
| This is better than sitting doing nothing, starving, and
| waiting for a handout to come, as happened in many, many
| countries.
|
| My strongest belief is that America needs an economic shock
| therapy, to spring out of economic lethargy.
|
| Lets face it. America is no longer the financial superpower.
| China is currently world biggest foreign investor, and
| creditor, and has banks that make Morgan's balance sheet look
| like pocket change.
|
| Betting on banks to lead America's return to prominence is
| futile. It's akin to trying to wing a card game against a
| professional card trickster who lives off ripping off
| casinos.
|
| Nor is the dream of service the dream of "service economy"
| feeding much of the country materialised. You can't earn much
| FX selling McKinsey consultants, nor are they are much needed
| around the world, because the world doesn't have American
| problems.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You're exaggerating the bank size difference, ICBC is only
| 25% larger in assets.
|
| If you meant to convey all Chinese banks against just JPM,
| sure, but that's a silly comparison because there are many
| more US banks that when also compared in aggregate the %
| difference is still roughly the same.[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks
| ak217 wrote:
| > America needs an economic shock therapy
|
| It's hard to overstate just how bad the track record of
| "economic shock therapy" strategies is. Tens of millions of
| people have died, and hundreds of millions more lost their
| basic freedoms, because leaders thought they could "shock
| therapy" their way out of economic problems.
| roenxi wrote:
| > My strongest belief is that America needs an economic
| shock therapy...
|
| There is a strand of thinking that turns up sometimes,
| something like "they will realise their choices are making
| things worse, then make different choices!". I have not
| seen that work out well very often. People usually persist
| in their mistakes with little heed for the results.
|
| The correct approach is almost always to move directly in a
| better direction.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's often the case that reformers (of anything, not just
| government) lack an understanding of _why_ people are
| making choices that appear sub-optimal. They make or
| encourage changes to the visible things, without fixing
| the underlying hidden causes. Such changes are usually
| unsustainable.
| otikik wrote:
| What America needs is the rich stopping buying politicians
| and gaslighting other Americans, and start paying more
| taxes.
| ipatec wrote:
| why pay more taxes when there's no accountability and
| responsibility regarding spending? spending needs to get
| under control before raising taxes is even a thing.
| syshum wrote:
| Too many people, especially high income software dev's,
| that government can not spend enough money. So to them
| them the spending is not out of control at all, they want
| the 3, 4, 8 trillion spending because they have bought
| into the government-side economic model that inflation is
| good, government spending is good, and the "evil rich"
| (who if you ask them is always someone that makes more
| than them. They are not "the rich" it is the others....)
| needs to just pay "their fair share"
|
| of course they will not define what what "fair share" is,
| just that is "more than they are paying now" however much
| that is...
|
| I firmly believe even if we had a 110% tax rate it would
| not be "enough" for some of these people
| otikik wrote:
| You are confused because the word "rich" has two
| meanings. Agreed, a lot of devs are "rich", compared to
| the average citizen. But the problem is not "they
| slightly more than me and they are bad because I'm
| envious". It's "they make so much money that they are
| writing their own laws with it, and they're killing my
| country and my planet in the process". That is a
| different kind of "rich". It's "I can buy a full news
| studio if I want"-rich.
|
| That second class is who the people are referring to when
| they say "the rich".
|
| And most of them are paying much less taxes over their
| income than you or I, in percentage. They are so wealthy
| that they can afford to pay full teams of people who
| specialize in tax evading, and that costs them 1% of
| their income, but then they avoid paying taxes on the
| rest.
|
| The usual "fair share" tax is a gradual tax. For example.
| 10% for the first $10000 earned. 15% for the next $20000.
| And so on. Such a tax can never reach 110%, by
| definition. It cuts a dev salary by 40% or even 50%. For
| one of these rich people, it can go to 70% or 80%, but it
| would be orders of magnitude more, in absolute numbers.
| But as I said, none of them pays that. They'd rather
| provoke a war than pay that.
|
| And then make you pay for it.
| defterGoose wrote:
| Do you agree that "getting the money out of politics"
| might help your accountability gripe?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The big money (and thus influence) in politics is in the
| spending of it, not the salaries/donations. And politics
| without that money is pointless.
| nescioquid wrote:
| When you raise money from donors to win election to an
| office, those donors effectively become your
| constituency, rather than the people living in your state
| or district. Those donors will also offer you strangely
| sumptuous speaking fees or a lucrative lobbying position
| after you leave office.
|
| If politicians' incentives can be aligned with their
| constitutional constituencies (not donors), they can make
| decisions that are actually in the best interest of those
| they represent, rather than the highest bidder.
|
| Are you saying it is simply having some power over the
| budget that corrupts politicians, and not what they have
| to do in order to obtain that power that corrupts them?
| newswasboring wrote:
| You really think rich people will suddenly start paying
| taxes because government is more efficient? I don't think
| that is their gripe. If that was the case thet would not
| be lobbying for complex tax codes which exempt yachts.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > You really think rich people will suddenly start paying
| taxes because government is more efficient?
|
| Erm. I didn't really say anything to do with that.
| imtringued wrote:
| A lot of the "spending" was used for tax cuts instead of
| infrastructure. It's kind of funny how Trump burned huge
| holes into the state budget and yet it's the
| infrastructure bill that is going to ruin everything.
| verall wrote:
| Because right now the middle class is paying the bill and
| the working class is getting abused. The ownership class
| just skates on, doing less to justify their existence
| every year.
|
| Or do you feel like a billionaire space race is a good
| use of society's efforts?
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Services and manufacturing are fungible and the rest of
| your tough guy act is even less convincing.
|
| Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk all came from at
| least upper-middle class background. None of them was ever
| at risk of starvation.
|
| The carrot-and-stick approach to motivation works-in an
| extremely small band of human experience. But as it works
| in that band, which is the lower middle class, it draws
| people in from both sides: those richer ease up a bit,
| those immediately below put in an extra hour. That's why
| it's sort of the default experience. It's also a "winnable
| struggle" so it makes for good stories and is
| overrepresented in film and literature.
|
| But, once you leave that narrow band, other forces are
| clearly at work. If inflicting pain on homeless people
| worked to motivate them to successfully get off the
| streets, there wouldn't be any homeless people. Because
| life on the streets sucks. If you think they are "lazy",
| have you ever toyed with the idea of just quitting and
| checking out an underpass with a good view? No...? But you
| do have a vague idea what laziness is? So then: that's not
| it.
| zpeti wrote:
| How about Brian Chesky (son of social workers), Marc
| Andreesen (son of seed factory worker), or just Jeff
| bezos with a pretty shitty family background:
|
| At the time of Bezos' birth, his mother was a 17-year-old
| high school student and his father was 19 years old.[18]
| After completing high school despite challenging
| conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing
| Bezos along as a baby.[19] After his parents divorced,
| his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in
| April 1968.[20] Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted
| four-year-old Bezos, whose surname was then legally
| changed from Jorgensen to Bezos.[21]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
|
| We can all pick examples to fit our narratives
| [deleted]
| fragmede wrote:
| How does Bezos' background disprove the notion that
| homeless people aren't homeless because they're lazy?
| That if only we made life just a little more horrible for
| them, that they would realize being homeless sucks, stop
| being lazy, and just go get one of those job things, and
| then pull themselves up by their bootstraps. (A feat
| which is literally impossible, mind you)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think the examples are to counter the cherry-picking of
| entrepreneurs who are from middle class backgrounds.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The salient point is that certain class of people are
| likelier take risks because failing will not leave their
| children hungry. Obviously, poor people can also take
| risks, but the ones that fail do not get to try again and
| you do not hear about them again.
|
| Bezos is a ridiculous example to use anyway, as he
| obviously made bank working in finance before he took
| risks on Amazon such that he was never risking being
| homeless.
|
| Just the simple fact that your parents own a home where
| you are welcome to live can be enough for you to be able
| to take risks. And Zuckerberg and Gates and others were
| not middle class, they were at least upper middle and I
| would bet their parents (dentists and prominent lawyers)
| were already above 90th percentile in wealth.
|
| I love when people tell me examples of extremely poor
| people taking risks and hitting it big, and at the same
| time lament how people irresponsibly have children and
| debt they could not handle. Celebrate them when the
| gamble pays off, but shit on them when it does not.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I love when people tell me examples of extremely poor
| people taking risks and hitting it big, and at the same
| time lament how people irresponsibly have children and
| debt they could not handle. Celebrate them when the
| gamble pays off, but shit on them when it does not.
|
| How often does this happen? Who says those two things
| simultaneously?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Maybe not simultaneously, but I grew up in an immigrant
| family where everyone's parents had farmland and houses
| in the original country. Almost all the families and
| cousins are pretty successful business/real estate
| owners/operators, who champion themselves, while ignoring
| the fact that they all had houses and farmland to go back
| to in their original country in case they failed.
|
| But many, especially the older generations, also like to
| complain about people not striking it out on their own as
| a causal factor for why they remain poor.
|
| It is a popular trope in culture too. It makes people
| feel good about themselves if they can forget about the
| shoulders they stood on, and for those who do not have
| shoulders to stand on, it gives them hope.
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We can indeed. You left out this part:
|
| After Mike had received his degree from the University of
| New Mexico, the family moved to Houston, Texas, so that
| he could begin working as an engineer for Exxon.[22] Jeff
| Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston
| from fourth to sixth grade.[23] Bezos' maternal
| grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise, a regional
| director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in
| Albuquerque.[24] Gise retired early to his family's ranch
| near Cotulla, Texas, where Bezos would spend many summers
| in his youth.[25]
|
| [...] He accepted an estimated $300,000 from his parents
| and invested in Amazon.[47][51][52] He warned many early
| investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would
| fail or go bankrupt.
|
| The one thing many CEOs have in common is early access to
| resources and tinkering opportunities which aren't
| available to most of the population.
|
| Which is the exact opposite of your point.
| [deleted]
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Does anyone know if applying for PPP loans played a part in
| this? Anecdotally saw some people register businesses for the
| sole purpose of collecting PPP but am not sure if they were
| successful.
|
| Edit: I appear to be wrong here. After some Googling it appears
| that PPP loan was based on previous years tax returns to I
| don't think you could collect PPP the first year to establish a
| business.
| disillusioned wrote:
| Not only that but technically you were only able to apply for
| PPP if your company existed before February 15th, 2020, to
| explicitly prevent this sort of behavior.
| whateveracct wrote:
| How would that work? Collect PPP and use it to pay yourself
| salary? I thought you had to show the people were already
| employed and paid when you apply. I'm sure it was a mess
| though.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Sole proprietors were eligible for PPP to cover lost income
| but it was based on previous years Schedule C so first year
| business owners likely couldn't apply
| fragmede wrote:
| Your hypothetical scammer just got $20,000 deposited into
| their bank account. I don't think adhering to the letter of
| the loan, and repaying it, is a huge concern of theirs.
| Withdraw it all, and go live somewhere cheap for a couple
| years.
| syshum wrote:
| That is if you assume people played by the rules, and there
| was actually validation controls in place
|
| from what I have seen of the PPP and other covid programs
| the concern was getting the money out as fast as possible
| not validating claims. There was a SHIT ton of fraud...
| most of which will never be discovered
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