[HN Gopher] Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' ...
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Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
Author : alecco
Score : 243 points
Date : 2026-01-05 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.barchart.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.barchart.com)
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| The children yearn for the data centers
| blitzar wrote:
| He is free to give back some of his $150bn anytime.
| itsyonas wrote:
| I do think that this is at the heart of the problem. The issue
| is not an overall lack of wealth, but how it is distributed.
| This is not going to change, no matter how many data centres or
| factories are built in the US. Ultimately, all the wealth will
| still end up in the hands of a select few.
|
| Not to mention that we are already exceeding a number of
| planetary boundaries, which endanger humans. The ever-growing
| demand for natural resources and energy, which is directly
| coupled to GDP growth, is not likely to end well.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| After spending quite a long time on this thread writing my
| thoughts etc, I feel like this is the most correct
| explaination of the situation
|
| Distribution of wealth is the biggest issue and In my
| opinion, the most tangible way to solve things but then
| again, this is the core of the issue
|
| Either you need a really anti corrupt body which can do their
| work and fight against such issues
|
| But with causes like lobbying etc., those get washed up
|
| Or we can have new people (like Zohran etc.) who try not to
| take lobbying money and then America can have new people who
| genuinely want to help and not be corrupt
|
| But I am not sure what would happen, perhaps more people
| follow the example of zohran perhaps not. People are keeping
| an keen eye of the progress and what can happen. But one of
| the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just
| didn't expect so much competition in the first place when
| Cuomo got around 40% I think?
|
| it's wild because zohran's message was so well put out and
| received and this is the state then, I doubt that the voters
| might replicate it or not
|
| It really depends ultimately on the voters. The truest form
| of responsibility but its also the lack of options and the
| two party system which is really bad in America ultimately
| causing the problems to exist even further.
| itsyonas wrote:
| > Either you need a really anti corrupt body which can do
| their work and fight against such issues
|
| If changing the system is off the table, then this is what
| any solution would inevitably look like. I do not think the
| problem is a flaw in the system though. Calling it a
| systemic issue is misleading, because the system is largely
| functioning as designed. The logical response, therefore,
| is to change the system itself.
|
| That idea sounds frightening, largely because most
| political parties treat the system as untouchable,
| presenting it as if there are no viable alternatives (thus
| convincing people that there are none, making them feel
| helpless). This creates a dead end: people experience the
| full force of the system's pressures while being told that
| nothing fundamental can be changed.
|
| In that vacuum, scapegoating becomes an easy outlet. When
| the system itself cannot be questioned, frustration is
| redirected towards marginalised groups, under the implicit
| belief that punishing or excluding them will somehow
| relieve the pressure on everyone else, and that's how we
| ended up at this point (imho).
|
| A system centered on people's needs would judge success by
| outcomes like health, stability, and quality of life rather
| than by growth metrics. If a policy reduces stress,
| improves wellbeing, and lowers long-term costs, it should
| be pursued even if it shrinks parts of the economy or even
| the economy overall. The fact that we currently treat any
| reduction in economic activity as a failure, regardless of
| human benefit, reveals how misaligned our priorities are.
|
| I hope Zohran succeeds in improving people's lives, but I'm
| not holding my breath. I've been burned too many times
| before...
|
| > But one of the things which we saw was that although
| zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the
| first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?
|
| I think this primarily relates to how people are
| socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society',
| i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own
| interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for
| cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in
| the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking
| out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this
| can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural
| shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on -
| the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction
| in the first place.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I Agree with your comment but one of the idea that
| terrifies me is not that change is impossible but rather
| change requires the whole world to do something about it
| and I am not that optimistic about it simply because of
| what you call about "elbow society"
|
| > I think this primarily relates to how people are
| socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society',
| i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own
| interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard
| for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so
| lost in the world that they are losing their humanity,
| only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I
| believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-
| scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the
| media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us
| in the other direction in the first place.
|
| I so so agree with this statement, this is probably what
| I thought as well but one of the most terrifying things
| about this is that its sort of like a chicken and egg
| problem because the media,education and so much more are
| so influenced by policies/directly by the govt and the
| elites that I would doubt that making such change or
| giving people the idea that "change is possible" is
| itself possible
|
| But there have been instances in the past where we pulled
| out of things but I am not sure how we can do it right
| now.
|
| A large-scale cultural shift.
|
| > the same institutions that pushed us in the other
| direction in the first place
|
| So the thing which worries is me that I don't see a
| reason why these institutions would change? Do you see
| something in this perhaps?
|
| I think that the best way is probably via at a small
| scale level and then having that grow up. Adopting it
| ourselves and discussing about it like we are doing right
| now is the only thing possible that we can do
|
| My issue with this is that the incentives just aren't
| there for something like this. Let's say I want to create
| a social company and I just want "enough" and afterwards
| I'd just do it for helping etc. and getting miniscule
| gains because I think that the goal of money and only
| money itself is very dim
|
| Even if we do something like this, the incentives really
| change because companies wont invest, you wont get
| funding etc.
|
| So in a way, I think that the best way is probably
| getting attention of like minded people and having them
| invest with such knowledge but we really haven't seen
| such platforms. I think Kickstarters are a good idea for
| small scale projects but even they feel like you still
| have to get yourself a promotion or attention itself to
| fund it and it just becomes really 10x harder imo
|
| I feel like microgrants are genuinely the best way moving
| forward. If people can provide 1-10k$/perhaps 50k? for an
| idea with intentions of good once it scales. To me it
| feels like the best way and I found ways to look at
| microgrants and they exist but I dont see many of them in
| much action either.
|
| We really need to change incentives where doing good is
| favoured more than doing bad, We can even start small
| because sometimes even small good incentives are all one
| needs for real change.
|
| I wish there was more interest in microgrants, I must
| admit that I had thought about working in this space or
| similar and perhaps I will jump back to it someday but
| what are your thoughts on it? Do you know of some
| mechanisms where good incentives can be generated at a
| societal rate?
| lta wrote:
| I think he's talking litteraly about distirbuting wealth :)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep. The structural incentives for the bosses don't change
| when their employees are assembling cars or treating patients
| or serving coffee or writing code. Power is tipped towards
| capital and against labor. The owners extract wealth, which
| tips the scales further. Labor organizing has been kneecapped
| in this country and it will only get worse (there is an
| ongoing case trying to get basically the entire NLRB declared
| unconstitutional).
| mlsu wrote:
| The distribution is a problem, but not for the reasons people
| think. At these amounts (billions) the money stops being
| human-scale and starts to become civilization scale. You can
| accomplish big things with 150 billion. Things like:
| installing a gigawatt of solar, building a 1000km HVDC line,
| etc.
|
| The issue is that when that 150 billion is concentrated into
| one person's hands, it tends to be inefficiently allocated.
| This is the argument against central planning; it's
| inefficient, it does not actually go where it would maximally
| benefit society.
|
| We have, with the amount of wealth inequality, essentially
| re-invented central planning. It's arguably worse today,
| because rather than giving central control to a worker's
| council which is nominally accountable to regular people,
| we've given it to Larry Ellison who is going to build yet
| another datacenter for AI, instead of spending it on energy
| or manufacturing capacity.
|
| My home electricity bill has doubled since AI came out. That
| is my evidence that this concentration of wealth is
| egregiously misallocating capital. It is a civilization-scale
| self-own. Countries that allocate capital properly will wipe
| the floor and we are beginning to see that play out.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > give back some of his $150bn
|
| To who? There are ~300 million people in the United States. He
| could give each one a $500 check (assuming he didn't want to
| keep any of his $150bn). Or should he give it to the U.S.
| treasury? It's $38 trillion in debt, so he could give up all of
| his money to pay off 0.004% of it.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Nobody could see that coming! /s
| newyankee wrote:
| Everyone wants to give advice, no one wants to take a lead and
| execute anything concrete.
|
| All the talk of energy and no mention of solar, wind, batteries
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| All the talk is nuclear.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Politics is the art of the possible. If Trump wants to focus on
| Nuclear, then let's take the opportunity to improve nuclear.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| This only works if Trump is president for life. He only has
| three years left in office, and you can't build nuclear that
| fast.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I don't think Democrats are virulently anti Nuclear the way
| Trump hates wind farms. Unlike Trump, I don't think they'll
| just stop a popular project meant to provide power for a
| region.
|
| And in any case 3 years might not finish projects but it
| might seed a lot of private investment and R&D
| bluGill wrote:
| There is no such things as "democrats". There are
| individual politicians that usually group together. 30
| years ago I would confidently say most democrats would be
| against nuclear, but the political winds have changed. I
| think the old ones would still be strongly against
| nuclear, but the younger ones don't care as much.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's not a question of being anti-nuclear, is just that
| nobody is going to pay for it if there are cheaper
| sources of energy. The only thing that would keep it
| alive is if the government keeps intentionally killing
| solar and wind projects.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Is he going into politics or something...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| All leadership positions are "into politics". His just happens
| to be one influential enough to matter to the US federal
| government.
| torlok wrote:
| Kiss the ring. The only way to keep the line going up is
| government money.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Please let me put a data center in your back yard. Please just
| one more I promise the chat bots will help you email faster
| please bro AGI is just around the corner I promise it wont be an
| exponential multiplier on wealth concentration.
| freedomben wrote:
| In quite a few places in the rural US (especially the mountain
| west), people are asking for that. Those companies usually
| build out a lot of needed infrastructue (power, water, even
| roads) as part of the deal, and it provides job opportunities
| (a ton up front, and some (though fewer than many people
| realize[1]) in perpetuity).
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46498947
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 50-100 jobs long term for a town, for noise and environmental
| effects in perpetuity, plus tax cuts as incentive from the
| locale to hire a handful of mechanical/handyman type jobs.
| Likely the skilled labor will be imported.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I always ask who the "we" is in statements like this? Is it self
| critique or just a way of saying we are all at fault you better
| don't focus on me.
| freedomben wrote:
| From reading the article and having listened/read a lot from
| Jensen and his ilk, I feel pretty comfortable saying the "we"
| is referring to the _system_ we have built in the US. Basically
| the era of free trade. He and Trump and that group generally
| think we made a mistake by allowing free trade, and the
| solution is to "force" that away with a mix of taxes
| (tariffs), laws, incentives (subsidies/grants/etc) and others.
|
| This is a summary FTA, not a direct quote from Jensen, but it's
| a pretty good one IMHO:
|
| > _In a recent speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined his
| plan for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America: force
| companies to build AI infrastructure in America._
| rwmj wrote:
| I highly doubt he really thinks that, but it pays to say so
| in public.
| freedomben wrote:
| For sure, it's quite possible he doesn't really believe
| this stuff but is evangelizing it because of the benefits
| of being in good with this administration. It's sad but
| important to keep in mind as a possibility
| jollyllama wrote:
| Offshore the datacenters (no jobs). Keep any manufacturing (some
| jobs). Problem solved.
| bluGill wrote:
| Data centers provide jobs. Not as many as manufacturing, but
| the difference isn't as large as you would guess. A modern data
| center needs 50-100 people to repair/replace hardware, maintain
| the generators and such. A modern factory needs 200-500 people
| to do the assembly, shipping, and other such work that isn't
| automated.
|
| Of course if labor is cheap you can use a non-automated factory
| and then you will have 2000-10000 people needed. However those
| are not coming back to the US (or Europe).
| jollyllama wrote:
| > A modern data center needs 50-100 people
|
| I doubt it. Job density for land usage and other
| externalities generated is going to be one, maybe two, orders
| of magnitude greater for manufacturing.
| bluGill wrote:
| One CNC laser cutter replaces the 40 humans in a factory. I
| don't know how many people the automated paint system
| replaced... factories are not near as labor dense these
| days as you would guess.
| jollyllama wrote:
| > One CNC laser cutter replaces the 40 humans in a
| factory. I don't know how many people the automated paint
| system replaced.
|
| In any new, expanding, or relocating factory, nobody is
| getting replaced by these things, because they are
| already priced in.
|
| > factories are not near as labor dense these days as you
| would guess.
|
| That's a bit presumptuous of you.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Is that comparison similar square footage? I know of
| factories that have 10 employees and are small machine shops,
| and factories that have a few thousand employees (even ones
| that are highly automated). The difference is scale.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| I'm not sure square footage is what matters here, though
| comparing the overall market for datacenter/manufacturing
| jobs would be more useful than individual installations
| anyway. It's not like the U.S. is hurting for physical
| space in which to put factories or data centers. Speed of
| light isn't that slow -- the big New York IXP is actually
| in New Jersey and it would be fine even if it was further
| away.
| bluGill wrote:
| Yes, but I'm comparing a specific factory with a specific
| data center that I happen to know enough about to compare.
| There are larger factories that have more people.
|
| The factory I'm thinking of had 2000 people in 1950, and
| around 250 today - while producing the same amount of
| product. Automation is continuing to come to that factory -
| there are number of things that could be automated but
| their volumes are not quite high enough today to justify
| the upfront costs.
| 15155 wrote:
| - Keep the data centers (jobs, downstream commercial demand,
| etc.)
|
| - Build up manufacturing (more jobs!)
|
| Problem solved.
| zobzu wrote:
| no power no jobs.
|
| same reason why america has been protecting their oil with
| wars.
|
| energy is the basis for everything. cheap energy is what you
| want. cheaper than the next guy. it doesnt matter if its for
| AI, transport, refining goods, etc. its the same problem.
| hackthemack wrote:
| Ross Perot in 1992
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4
|
| We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange
| situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve
| for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.
|
| We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
|
| You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can
| move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for
| your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single
| element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no
| pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about
| anything but making money.
|
| There will be a giant sucking sound going south.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, this was one of the first things I thought of too. I
| remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently
| used to dismiss his views. I'll never forget talking with an
| educated Perot voter (a friend of mine) at the time and
| actually being confronted with the real views, not a shallow
| strawman, and realizing I didn't have any good answers because
| I hadn't actually thought about it. That was a good maturation
| point for me when I started realizing the power (and danger) of
| bubbles.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| He was't crazy, just thin-skinned and not suited for
| politics.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The GOP/Bushes blackmailed him into dropping out of the
| election by using his daughter, threatening to out her as a
| lesbian right before her wedding. How thick a skin do you
| need for that?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| My comment was more in general, not about any one event.
| Apparently he was also a conspiracy theorist and this
| whole thing about an attempt to disrupt his daughters
| wedding seems to be one of those, and he admitted he had
| no evidence.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy,
| frequently used to dismiss his views.
|
| Was he crazy or was he made to look that way as an excuse to
| dismiss his views? Sitting here in the 2020s knowing what we
| know now about "how it all works" it sure does cast a lot of
| doubt upon the past.
| rapnie wrote:
| Isn't is similar to Carter being depicted as a 'weak
| president' because he had more progressive ideas than an
| average US president, which make similar amount of sense..
| and hence best ridiculed as a threat to "greed is good"
| prevailing ethos.
| starik36 wrote:
| He was depicted as weak because during his time an entire
| US embassy was held hostage in Iran for more than a year.
| Couple that with inflation reaching 14.8% and now you
| understand why.
| okaram wrote:
| Porque no los dos?
|
| He was a super-rich guy, who had had too many people
| telling him he was a genius for way too long (reminds you
| of anybody?), and so was way too sure of himself. A bunch
| of his ideas _were_ crazy, which doesn 't mean others
| weren't trying to dismiss his views.
| efitz wrote:
| > A bunch of his ideas were crazy
|
| Which ones?
|
| btw young idealistic me voted for Perot in 1992
| naasking wrote:
| I too would like to know.
| chucky_z wrote:
| All shoe sizes should only be small, medium, and large.
| He really did have a lot of very ridiculous ideas. He
| also had a lot of extremely good ideas and incredible
| understanding of socioeconomic conditions.
|
| His book "United We Stand" with modern context is quite
| amazing considering it came out in the early 90s.
| resumenext wrote:
| Powerful people like those who control both parties and our
| news media don't tolerate outsiders. When you have the
| power any deviation from status quo is a threat. A side
| effect of this is that voters stop listening to the talking
| heads and politicos when they call some political outsider
| a dangerous loon even when that may be a valid point.
| resumenext wrote:
| I'm not directing that last sentence at the president or
| RFK, but I'm guessing that's the reason for the
| downvotes?
| secretmark wrote:
| The POW stuff was actual insanity
| dfxm12 wrote:
| If you're interested and aren't willing to take OP's word
| for it, the 90s are recent enough that you can probably
| read contemporary news articles/opinions pieces about him
| online (and almost certainly at your library). You can also
| read up on his views/life on Wikipedia.
| brightball wrote:
| I had a similar experience when I learned about Ron Paul back
| around the 2008 election. It was also the first time I had my
| eyes opened to information suppression when Fox News edited
| some of his answers out of rebroadcasts of debates.
| freedomben wrote:
| Same! I actually watched the debate live (on AFN) while in
| Iraq (deployed), and when I got home and got into
| discussions about it with friends I had a hard time
| believing we had watched the same debate. Turned out we
| didn't, they had watched the edited version. That was
| extremely eye opening
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the jokes about Perot being crazy
|
| I remember the debates around the time, though, and what most
| people said was that shipping manufacturing jobs out of the
| united stated would actually create prosperity here so that
| the manufacturing types could "move up" into less menial
| work. They're saying the same thing now, and although it
| _does_ seem that that did happen in the 90's when all the
| manufacturing jobs went offshore, it doesn't seem to be
| happening now.
| casey2 wrote:
| Fatten up the pig, then carve it can you fatten it up again?
|
| American leaders lost hope in Americas ability to build the
| future. They decided this was as good as it's going to get and
| squoze the people at every level with unproductive IT,
| bureaucracy, consumerism. This country doesn't have a workforce
| capable of building the future anymore, it's dropouts and
| druggies the lot of them.
| tokai wrote:
| Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is
| great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign
| actors. Unless we want to return to mercantilism a global
| empowerment of organized labour globally is the only real way
| to fix this.
| K0balt wrote:
| This assumes that leadership has a vision beyond the next
| quarterlies. Offshoring is seen as a solution to organized
| labor, unfortunately.
|
| Exec compensation above a reasonable salary needs to to tied
| somehow to longer term outcomes.
| tokai wrote:
| Forgot the whole crux of my point. Labour needs to be
| empowered globally, to minimize the benefits of offshoring.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| If your plan relies on total coordination of the the
| entire globe you have no plan.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I guess, but the real issue here is that capital will
| mount a concerted, decades long effort, to prevent global
| organization of labor. Its not like its per se impossible
| to get enough global labor organization: its just
| profoundly, aggressively, even murderously, opposed by
| people who have power.
|
| I guess we could think of that as just "part of the
| reality," but I think its a little silly not to at least
| mention it.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| It is not realistic but even worse it isnt even
| desirable. There is huge swaths of opposition to "global
| organization of labor". The last thing you want is to
| oppress a bunch of people under your vision of perfect
| government.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't see how mass organization of labor constitutes an
| oppression of anyone.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Labour is still going to be cheaper in offshore countries
| simply because of purchasing power parity.
|
| Even good conditions and everything in country like India
| paying them around 10-30k$ is seriously really really
| good (source: I live there) and its english speaking and
| well integrated etc.
|
| I saw another comment which mentioned that just merely
| healthcare in america can cost around 10k$/year
|
| So Labour should be empowered in a good way but this idea
| still won't help america simply because of power
| purchasing parity.
|
| Not to forget that America is going through some really
| tough economic crisis right now which it needs to figure
| out on. The deficit is still high and everything and
| companies are favoured completely capitalistic and so
| combined with all of these factors, we really come to the
| situation where it is.
|
| I appreciate your optimism but I have my doubts.
| Especially when one reads the tense atmosphere of America
| right now
| foobarian wrote:
| I think it's hard to overstate how big of a deal "Labour
| needs to be empowered globally" is.
|
| Think of it as two huge reservoirs of water, one of which
| is at a higher altitude. If you connect them with a pipe,
| they will inevitably tend to equalize - this is what is
| happening with globalization. It's good for the
| developing world but bad for the developed. The labor
| class not only needs to demand better working conditions,
| but also standards of living, environment regulations,
| housing, etc. etc. until equilibrium is reached. The
| owner class will be exploiting the difference until that
| happens.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I doubt that an equilibrium can ever be reached tho.
|
| The biggest issue is that even if one provides better
| working conditions, but also standards of living,
| environment regulations, housing, etc. etc
|
| Even then, there would still be an imbalance and
| equilibrium would still not be reached simply because of
| power purchasing parity and other factors.
|
| Plus another issue is corruption. There are rules and
| laws already in place but corruption takes their way
|
| Also another thing but corruption can actually also take
| regulations and hijack them and actually penalize things
| simply for reducing competition etc.
|
| Corruptions also the reason why we have enough food to
| feed the world but corruptions in the way and I am not
| sure if there is a way to solve it
|
| y'know I have this pet theory that corruption is
| everywhere but the incentives of corruption/ways changes.
|
| In the UK, the prices of rent are so damn high, this is a
| developed country.
|
| In America, corruption takes place in the form of
| lobbying and the coupling of politics and finance and
| also the immense parity of money between the average
| person and the CEO salary's ratio being one of the
| highest and the shrewd incentives being one causing these
| issues in the first places being written almost in law,
| CEO's of major companies will fire 10_000's of people or
| more in a blink of an eye.
|
| China, although secret, In my opinion has corruption
| inside the country as well from a more political
| standpoint as well
|
| In India, there are some regulations and systems meant
| for good but people skirt through them via corruption.
|
| So I don't know but to me corruption feels natural in the
| sense that altruism can't be the only gene and biology
| would dictate maliciousness to be present
|
| This does make me sad thinking about it but I think that
| the nash equilibrium is unfair. This is how the system
| works, this is a cycle and Countries Like India/China
| once were super rich then became poor then are getting on
| their path again
|
| At the end of the day, the person speaking about this
| Jensuan huang is corrupt as well selling AI hype in the
| first place, spiking actual prices of actual goods people
| buy thus contributing in inflation but also that some
| people accuse them of even writing this statement as a
| way to people please
|
| When I had thought about it previously, I think um the
| best things we can do is probably reduce the incentives
| of corruption and then the nature of good ideas would
| take prevalance.
|
| It's also just not a developing vs developed countries
| thing anymore as I said. We see in the news cycle how
| much blatantly corrupt America's current administration
| is becoming.
|
| At the end of the day, facing reality is hard but that's
| the only way we can really put real change in the world.
|
| if you have some thoughts about how to counter corruption
| in your idea/ actually creating incentives to be good and
| not corrupt or even malicious compliance in your idea and
| I am listening and I'd love to discuss more about it.
|
| I wish there was less corruption but I am starting to
| think that incentives are set this way to help corruption
| and those themselves might've been/were brought by
| corruption themselves as one wrote on HN once that
| corruption brings more corruption , so how can one stop
| this vicious cycle? Because if that happens, I am telling
| you that America has enough money but the corrupt forces
| distribute them in a concentrated manner, even solving
| that problem to me feels like something which can help
| empower the labour globally
|
| perhaps the rich can be taxed for what they deserve and
| that money can then be spent in developing countries
| labour class in your idea? This to me feels the most okay
| way to help but the problem is, nobody's taxing the
| rich/its hard because of all the loopholes/malicious
| legal compliance in many places.
| foobarian wrote:
| I don't have any solutions unfortunately but I appreciate
| your considered response!
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Any executive in America can probably have a vision if they
| so chose. Their hand is forced by "the system".
|
| The Weathertech CEO (or maybe I'm misremembering, in any
| case it was a big private company CEO) has a good talk
| about this IIRC.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The only reason offshoring is ever done is because
| leadership does have a vision beyond the next quarter.
| Offshoring takes years to pay off because of the upfront
| costs and time it takes to work out how to run the new
| operation efficiently.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Not sending production to the place with the cheapest
| labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted
| by foreign actors
|
| This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those
| places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic
| companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete
| factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete
| us wasn't down to _just_ incentive structures (though that
| was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to
| being locked out of the market on machine tools.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| Basically, A company is bound by legal precendence to focus
| on capitalistic gains. It would be better if we argue the
| existence of other structures/their prevalence but I don't
| think that we can blame the entire companies but the darn
| structures that they are in
|
| A CEO makes 100x (yes its not becoming hyperbole, sad
| reality) than workers. He is given power and he is given
| incentives to cut money wherever he can. He sees off
| sourcing and does this.
|
| But I am not seeing America go towards a path like this, on
| the contrary, we are seeing America try to actively talk
| about workers in here and then talk about businesses
| without doing anything about all the issues in the first
| place.
|
| There is a fundamental conflict of interests and America's
| promising both sides. It honestly feels political to me now
| because the news cycle for America is moving so damn fast
| (which is really really bad) that nobody comes to question
| these things in the first place or most aren't because they
| aren't literally having the time to do such with all the
| news cycle imo
|
| I don't really know what America can do at this point.
|
| > This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of
| those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the
| domestic companies without the traitorous companies
| shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets
| didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive
| structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of
| their failure was down to being locked out of the market on
| machine tools.
|
| Do you have any sources for this, I found it quite
| fascinating that machine tools can play such a big impact.
|
| If it is, is it a sort of chicken and egg problem where
| machine tools require factories themselves which again
| require machine tools. If so, why couldn't Soviet Union
| just import some from other countries to bootstrap the
| production of tools which could then bootstrap all
| factories?
| terminalshort wrote:
| This just comes down to their incompetence. They were
| communists so they refused to just let thousands of
| domestic companies start up to produce the machine tools
| domestically to solve their problem. China did.
| tokai wrote:
| You might disagree, but that does not make it _fallacious_.
| naasking wrote:
| > Not sending production to the place with the cheapest
| labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted
| by foreign actors.
|
| Or it's a great way to spur innovation in automation, which
| has other beneficial downstream effects. This is what people
| always seem to forget to consider, and I don't know why.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The world has seen dizzying levels of innovation over the
| last 100 years. It's STILL cheaper to outsource for huge
| swathes of manufacturing.
| naasking wrote:
| Sure, because of legislation. And legislative changes
| could undo that advantage and thus spur more innovation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > companies being outcompeted by foreign actors
|
| I've been hearing this since the early 90's, and I'm still
| not seeing any evidence that it's true.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| That's like rich people threatening to leave if taxes are
| raised. It's always a bluff.
|
| And, the cheapest labor is slave labor like Dubai and the US
| (via prison labor in current use by multiple major
| corporations) use already. If there's no floor of standards,
| that creates perverse incentives and ridiculous instability.
| ecshafer wrote:
| One of my main arguments for a universal health care scheme in
| the united states is how horrendously expensive, for employers,
| health care is. Lets totally ignore efficacy, moral arguments,
| expense for the patient, etc. If you are a company in the US a
| large percentage of the effective compensation of employees is
| healthcare. A moderately good PPO is like ~$10k+ a year per
| employee. You can pay workers in some other countries less than
| just the cost of paying for health insurance for a US employee.
| jonhohle wrote:
| As someone paying for a family on a marketplace bronze plan,
| that's a bargain! I think our premiums will exceed $20K this
| year.
|
| With all of the medical group consolidation, all of the wait
| time woes our Canadian friends always complained about are
| the reality here now as well. So I'm paying more than
| anywhere else on the world and have to wait 6 months for a
| PCP appointment. We have the worst of both worlds.
| ecshafer wrote:
| So the ~$10k a year is just what the employer is paying in
| my example, taking some numbers from chatgpt for a medium
| sized company in new york. Not even counting the employee
| side of the premiums, which can be crazy high as well.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I'm curious to compare this to other countries that have
| state owned/mandated insurance and are so far still mostly
| covering everything and which are always touted as
| "superior" to the US, who "have the most expensive health
| care system". Can't use Canada as OHIP et. al. don't cover
| much and the same employer tied insurance scheme as in the
| US exists and is necessary.
|
| An example of a country with "good healthcare" and such a
| system would be Germany. Extra insurance does exist there
| as well nowadays from what I understand but health
| insurance isn't tied entirely to employment and the extras
| are things like a 20 EUR per month to cover the co-pay on
| large and expensive procedures. While private insurance
| exists there too, I want to compare to the often touted
| "free healthcare" i.e. public system. There are still
| different providers even under the one public system.
|
| So from a quick search, Germany has insurance rates from
| ~14-16% of gross salary, half of which the employee pays
| from their gross salary. But most insurances have an extra
| percentage they charge on top. I found one as an example
| that charges 17.29% total, which if you're self-employed,
| you have to cover yourself (to be comparable to your
| marketplace bronze plan being entirely self-paid).
|
| Now the question becomes: Are you paying more or less as a
| percentage of your salary and by how much?
|
| (and side question for your parent I guess: how does that
| compare to the $10k the employer pays, which would be
| 8.645% in this example)
| jaarse wrote:
| Canadian (OHIP recipient) here. As a long time employer,
| and former employee, I can tell you that no one takes a
| job here for the heath care. Some things like dental and
| vision are not covered (unless you are under 18, over 65,
| or low income), but everything else is. Over the course
| of a decade my father in law had 3 heart attacks, a
| stroke, and ultimately lost a year long battle with lung
| cancer. The total health care bill to him (or his
| employer) was $0.
|
| Now the downside ... because health care is free,
| everyone uses it and the wait times are longer. My
| grandfather recently required an MRI (non life
| threatening). The wait time in Ontario was 3 months. He
| drove to the USA, paid out of pocket, and had it done
| within in week ...
| larkost wrote:
| It is actually more complicated than this implies. For
| example hospitals are often held afloat by
| Medicare/Medicaid spending (25%/19%). Private health
| insurance is about 37%, so larger than either, but
| smaller than both. But then you have to remember that
| some of the private health insurance is being subsidized
| by taxpayer dollars (e.g.: the ACA subsidies), and that
| private health insurance is largely coming from tax
| exempt dollars (a form of subsidies). So where the costs
| are actually being paid is more difficult.
|
| https://www.kff.org/health-costs/key-facts-about-
| hospitals/?...
|
| I am not sure where your question about a percentage of
| your salary is valid on the face of it. Do you count the
| employer portion of your medical coverage as part of your
| salary? Do you count the tax exemption? How do you figure
| the taxes taken out to support Medicare/Medicaid/Veterans
| Health (all of which are required to support the system
| as it exists)? And how do you figure that for single
| payer systems?
|
| So a much more direct way of comparing is to look at
| total costs per person, and then figure out how outcomes
| compare. When you do that the U.S. comes to about double
| the cost, and generally worse outcomes. Conservative
| politicians will scream about how long it takes to get
| procedures, but the research shows that elective
| procedures take about the same time (and no-one waits for
| emergency procedures in comparable systems).
|
| https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-
| syst...
| triceratops wrote:
| > Can't use Canada as OHIP et. al. don't cover much and
| the same employer tied insurance scheme as in the US
| exists and is necessary
|
| False. From what I know, only prescription drugs, dental,
| and vision are not covered. And since Americans
| frequently drive to Canada to buy prescription drugs, we
| can assume that's not as big a burden as in the US. But
| hospital stays, surgeries, lab testing, imaging, doctor
| visits, vaccines are all fully covered.
| volkadav wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the original 10+k/yr/employee for good ppo
| coverage is a radical underestimate, for what it's worth,
| though I guess "way more than ten" is technically part of
| the "ten+" range, haha.
|
| The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate
| price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market,
| circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around
| 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra
| coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally
| paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and
| two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can
| only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left
| the country three years ago.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I got the $10k a year employee from chatgpt with "Assume
| I have a company with 100 employees in New York, how much
| on average does it cost to provide health insurance" and
| it gave me poor, moderate and good ppo plan prices. I
| figure this seemed reasonable for ballpark figures from
| employer friends, so the numbers may be very well off.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Just as an FYI, that is a massive outlier based on
| available data.
|
| My employees are about $500 per month in a major
| metropolitan area, and a family of 4 can run up to $2000
| a month for the most expensive plans (I cover individuals
| and their spouses in full for standard plans, and could
| cover one dependent for basic plans).
|
| I looked at marketplace plans in WA because I was
| curious, and it looks like it's about the same as where I
| am but nowhere near what you were quoted 5 years ago.
| bpt3 wrote:
| The key part of your statement is that you're paying for a
| family.
|
| Individuals do not cost $10k per year under any normal
| circumstances, and if you're paying almost $2k a month for
| a family bronze plan, you either have a lot of kids, you
| have some unusual needs, or you are getting ripped off.
| Even more so if you're waiting for a PCP appointment,
| because that is unusual as well.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Asking as not an American - $10k per year, how much % of a
| yearly salary is it?
|
| In Europe (here: Germany example), which is frequently seen
| here as the ideal example of healthcare spending:
|
| Employees and employers typically split around 14.6% of gross
| salary for public health insurance. [1]
|
| [1] https://feather-insurance.com/blog/germany-healthcare-
| statis...
| bluedino wrote:
| > Asking as not an American - $10k per year, how much % of
| a yearly salary is it?
|
| Depends on if you make 35k or 200k/year
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| The problem is that in the US it's a fixed amount vs in
| Germany a proportion of your income. This works OK for
| higher incomes but for lower incomes it's a big problem.
| And as always, the people in the middle get screwed. Not
| enough money to afford the premiums easily but too much
| money to get subsidies.
| ecshafer wrote:
| SO this is just what the _employer_ pays. The employee then
| pays premiums monthly as well for access. Employers pay
| somewhere between $5k and $25k (or more) per employee a
| year for health care depending on quality and portion of
| premiums they pay for the employee. Usually its split, so
| someone makes $80k a year, they pay $10k a year in
| premiums, employer pays $10k a year in premiums.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| The irony of the situation when you realize that you can
| probably get healthcare yourself in India (not sure about
| other countries) but for even a very good healthcare program
| to be around 25$ per month
|
| And that 10k$/year can be considered middle class / heck I
| can even argue just slightly above middle class in India
|
| And you can actually enjoy food and a lot of things really
| cheap as well
|
| Usually the only problem becomes if something is inherently
| expensive (think college or land) which is where PPP does
| hurt but in everyday life, I think India's decent to live in.
|
| Now I want to ask you but even if someone spends around
| ~$10k+ a year, even then I have heard people describe
| american healthcare subpar. Like why? Is it just corruption
| at healthcare level and lobbying efforts?
|
| Is there truly nothing that the average american can't do
| about to make things better for the healthcare situation. To
| me its feeling like america's moving even backwards right now
| from cutting medicaid putting even more strain on the amount
| and still even on the average person themselves as well.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| There is no simple explanation, but an important issue is
| that there is no price discovery mechanism or system
| pressure for efficiency. You also may not know that the US
| healthcare system is also an elaborate jobs program. Walk
| into any hospital and you will see 5-10 mostly young women
| doing basically nothing. I don't know why the powers that
| be decided that the US should divest itself from any useful
| work, but here we are. Now we're a couple generations into
| this social experiment by "smart" billionaires and their
| courtiers, and the military industrial complex is begging
| the Taiwanese to hold our soft hands and teach a blossoming
| generation hipsters and resentful immigrants how to build
| the computers we invented. We had a good run, but we're
| Rome circa. 400-500 AD. Don't let the marketing in
| Venezuela fool you. I'm just hoping the robots give us a
| few more decades of working plumbing.
| bluedino wrote:
| > One of my main arguments for a universal health care scheme
| in the united states is how horrendously expensive
|
| The costs need to be fixed, first. Moving to the
| government/taxes paying for it doesn't fix that.
| naasking wrote:
| > Moving to the government/taxes paying for it doesn't fix
| that.
|
| It kinda does, bigger players have more bargaining power.
| There is no bigger player than the government in a
| universal healthcare system.
|
| Furthermore, a significant cost in healthcare is all of the
| bureaucracy around billing. Much of that goes away with
| single payer.
| bluedino wrote:
| It would be very tough to reduce pay for doctors and
| other staff. The United States medical industry is one of
| the highest paying in the world.
| naasking wrote:
| Doctor and nurses are not bureaucrats. Single payer would
| significantly reduce the bureaucracy in healthcare, and
| simplify everything for citizens and businesses.
| nickff wrote:
| The main cost driver in medical care is provider (nurse,
| doctor, etc.) wages, not bureaucracy or drug prices
| (though they're frequently cited). I have tired of
| posting sources for the statistics, but they are very
| easy to find.
| cduzz wrote:
| So, let's look at UnitedHealth Group; do they deliver
| health care?
|
| If there were single payer, what would their role be in
| the healthcare delivery process?
|
| Apparently they made 2.3 billion in profits on 113
| billion in revenue in Q3 of 2025. How much of that
| friction would evaporate if they weren't in the
| healthcare delivery infrastructure.
|
| Someone once said "the best part is no part" ?
| nickff wrote:
| Compare UPS or FedEx to USPS; the first two companies are
| profit-seeking, yet very competitive with the 'public-
| oriented' (and legally privileged) USPS. Having the
| government in control does not necessarily lead to better
| value.
| naasking wrote:
| They are very competitive in the places where most people
| live, but the USPS delivers to many more places that the
| others do not, and still maintains cost competitiveness.
|
| This turns out to be a decent analogy to healthcare:
| insurance companies do not provide the coverage,
| universality and simplicity that a single payer system
| would; instead, you'll get something like insurance
| coverage networks providing spotty and inconsistent care.
|
| Either approach has upsides and downsides, but single
| payer, universal coverage for basic and emergency
| healthcare seems like a no-brainer.
| cduzz wrote:
| I've lived in cities where the city ran the utilities;
| they were generally way cheaper than the utilities from
| PG&E.
|
| The USPS is obligated to deliver letters at the same cost
| to everyone in the country, and they do a pretty okay job
| at it -- I've certainly had horrid events from UPS and
| FedEx, and those guys get to just pass the crap delivery
| tasks off to USPS if they don't like it.
|
| Lots of old people in the USofA seem to like their
| government run medical insurance, same with people in the
| VA system.
|
| The Doge crew spent months looking for fraud waste and
| abuse and I don't see any big law enforcement results
| from all the fraud they found, and I don't see anyone
| crowing over all the waste they curtailed.
|
| It's possible that the world's more complex than you
| imagine, and that sometimes people just do their jobs (IE
| the bureaucrats) and hard problems get solved.
|
| Now, tell me again, what part of the health care system
| is UnitedHealth? What critical problem do they solve?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| $2.3 billion is nothing in a $5 trillion system. Doctors
| make around $500 billion in the US. Their wages are much
| more significant than insurance profits.
| naasking wrote:
| $2.3bn is profit after subtracting costs. Doctors
| charging their time to deal with bureaucracy needed by
| insurance adds to the costs that are already factored
| into the revenue. Single payer wouldn't just eliminate
| the profit, but also those costs.
| array_key_first wrote:
| From what I've heard from doctors online, a large chunk
| of their time is basically spent just coaxing insurance.
| They waste time figuring out what they can and cannot
| bill, tailoring that to every patient, and constantly
| keeping records of everything. I think, for many doctors
| especially in small practices, treatment is a minority of
| their time.
|
| Obviously, paying someone 300K a year to sit on a 1 hour
| peer to peer explaining why they think they should do a
| surgery is just bad business. But, we do it, and I think
| a lot.
| naasking wrote:
| Exactly. You can believe the "main cost driver in medical
| care is provider (nurse, doctor, etc.) wages" all the
| live long day, until you realize they too spend a lot of
| their time dealing with bureaucracy. The true cost of
| bureaucracy cannot be accounted for by simply tallying
| the number of bureaucrats and their salaries.
| larkost wrote:
| This is true, but frontline healthcare staff wages are
| only one part of the problem. For specifics you can see
| details here (e.g.: US average front-line healthcare
| worker salary: EUR74.450, Germany: EUR40.522):
|
| https://www.qunomedical.com/en/research/healthcare-
| salary-in...
|
| But even absent any movement there you have a lot of
| savings to be had away from that: 1. The U.S. medical
| administration costs have ballooned, in large part
| because of the highly adversarial billing system between
| insurers and practitioners. Medicare/Medicaid is much
| less (but not completely) unpredictable. Doctors complain
| bitterly about the prices at times, but the system is
| much more efficient. 2. U.S. insurance companies are
| woefully inefficient. To the point that companies
| complained bitterly when the ACA required them to pay out
| 80% of premiums as medical payments. Before that there
| were companies making more than 20% profits. The most
| efficient insurance companies today use about 12% of
| their revenues for non-medical care. In comparison
| Medicaid uses about 3.9%.
|
| There are lots of other parts you could address as well:
| 1. Fraud drawn to the huge payouts for medical bills. If
| people's accidents were just covered as a normal part of
| life those payouts, and most of that fraud just goes
| away. 2. Malpractice insurance. This is like the first,
| but would mostly be solved by a combination of single
| payer and a working medical review system (seriously,
| what we have now is the definition of regulatory
| capture).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The United States medical industry is one of the highest
| paying in the world.
|
| Which the industry views as a historical accident, and
| now that they basically own all the hospitals and other
| companies, you can expect them to fix it.
|
| I would expect neutering Doctor labor power will happen
| soon. This admin will get a small donation or two, and
| the republicans will insist that letting doctors have
| high wages is the sole cause of our expensive healthcare.
| They've never really cared about the truth, seeing as
| they have often claimed "Medical tort" is the cause of
| healthcare costs, even though places like Texas, which
| have limits of Medical tort payout don't have cheaper
| healthcare.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Medical tort is a large part of our bloated healthcare
| costs. The problem with these discussions is that our
| healthcare system is horrible and has many things going
| wrong, so both sides can simultaneously be right.
| wyre wrote:
| Wages for doctors and staff are not the cause of high
| medical bills.
|
| The US spends something like $4.9 trillion dollars on
| medical care, and employs around 1 million physicians,
| 4.5 million nurses, or 9.8 million health care workers in
| total [1].
|
| If this was paid out in wages the average health care
| worker would be make almost $500k/year. Compare that to
| the wage of the average doctor at $335k/year [2] or
| average nurse at under $100k/year. There is a lot of
| money in medical care that is not going to wages.
|
| [1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/who-
| are-our-h...
|
| [2]https://www1.salary.com/Doctor-Salary.html
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's like every other compliance cost. It hurts the little
| guys more than the big guys. Too much of the US economy is
| big players so the status quo persists.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| "how horrendously expensive, for employers, health care is."
|
| So why aren't they pushing for abolishing employer-based
| health insurance? They had no problems getting rid of
| pensions but for some reason nobody really lobbies for
| employers to get out of the health care business. The same
| for 401k. Why do companies have to manage those instead of
| just contributing some money and let the employees find the
| right package on the open market?
|
| It's really weird.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Union employees have negotiated healthcare into long-term
| contracts, making it hard for those employers to switch.
| (Feel free to read up on so-called "Cadillac plans" during
| the original ACA negotiations for more details). The size
| of this market makes employers exiting a non-starter IMO.
| Any org that wants to exit will see a huge resistance to
| this change even if they can showcase all the common
| benefits.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Because if they let employees manage their own retirement
| accounts some of them would gamble all of it on crypto or
| options and lose it all. Then, because our society has
| become fundamentally incapable of saying "You are an adult.
| You have nobody to blame but yourself, and now you will
| face the consequences," this will become someone else's
| problem to pay for it.
| NickC25 wrote:
| >Because if they let employees manage their own
| retirement accounts some of them would gamble all of it
| on crypto or options and lose it all.
|
| This part is true.
|
| >Then, because our society has become fundamentally
| incapable of saying "You are an adult. You have nobody to
| blame but yourself, and now you will face the
| consequences," this will become someone else's problem to
| pay for it.
|
| Except that's an incredibly stupid short-term way of
| thinking. Because regardless, we end up paying for
| people's mistakes. As we should, because that's the whole
| point of society - we need to take care of the failures,
| the degenerates, the pieces of shit, etc because they
| play an important role in society - they too are humans
| and some of them weren't gambling away their savings out
| of a sense of fun, they did so to be able to continue to
| live in a day and age where costs continue to skyrocket,
| job growth is negative, and the economy is being hollowed
| out. We have many tools and mechanisms to help the
| winners in society. We need that for the opposite party,
| too. In winner-take-all capitalistm, the losers will
| always outnumber the winners. And you need to make life
| palatable for the losers, in hopes that their luck may
| one day change. Because if you don't take care of people
| who continue to lose and have nothing going for them,
| they will grow in numbers and eventually eat you.
|
| And besides, we've bailed out enough bad actors in
| important sectors of the economy that main street
| deserves to be taken care of too.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Someone will always have to pay for it, because we don't
| generally just let people die. And even if we do, someone
| still have to scrape their rotting corpses off the
| street, no?
|
| Radical individuality is an illusion. Yes, it would be
| nice if everyone could be solely responsible for paying
| for their healthcare or retirement. But is it possible?
| If you can't answer if it's possible or not before you do
| something, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| We almost do. Employers must provide insurance. If you're
| unemployed you can probably get Medicaid. We have private
| entities handle the details instead of something that looks
| like the Post Office. There is nothing anyone in Congress can
| do which results in all 8 billion people on Earth having
| instant access to all conceivable treatment in any location
| the the US. Like socialized medicine, there is no meaningful
| price discovery mechanism in the US. Unlike socialized
| medicine, it's a lot harder for political parties to conduct
| pogroms by rationing resources and euthanizing demographics
| that don't vote the way they like.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's a price to, in a way, handcuff workers. Systemically
| combined with policies that make sure unemployment doesn't
| get too low, weaken labor power, tie other benefits to
| employment, etc. Workers know they need your job to have
| affordable healthcare, so they have no choice but to stick
| with it even if it is somewhat crappy.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And yet they never lobby for nationalized health care.
|
| Because "Deal with our illegal, immoral, or stupid work
| requests or literally lose your healthcare" is such a massive
| bargaining chip for them.
|
| They would rather spend more money and have more docile and
| controllable workers, but not spend that money on paying
| workers more to be docile and controllable.
|
| It's not about the money.
| larme wrote:
| It's true that American companies have benefited from sending
| jobs overseas. Instead of trying to stop them, perhaps we could
| explore ways to share this money more fairly across the
| country.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Everyone in business seems allergic to "pay domestic workers
| living wages and provide flexible working arrangements with
| good work life balance" so we will only arrive there through
| politics, unions, and structural labor shortages as the prime
| working age population cohort continues to shrink, imho.
|
| Honorable mention to Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio for
| introducing legislation to tax outsource payment flows.
|
| _The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September
| 2025
|
| _Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource
| jobs overseas_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September
| 2025
|
| (US centric perspective)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Everyone in business seems allergic to "pay domestic
| workers living wages and provide flexible working
| arrangements with good work life balance" so we will only
| arrive there through politics, unions, and structural labor
| shortages as the prime working age population cohort
| continues to shrink, imho.
|
| I think its because I suppose we can either talk about
| small businesses who can be very cost cutting because their
| overall profits are very thin (you really can't blame them
| that much I think)
|
| And the medium to large corporations either take Venture
| funding and want to cost cut to show more growth or
| maximizing share holder profit
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| (taking an short summary from ddg AI)
|
| The case you're referring to is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.,
| decided in 1919, where the Michigan Supreme Court ruled
| that a corporation must operate primarily for the profit of
| its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of employees
| or customers. This case is often cited as a foundational
| example of "shareholder primacy" in corporate law.
|
| This is the root cause of the issue.
|
| Do you know that there is a solution to it
|
| They are called social enterprises and there are legal
| frameworks to do that. You might've seen some labels given
| by independent parties to show that as well
|
| So they exist, but nobody creates them, why?
|
| Because, its insanely hard to raise funding in them
| compared to the average structure. I looked up into it and
| the system of funding is just created such way where it
| rewards any and every cost cutting
|
| I think that just like non profits get good value from
| doing good. A middle way where a company's purpose becomes
| some aspect of social good and not entirely profits. This
| might help but we need govts supporting them (similar to
| perhaps even non profits)
|
| I have a hypothesis that if you provide easy access to
| lower interest loans with less collateral overall (perhaps
| even none?, provide micro-grants perhaps) at a federal
| level/banking level might be the best way to really start
| up some new innovation whose idea is social mission
|
| Most people have an idea of enough, I think that
| academically inclined people who create companies would
| really appreciate this and this could even include the
| creation of things like google etc. which really just
| turned evil from dont be evil because of the wiki link/case
| that happened imo
|
| Taxation as you say in the 25% tax won't really work that
| well imo as we saw recently in the tax scandal recently in
| America where billions were lost.
|
| Although so much of US especially its politics is so much
| lobbied etc. that I find the idea of this change just
| stopping because it could prove a real threat to the
| completely capitalist corporations which will fire 1000's
| of people in an instant
|
| Also whenever you position something as tax, the capitalist
| forces would find ways to evade it anyway, here let me give
| some ideas on top of my head
|
| What would happen if people paid outsourcing companies via
| stablecoin crypto, how would you tax that?
|
| What if things like this can count as gig work and laws
| related to that?
|
| What if an outsourcer creates their own mini company and
| such creates an invoice, I am not sure but this would be
| considered a service so how would that work, is there a
| service tax if so how much %?
|
| Suppose somebody got a consultancy company to work on a
| project and then just created the project end to end and
| deployed it and just tweaked it enough where its a mini
| saas designed just for that company, the
| company/consultancy can argue its a saas, so how would the
| taxation work for saas. Are we gonna reach a point where
| even things like saas could be highly taxed?
|
| The easiest way seems to me crypto for (bootstrappable
| outsourcing?) but depending upon the size of the
| outsourcing, they can employ multiple methods as I gave.
|
| How would the govt approach the multiple loopholes as such?
|
| The whole issue stems from a pure capitalist system where
| it sometimes rewards to do malicious things so long term,
| countries need to find ways of supporting social
| entreprises/funding them.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| We did, by lowering prices and returning shareholder value.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| And yet the timeframe Huang mentions does not go beyond 20
| years ago, indicating his statement is little more than
| political posturing.
|
| Also, last I saw, he wasn't prevented from speaking at any
| point in those past 2 decades and I don't remember any mention
| from him about these issues despite the fact that there's been
| bipartisan concerns about manufacturing in China for at least a
| decade.
|
| It's almost like he's trying to position his company's profit
| growing enterprises as a part of helping the poorest Americans
| to justify the U.S. taxpayer paying for a lot of it, or at
| least assuming all downside risk...
| baal80spam wrote:
| Who would've listened to (or even knew about) Jensen Huang
| before ChatGPT?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >And yet the timeframe Huang mentions does not go beyond 20
| years ago, indicating his statement is little more than
| political posturing.
|
| 20yr ago you could at least plausibly lie to yourself and say
| that things were ok. The seeds were sown back in the late 60s
| early 70s at least. Fair amount of gas was put on the fire in
| the 80s.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If we had some tariffs that somehow _just_ canceled out the
| exploitation (of people and the environment), that could be
| interesting. "Stop sending jobs overseas" is too blunt, create
| a fair international market and let winners win.
|
| But, I don't think anyone is naive enough to propose such a
| thing seriously. It is impossible to believe that some
| administration wouldn't use it for political favors.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > create a fair international market and let winners win.
|
| Why? It's selfish, but since the US and EU sent jobs out to
| India and China. India and China, have created protections
| that make getting those jobs back nearly impossible short of
| stopping payments. At the same time, these countries have
| huge trading imbalances (see FR complaining that their CN
| trade imbalance is untenable) and have become the defacto for
| cheap labor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not sure what the "It's selfish" part means, did you
| leave out a suggestion of some selfish action you think we
| should take?
|
| I'm hoping that free markets tend to produce winners more
| often than protectionist ones. I don't really want stagnant
| US companies to just stick around because they cozied up to
| the government.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I voted for Ross. Sad he didn't win.
| emchammer wrote:
| The dignity of three presidential candidates who disagree with
| each other, sitting quietly while allowing the other to finish
| using their allotted time...
| hackthemack wrote:
| Side point about this HN post "Jensen: 'We've done our country
| a great disservice' by offshoring" currently 3 hours and 129
| points
|
| Why does it seem like it is getting pushed down relative to
| other posts that have less upvotes and with longer times?
|
| Here are some posts that are currently higher ranked.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445412 currently 8 hours
| and 82 points
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465493 currently 4 hours
| and 29 points
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497589 currently 5 hours
| and 82 points
|
| It does not make sense unless some force is pushing the Jensen
| post down, or the other posts up?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Doesn't HN have some system for lowering threads that have,
| like, acrimonious voting patterns? Under the assumption that
| they are producing more entrenched argument, instead of
| informing discussion.
| moogly wrote:
| He is not causally connecting "AI" with industry and
| manufacturing here. Building data centers isn't manufacturing. He
| says in this piece that energy production needs to come first,
| and manufacturing later and not the other way around. Is he
| saying that AI will require building out energy production and
| the increased energy production will be used for...
| manufacturing? But it'll be used for the data centers.
|
| What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI
| will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems?
| It's weapons isn't it[1].
|
| That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and
| some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization,
| because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty
| pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from
| before.
|
| Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip
| manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of
| continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when
| they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get
| it.
|
| Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense
| of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently
| quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's
| "entirely there".
|
| [1]:
| https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/se...
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't know about Jensen specifically, and I can't remember
| the guy at the moment, but there have been a few tipped hands
| including one where the guy on national TV said something about
| "Americans should be gluing the iPhones together in the
| factory, not Chinese" and it really made a lot of this stuff
| click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in
| American factories. That's probably not the whole vision, but
| it is a big part of it IMHO. I'll try and find the quote or
| video but if someone else remembers this, please share a link
| moogly wrote:
| That was Howard Lutnick. He's said a lot of, let's say "out-
| of-touch", things. He's not living in the real world, though.
|
| Motorola tried that not too long ago. Didn't go well. If you
| want to decimate American wages, you could do it, but if you
| at the same time deport people who were the most ready to
| work for a pittance, it's going to be hard to do this without
| riots. Then again, Stephen Miller wants those riots, so maybe
| you're right.
|
| The crux of the matter is that those workers won't be able to
| afford the iPhones they're assembling, however.
| fragmede wrote:
| The old chestnut that Henry Ford didn't actually say comes
| to mind though: "I wanted to pay my workers enough so they
| could afford the cars they were building." If they were
| making them in the US, Tim Cook could pay them enough to
| afford an iPhone on a payment plan with Verizon or AT&T.
| Even if he didn't want to, there's a federal minimum wage
| US workers employers are required to pay. What's
| frustrating is the investment Apple made in China is double
| the size of the Marshall plan the US invested in rebuilding
| Europe after WWII. That money could have been spent on
| America, but Steve Jobs spent it on China instead.
| fooker wrote:
| > That money could have been spent on America
|
| This is wishful thinking, and similar to how how video
| game producers think if they stop N people from pirating
| a game, there will be N more copies of the game sold.
|
| No, instead of that the game will be played less. And
| analogously, less iPhones would be produced.
|
| You could argue that less iPhones would be good for the
| world, but that's orthogonal to the topic.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're overestimating the proportion of the price
| attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone. The reason
| that production is offshored is to shave off a few
| percentage points. The price difference is almost nothing
| to the buyer, but a lot to the owners of Apple.
|
| iPhones have nothing to do with videogames. They are
| material objects, not zero marginal cost copies.
|
| edit: and the point is that, across the economy, it is
| very good for labor. While the iPhone's cost would rise a
| little bit nominally, it wouldn't rise as a portion of
| income, which is the only important number. The retail
| price would probably rise a bit more than that, but
| that's because it is a luxury good and its price would
| rise as incomes rose.
| fooker wrote:
| > price attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone
|
| Oh, that was not my point at all.
|
| It's that we simply do not have the scale and manpower to
| do it. Maybe in ten years with more automation sure, but
| definitely not in the Steve Jobs era.
| fragmede wrote:
| Interesting take. I would happily give up my iPhone if,
| instead, the US Department of Education got an extra $55
| billion/year and US would pay people to go to college.
| fooker wrote:
| US pays people to go to college, but just the outliers.
|
| It's an interesting tradeoff, make the outliers the best
| in the world at what they do, or make the average person
| slightly more competent.
|
| I think it's difficult to design a system that makes both
| outcomes true at the same time. The countries that have
| succeeded in doing it so far have a tiny population
| compared to the hundred millions of students
| US/China/India has now.
|
| China seems to be slowly moving to a system comparable to
| the US one where outliers are prioritized. India has
| avoided it so far, which is why we see so many generic
| software engineers from India. I wonder if that stance
| will change with that category of jobs rapidly shrinking.
| pepperball wrote:
| > The crux of the matter is that those workers won't be
| able to afford the iPhones they're assembling, however.
|
| Of course they will, Americans banks and "tech" companies
| are always coming up with creative ways to extend shady
| lines of credit to the poorest Americans.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Howard Lutnick is "in charge," real or not it's his world
| we're living in. ;-)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they
| want to provide low-paying American jobs in American
| factories.
|
| This isn't a fair characterization. The people on reddit who
| complain that the coffee place is only scheduling them for 10
| hours a week and that people are being stingy with the tips
| might actually prefer the factory job with a regular 40
| hours, occasionally mandatory overtime, and $5/hr more than
| what Starbucks offers. If you disagree, then I suspect that
| there's no universe possible where you're satisfied without
| the population of the United States being cut by three
| quarters.
| terminalshort wrote:
| You have one of 3 choices here:
|
| 1. Low paid American workers glue iphones together in
| sweatshops
|
| 2. Low paid Chinese workers glue iphones together in
| sweatshops
|
| 3. Well paid American workers glue iphones together in
| sweatshops, and to make this possible we have a massive
| tariffs regime that makes consumer goods massively more
| expensive and massively increases the price of all
| manufactured goods.
|
| Pick your poison. They call economics the "dismal science"
| for a reason.
| YY4398742398 wrote:
| Chinese workers are not "low paid" relative to prices of
| goods in China though. A Chinese worker gluing an iPhone
| together can afford a decent middle class lifestyle, the
| Chinese version of the "American dream".
|
| What America really needs is massive deflation in the cost
| of everything, curbing income inequality (which is driving
| inflation) and moving to renewables (cost of oil/gas also
| drives inflation).
| intalentive wrote:
| Yes, and a big part of the reason labor costs are so high
| is that living costs are high. The US worker is saturated
| with debt, fees, payments, rents of every stripe.
| groos wrote:
| Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if
| economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal
| Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards
| cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses
| value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or
| invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard
| cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money
| available for economic growth.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| If the US minimum wage is what we have agreed is the
| minimum amount someone should be paid to have a reasonable
| quality of life (and it can be argued that it is still too
| low), then number 3 is the only ethical choice.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like
| aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is
| high.
|
| I think it's 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can
| drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the
| entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive.
|
| Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are
| bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices
| and regulations. (there's likely some modern process
| improvements they could add too but those won't increase
| productively as greatly).
|
| To reduce energy costs... you'll need about double the current
| energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but
| it's very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50
| years). It could with a little push from the Government catch
| up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.
| moogly wrote:
| Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-
| versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit
| complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated
| private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but
| there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting
| spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market
| should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or
| perhaps abolished and everything should be brought back to
| being state or federally run (I'm not sure the US ever had
| that)?
|
| It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really
| low energy prices, after all.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation
| should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately,
| as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system
| is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the
| customer.
|
| We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting
| tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers
| should still have access to the power grid, with complete,
| transparent, and understandable costs for consumers.
|
| There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and
| maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then
| requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent
| seekers.
| terminalshort wrote:
| From personal experience the closer to a regulated
| monopoly an industry is the worse its products are and
| the customer service is nonexistent.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| Same with my experience, PG&E burned down my mom's entire
| hometown.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I see you've dealt with Comcast and Verizon.
|
| Snark aside, let me remind you of the term
| "enchitification": it came about because companies in
| theoretically competitive markets make good products
| shittier.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| There are still a few regions that are fully vertically
| integrated and fully regulated with no market prices.
| However, much of the US is under a regional ISO that sets
| hourly day ahead prices and 5-minute nodal spot prices.
| Under an ISO the utility still handles distribution and
| often transmission, but generation decisions (like when
| should I turn on my plant and what should my output be) are
| handled by the ISOs optimization auction based off various
| inputs from the generator such as costs and constraints.
|
| In theory, this ISO setup has saved untold millions of
| dollars (probably billions), by operating the grid
| regionally in a much more efficient manner than in the days
| of old. It is hard to tell though as you can't do a direct
| comparison very easily. The economists certainly like the
| price signals though, but there are numerous issues.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >To reduce energy costs... you'll need about double the
| current energy production we have today.
|
| I'm worried that if we were to double energy production, all
| of the new surplus would be soaked up by data centers.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The entire point of producing more energy is to consume it.
| A surplus of electricity on the grid is actually a bad
| thing that needs to be dealt with.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >The entire point of producing more energy is to consume
| it.
|
| If the point of producing more energy is to produce more
| products, and instead it gets gobbled up by idiots giving
| us the next crappy phone app that runs in the cloud, then
| it's not me that's missing the point si it?
| terminalshort wrote:
| All those computers in the data center are just as much
| products as anything else. If you don't like the apps, by
| all means don't buy them.
| K0balt wrote:
| Manufacturing means, realistically, bootstrapping the general
| purpose robots that will foment the "third Industrial
| Revolution", which will revolutionize capital and make money
| largely irrelevant. Energy, materials, and automation are the
| only relevant factors for capital in the post-employment era.
| moogly wrote:
| Oh yeah, I also like post-scarcity SF like Iain M. Banks.
| Funny names for those ships, right? So we're betting
| everything on infusing humanoid robots with "AI" and
| abundance will automatically follow? I'm missing a lot of
| steps here inbetween. Will we live in harmony or will it be a
| massive scramble by the various nations to extract every
| single piece of natural resource by way of PvP? Oh right, the
| robots will fight. It'll be like that ancient robot-fighting
| show. We'll have that show too, but it'll be AI slop now, and
| it'll be entertainment for the robot warfighters while they
| charge their batteries.
|
| Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from
| China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a
| post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular
| Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of
| interest. Hmmm.
| pepperball wrote:
| > Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot
| from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in
| a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any
| regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive
| conflict of interest. Hmmm.
|
| Dude it's all good. Just snort another line and fall in the
| techno-delusion.
| m000 wrote:
| Can someone please fix the title? s/Jensen/Nvidia CEO/
| metalman wrote:
| My grandfather worked in the aleganey forge running the tempering
| ovens for very large metal forgings. Raised a family,4 kids, kept
| the farm, retired and lived 30years more, and there was some
| money left for everybody. He bemoned the selling off?, out, of
| american manufacturing that began in the 1970's. He was the kind
| of american who was comfortably unaware of the rest of the world,
| perhaps ever so slightly embarassed by his unworldlyness, only
| having a high school educatiin, but also completly untroubled by
| anything, anywhere, ever bieng a real concern.He had worked on
| the 16" guns that are still to be seen on the decks of WWII
| battleships. But instead of an enduring world peace and
| prosperity he got to see the errosion of the american dream, and
| the desruction of americas strength from within. As a further
| illustration, granpa and grandma, used to go visit "uncle
| kieth"in NYC, St.marks place, 6th st, between 2nd and 3rd ave,
| manhatten, in the 70's ,80's and early 90's, stayed in the truck
| camper, parked on the street,an unspoken,unwritten imunity
| convieghed by that little bit of mud in the fender wells.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People love the abundance of cheap affordable stuff more than
| they love their neighbors having work.
|
| It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people
| have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap
| foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an
| economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is
| just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain
| moral purity, of course).
|
| Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a
| cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar
| General and towards spending more money for less goods.
|
| Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to
| land lines.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Who is "we"? Jensen, where are your chips made? You're part of
| the problem.
| runako wrote:
| There are so many underlying changes to the established
| relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a
| necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively
| make us a completely different country.
|
| For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring
| back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to
| conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is
| envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong
| labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
|
| Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason
| service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule
| that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the
| elderly or food delivery.
|
| We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those
| jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what
| would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| What's your point? Say everything you just said again, but with
| software engineering and Indians, instead of manufacturing and
| the Chinese, or textiles and Vietnam and Pakistan.
|
| There's no reason American cars need to exist either, they
| basically all perform worse dollar-for-dollar, feature-for-
| feature, than foreign cars.
|
| In fact, let's offshore everything. There's no reason not to
| use Filipinos for McDonald's and In-n-Out drive-thru speakers.
|
| Let's all adopt Chinese tang ping. Lay down and die. Treat
| every effort of labor as replaceable and void of respect.
|
| If China and India wanted to wage effortless war with the US
| all it would have to do is stop exporting goods and labor to
| us.
| runako wrote:
| Please read my comment again. This time, consider that our
| laws and regulations are not laws of physics or axioms of
| mathematics and are therefore able to be changed. The comment
| will make more sense in that light.
| luma wrote:
| Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around
| inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that
| can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
| khuey wrote:
| Depends on the service. Call center work was easy to export.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I don't think that's how your parent meant this.
|
| It wasn't about the _labour_ part and whether that is
| exportable in the off-shoring sense.
|
| It's about the _product_ being exportable (in the sense of
| being able to sell it for money outside of your country)
| vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left
| pocket <-> right pocket".
|
| And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to
| other countries. You just have to first make them come -
| it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other
| jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can
| themselves be off-shored!
| malvim wrote:
| That is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that
| exporting brings wealth to a country is... kinda not really
| the case anymore.
|
| If that wealth is ending up in very few people's hands, and
| if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money
| offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the
| big difference in making something you can export?
| gruez wrote:
| > Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported
| for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
|
| Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside
| your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming
| cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of
| making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside
| your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a
| chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel
| all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can
| exported?
| terminalshort wrote:
| That's why we import cheap illegals for those.
| almosthere wrote:
| Slavor
| triceratops wrote:
| Curious that there are two parties involved in lawbreaking
| but only one of them gets called an "illegal".
| triceratops wrote:
| This makes next to no sense. Service jobs aren't "just moving
| money around inside your country" for the same reason that
| exporting goods isn't "just moving money around inside your
| planet".
|
| Services sell time and skills directly, instead of in the
| form of a tangible good. That's it.
| blargey wrote:
| It's also hard to export manufactured goods if they're not
| price-competitive on their own merits.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Unless elderly care is too expensive and people have their
| parents live with them.
|
| In the late 90's when we talked about the transition to the
| Service Economy, jobs such as call center were touted as the
| way forward for the recently unemployed textile workers.
| Until we found we could move those to the Caribbean,
| Philippines and India.
|
| I remember a number of people talking about how they could
| make decent money bar-tending and waiting tables. Until the
| economy slowed down and people stopped eating out.
|
| Service is job that you pay someone else to do because you
| don't want to do it, which is great until you have less
| income. Then it becomes a budget line item that can be cut.
| yibg wrote:
| Depends on the service. The US is a huge exporter of
| financial services.
| stuffn wrote:
| > What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of
| "good jobs" everyone is envisioning
|
| Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always
| a good job. I'm not sure if you realize what kind of skilled
| labor went into manufacturing:
|
| 1. Machining 2. Tool and Die 3. Welding 4. Etc
|
| Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars
| an hour at 18. That's good money, and at the time if I would've
| stuck to it I would've been able to afford a decent life. My
| stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good
| highly rewarding job.
|
| Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a
| living wage. Unfortunately even with such "wage suppression"
| America is still one of the most expensive countries to live
| in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with
| your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and
| reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports
| raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less
| fortunate countries. You cannot have both.
| wvenable wrote:
| "The United States provides over 40% of the world's
| humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on
| foreign aid, including _military aid_. Surveys suggest that
| Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on
| foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government
| spends too much on foreign aid "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169
| stuffn wrote:
| Wikipedia isn't a primary source. Your entire point can be
| disregarded.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Do you have a primary source showing that "the party who
| supports raising wages also supports near limitless
| spending on the less fortunate countries"?
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in
| the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat
| out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can
| be disregarded at no cost.
|
| https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-
| aid...
|
| https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-
| the-u...
| wvenable wrote:
| Literally every sentence of that quote has sources listed
| in Wikipedia.
| afavour wrote:
| > But the party who supports raising wages also supports near
| limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You
| cannot have both.
|
| Do they? Who advocates near limitless spending? Last I
| checked foreign aid was less than 1% of the federal budget.
| Supermancho wrote:
| It's about 1.2% in 2024 with 0.24% being Israel.
| almosthere wrote:
| .24 of the 1.2?
|
| I would have believed Ukraine to have been the largest.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become
| an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy.
|
| Would that not come with the end of the dollar as a reserve
| currency trough which the world essentially subsidizes
| american imports?
| stuffn wrote:
| Necessarily.
| runako wrote:
| I'm not sure wilder:
|
| - $20/hr for hazardous work is "good money"
|
| - your suggestion that we become an export economy, here on a
| forum where many people are working on products that will be
| purchased by the world but not counted as exports (examples
| of non-exporters who collect money from around the globe:
| Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank,
| AWS)
|
| - the idea that the way to prosperity is for Americans to
| move back into lower-productivity jobs. (Here I ask you to
| look up the revenue per employee of Costco and JP Morgan and
| on the other hand good manufacturers like Steelcase and
| Lockheed Martin and Eaton. What do you think happens if we
| move the workforce from higher-productivity jobs to lower-
| productivity jobs?)
|
| - your confusion of an economic point with a political point
| afavour wrote:
| Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say
| we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often
| shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured
| in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would
| be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it
| would be.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's why I don't like to blame corporations for
| outsourcing. The consumers outsource every time they select
| for cost.
| miltonlost wrote:
| That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The
| companies outsource every time they select for more profit
| for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I
| could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but
| for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy
| domestic.
|
| Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame
| because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at
| the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made
| in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate
| production of. We have had the "women at a sewing
| machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026
| with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would
| be equally productive as she was back then in an hour,
| and even after working that machine for a decade would
| not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy
| stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with
| the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though
| the machines are faster.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Nonsense, it's just cheaper to pay someone without any
| rights 50c/h then to automate it
|
| If that industry was still in the area, they'd be
| automating the shit outta it. It's just not worth it
| right now considering there are always literal wage
| slaves in some place they can ship in for their
| sweatshops
|
| Also, even locally produced premium clothing uses
| materials sourced from literal slave labour. There is no
| consumer decision anywhere, because the immorally sourced
| materials are just too cheap... And if you're willing to
| pay a premium for your morals, someone in the middle will
| just take it and fulfill the order with the cheap stuff.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _If that industry was still in the area, they 'd be
| automating the shit outta it._
|
| ... and the jobs that were provided go poof again.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Not all of them, even automated industry is generally
| good at the macro level
| bluGill wrote:
| They have been trying. Clothing is hard to automate. It
| needs to stretch and flex which is a problem for
| machines. We need many different sizes which makes things
| harder
| gruez wrote:
| >If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the
| US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
|
| How's that much different than the parent's claim of "The
| consumers outsource every time they select for cost."?
| afavour wrote:
| It isn't. I'm saying that people select for cost because
| corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources
| for the rich. If they didn't people wouldn't need to
| select for cost as much as they do.
| gruez wrote:
| >I'm saying that people select for cost because
| corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources
| for the rich.
|
| People select for cost when resources are finite. This is
| going to be the case until we reach a post-scarcity
| economy, rich people or not. It's not like under
| communism everyone was driving around in lambos on gold
| paved streets.
| bpt3 wrote:
| When do you intentionally overpay for goods or services?
|
| Are you haggling with your mechanic, landlord/mortgage
| lender, or grocery store to pay them more money than
| they're asking for, or do you purposely seek out
| suppliers that do not provide the offering with the best
| value?
| terminalshort wrote:
| But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see
| several shirts that looked basically the same and not
| pick the expensive one without giving it any more
| thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that
| makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because
| demand is completely unmet.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even expensive brands are usually made overseas. I looked
| at a couple of random pieces of expensive Patagonia
| outerwear in my closet. One was made in Vietnam. The
| other in Bangladesh.
|
| Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made
| in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering
| premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little
| clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and
| picking things off the rack.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Right, because there is virtually no difference in
| quality so companies go with the lower labor costs (as
| does basically everyone else on earth who is looking to
| have a task completed).
| runako wrote:
| IIRC the last company that manufactured men's dress
| shirts in the US closed not too long ago. They really
| were dedicated to making stuff here. The economics just
| simply did not support it. Which is another way of saying
| people would not pay the necessary price premium.
| mothballed wrote:
| The expertise to do that isn't here anymore on a scale to
| satisfy the majority of the market.
|
| However that is likely exactly what happened when it was
| finally pretty much killed of in the 90s. At some point
| clothes were made largely domestically. Some
| manufacturers started offshoring while others didn't. At
| that point consumers had a choice, the choice they made
| was to drive the onshore industries out of business or
| offshore.
|
| There might be some argument people have more surplus
| wealth now though, and they'd rather en masse buy those
| domestic products than healthcare, healthy food for their
| children, education, housing, and the other stuff that
| absorbs all the income we can muster. Of course I think
| there is always a market for people with money for luxury
| goods, some of them buy USA because it is USA.
| terminalshort wrote:
| This is true, but let's not pretend that "healthcare,
| healthy food for their children, education, housing" is
| what's absorbing all the money. Average car payment is
| around 700 bucks a month now.
| mothballed wrote:
| The median car payment is $0.
|
| ~75% of cars are bought used and according to Experian
| only 33.5% of those are financed. When adding 80% new
| cars financed you're already under 50%. Then consider
| already paid off vehicles.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic
| decisions, not decisions that should flow down to
| individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and
| their moral failing.
|
| Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy
| American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant
| (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-
| existent benefit unless _everyone_ does it. Instead, when
| goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they
| should either be barred from import (if they 're morally
| impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to
| optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes
| are not a factor.
|
| But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What
| is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the
| workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by
| planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being
| imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the
| costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if
| owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor.
| Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing.
| What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing
| market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic
| clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e.
| sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force
| a quality local clothing market.
|
| > I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the
| US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely
| unmet.
|
| The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved
| by spontaneous generation is a form of religious
| capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is
| pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an
| eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial
| that our economy is always actively managed by a very few
| people.
| terminalshort wrote:
| You seem to think I'm trying to make some moral point but
| nothing I said has the slightest thing to do with
| morality. It is simple fact of incentives and human
| behavior.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I recently came to a tangential realization (obviously
| I'm not the first to notice) regarding "cheap Chinese
| knockoffs":
|
| The US company outsources the manufacturing to China
| because "they have to" (I don't necessarily agree with
| that), Chinese company keeps the assembly line running a
| few extra hours and resells the units back in the US
| under a slightly different name.
|
| This equation is so comical to me:
|
| The greed-driven US company screams that it's "fake", yet
| they didn't do anything illegal by outsourcing, just put
| Americans out of jobs. But if they don't build in China,
| a competitor will.
|
| The Chinese company is driven by the same "profit over
| everything" motive and doesn't infringe on the US
| companys trade mark, but competes with the US company
| with essentially an identical product minus the R&D
| costs.
|
| US company cries foul, "they're stealing our trade
| secrets!" Creates FUD about China but has no legal
| standing to do anything about it. Reeks of the same
| "immoral but completely legal" argument the former/would-
| be employees make
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Does your budget not allow it or have you allocated it
| elsewhere with optional or luxury purchases?
|
| Most people don't drive around in a base Honda Civic.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It would be a virtuous cycle, though, right? If we had the
| right incentives for keeping manufacturing here, then sure,
| prices would be somewhat higher [0], but so would income
| for the very people who would be buying.
|
| [0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line,
| what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to
| produce?
| zdragnar wrote:
| That's not a virtuous cycle, that's inflation.
|
| Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect
| substitute, that means that the value has not changed.
|
| Paying more for the local good means your money is worth
| less, as it buys less value.
|
| Your question on the production line doesn't account for
| all of the precursors also being local, plus the local
| energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on.
| _Everything_ tends to be more expensive, otherwise the
| cost of managing offshore production wouldn 't be worth
| the effort.
|
| Total isolation only works when there's still room to
| grow by way of some underutilized resource- cheap labor,
| land, or something extractable from the environment like
| wood or minerals.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > That's not a virtuous cycle, that's inflation.
|
| From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are
| other advantages to maintaining production capacity
| within our own country.
|
| Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world
| towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if
| you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are
| labor in the richest country in the world.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Pretending to not understand how game theory works is a
| choice -- more of a choice than customers have.
|
| Companies are also constrained to do labor arbitrage once
| the rules allow it, but they were the ones who lobbied the
| rules into place and they were the ones to profit from the
| rules, so they have far more culpability here.
| mothballed wrote:
| The jobs also generally suck.
|
| I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and
| manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse
| than stuff like general labor building houses or working on
| fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that
| stuff wasn't nearly as rote.
|
| You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and
| over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you
| think that sounds easy but wait until you're up all night
| taking care of a screaming infant and then have to come in so
| your family doesn't starve, then you make a simple mistake
| and now part of your body is gone. Often a overnight shift. I
| would find myself waking up at 2,3 am moving my arms but
| completely unconscious. Sometimes I would catch myself before
| I stick my hand into something that would break it apart. One
| place I was working, about half the people were missing
| fingers.
|
| I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people
| getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped
| up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because
| maintenance didn't maintain them right. Why we would trade
| away our comparative advantage in things like designing
| widgets and instead do the awful work making them is beyond
| me unless you are so desperate it's your only option.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your
| coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory
| still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm
| crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to
| exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at
| worst.
| mothballed wrote:
| In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance
| to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the
| factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster
| and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the
| factory to do so. He was punished by management for
| altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow
| workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand
| for jobs.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or
| boomer era story.
|
| I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much
| all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think"
| workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the
| course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management
| made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come
| back over the past 10-15yr).
|
| Now, of course if you are doing something that's as
| unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse
| workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are
| absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days
| teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace
| people feel doesn't suck".
|
| This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s
| and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more
| cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s
| were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another
| wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking
| that's waning.
| almosthere wrote:
| That's the American dream story- always starts with dad
| getting yelled at for making things better and faster -
| the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went
| his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the
| years since has become a global corporation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the
| past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be
| bought out by the competitor of the company you left
| sometime before the 50 employee mark.
|
| (only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I
| want it to be)
| almosthere wrote:
| Well, I hope to think it's still possible.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may
| not but some of the people I talk to like that they can
| basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid.
|
| >Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up This
| should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in
| existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown)
|
| https://www.osha.gov/laws-
| regs/regulations/standardnumber/19... >1910.212(a)(1)
| >Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding
| shall be provided to protect the operator and other
| employees in the machine area from hazards such as those
| created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating
| parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding
| methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices,
| electronic safety devices, etc.
|
| > a stamping machine has all its safeties break because
| maintenance didn't maintain them right. When the safety on
| a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not,
| then the safety was not installed correctly.
| mothballed wrote:
| Sounds nice but not reality. The price of paying out a
| finger every few years is a lot cheaper than paying for
| maintenance and safety equipment.
| cpursley wrote:
| Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land
| of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a
| machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple
| years after his company sold a machine asking about a
| particular one that was sold (not even by him) because
| their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up
| in the millions.
| afavour wrote:
| A payout in the million doesn't seem in disagreement with
| the OPs assertion that the payouts make economic sense
| for these companies.
|
| I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than
| the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old
| working in a poultry processing plant:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-
| children...
|
| These companies know what they're doing.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I've worked some in metal fabrication and supported some
| light industry. if you think anyone in a normal business
| in the US that hires less than 50 hourly people has even
| read the OSHA regs, you're completely unconnected with
| the reality
|
| we really do call those stamping machines 'finger eaters'
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I work in manufacturing and stamping machines scare the
| shit out of me, usually because of the forces involved
| but I did work on some that were not guarded. That was
| not in the US however.
|
| My first job with a stamping machine was in a company
| with about 30 production workers. This was early 2000s in
| the southern US, all the workers were from Latin America
| and I think that most of them were not here legally(I say
| this because the company used temp agencies to employ the
| workers and at one point later they wanted to bring one
| of them on in a management role so they had me(also a
| temp) ask if the person wanted too switch the the higher
| paying but also requiring them to submit legal documents
| role).
|
| Even under those circumstances, I never saw the company
| do something that skirted OSHA regs. Their stamping
| machine was a POS that was annoying as hell to use,
| mostly because the light curtain and other safetys kept
| tripping but it was never bypassed.
| nonford150 wrote:
| Or more likely, the safety measures were bypassed because
| they were a PITA. You can put all of safety measures you
| want on equipment, but humans have this insane mindset of
| faster = better. Yes, that includes top to bottom of
| companies.
| mc32 wrote:
| Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the
| government.
|
| People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers
| after work and putting their kids through school. Something
| an unemployed person has more difficulty doing.
|
| Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People
| found a way to live life.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to
| work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go
| wrong there!
|
| You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for
| goods so someone can feel better about themselves
| personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a
| country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people,
| but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally
| superior one due to the global impact.
| mc32 wrote:
| It's going to cost the consumer one way or another.
| Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if
| they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes),
| quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for
| maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
|
| I'd prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap
| but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don't need
| new fashion every year. I don't need new appliances every
| few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for
| my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may
| be. At least he's not calculating the cost of suicide and
| wondering if he'll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > It's going to cost the consumer one way or another.
| Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if
| they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes),
| quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for
| maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
|
| It's actually not, because people aren't required to live
| near people who consume more in social services than they
| contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but
| basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling
| to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just
| leave.
|
| > I'd prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap
| but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don't need
| new fashion every year. I don't need new appliances every
| few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for
| my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may
| be. At least he's not calculating the cost of suicide and
| wondering if he'll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
|
| I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on
| behavior.
|
| It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair
| to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to
| compete with other companies that don't have artificially
| inflated expenses.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Out of all the many industries out there, I don't
| understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing
| manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also
| worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK.
| Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring,
| stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And
| most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well.
| For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid
| of these jobs, not adding them.
| almosthere wrote:
| Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of
| them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless
| people - it's because we're selling them out.
| treis wrote:
| Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly
| have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we
| had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office
| jobs.
| yibg wrote:
| that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those
| would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How
| many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs?
| There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back
| for national security interests etc, but from a labor and
| economics perspective, it seems a better investment is
| first to try to invest in people such that more of the
| current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > For the sake of our own society, we should be getting
| rid of these jobs, not adding them.
|
| So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous,
| monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best
| thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous
| jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a
| shit about. Wonderful.
|
| I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can
| openly be.
| mothballed wrote:
| You can't seriously believe those other societies are
| taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than
| what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less
| fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us:
| better lives for themselves and their family. If they're
| working in a factory and not the alternatives it's
| because they passed something else along the way that was
| an even shittier option than that.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > You can't seriously believe those other societies are
| taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than
| what they already have.
|
| My statement is in reply to those who are unconcerned
| about exploiting desperate societies.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Short of going back to a society of married families with
| a single income, there isn't really a solution to keeping
| everyone working and making an income though. Without
| jobs, we revert from a modern society to a third world
| nation.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back
| people getting burned alive in steel mills
|
| We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety
| standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can
| be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides
| enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
| runako wrote:
| > Unions are a potential solution to this issue
|
| This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in
| my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in
| the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to
| be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
|
| OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a
| lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We
| could, for example, make it so that any large employer
| pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for
| them full time (including contractors) is eligible for
| income-based government assistance at the state or
| federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to
| any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we
| can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling
| the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over
| and over.
|
| Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my
| grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI
| presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.
|
| > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back
| people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers
| chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties
| break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
|
| I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with
| people outside of your country So the laborers in other
| countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
| triceratops wrote:
| > Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in
| things like designing widgets
|
| As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage
| erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's
| very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into
| widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's
| nowhere to hide.
|
| Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor
| supply as widget production. And many people can't do
| widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly
| competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if
| you focus only on widget design.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over
| and over.
|
| Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my
| grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI
| presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes
| and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure,
| its monotonous at times but that can be said about many
| jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.
|
| > I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back
| people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers
| chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties
| break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
|
| I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other
| people being subject to the same conditions.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Theoretically wages should rise due to the increased demand
| in labor.
|
| In practice, not sure. But it's not like the prices dropped
| drastically when mfg. was outsourced, the companies pocketed
| a most of the savings as profit.
| spankalee wrote:
| Prices absolutely _did_ drop dramatically for many, many
| things that are manufactured overseas. Goods from from
| clothes to electronics are vastly cheaper.
| Teever wrote:
| How much is that due to genuine innovation in
| manufacturing and automation vs cheaper labour and a lack
| of environmental and human rights regulations?
| almosthere wrote:
| For clothing, for the most part is an Indian woman that
| is moving the cloth on a sewing machine still. We have
| not LLM'd making clothes yet. Nike and a few other
| companies are working on 3d printing shoes, but it's not
| comparable to hand made yet.
|
| For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs
| USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for
| $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't
| fact check me, it's just a guess here). She can probably
| make 5 shirts an hour.
|
| A woman in the United States will make $16 per hour and
| still make just 5 shirts (or less - more rules in the US
| about breaks, and probably streaming Netflix too)
|
| Now the company that sells the shirt at Walmart for $10
| will have a profit margin of probably $5 per shirt from
| the Indian labor, and $1 from the US labor.
|
| Technically after the industry is built out more we may
| be able to squeeze more shirts per hour if we start doing
| technical innovations (for example we make a machine that
| pre-sews 5 of the seams because of innovation. This is
| something that won't happen if the center of gravity is
| in India, but may happen in the US. (Actually today that
| may happen in India as tech is taking on its own thing
| there now).
| leptons wrote:
| If we cut costs and automate the way China has automated
| - some factories run without any lighting at all because
| it's all robots running in the dark - then there aren't
| going to be a lot of jobs created by on-shoring. And the
| only way to create a product on-shore that approaches the
| pricing of the Chinese equivalent is to heavily automate.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| "Lights out" has been the big automation meme since
| before China joined the WTO. Everyone has gotten better
| over time but it's still "high school sex bragging
| rules": a few people are doing it but not nearly as many
| as brag about doing it.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Clothes are nowhere near as heavily automatable as people
| like to believe they are, is the problem. Unlike many
| other goods, nearly every article of clothing produced
| today is still produced with human hands. This does not
| mesh well with the fact that the modern public has been
| trained not to value apparel; people expect to casually
| buy items of clothing for less than they'd spend on a
| single meal.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It's not like the cost of clothes would be that much more
| if produced domestically though... the difference is the
| margins would be lower, a domestic employee would have a
| job and the domestic economy as a whole would be stronger
| as a result. Not to mention, the lower margin also means
| the wealth gap would be more narrow and there would be
| less incentive to stoke the flames of class warfare.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Why do people assume that clothes (and other goods, mind
| you) produced in the US are a mere hypothetical? There
| are _plenty_ of brands that do so, and your general
| public overwhelmingly ignores them (and, as you have just
| demonstrated, don 't even know they exist) precisely
| because they are way more expensive than consumers have
| been conditioned to believe that clothes should cost.
|
| For instance, actual MiUSA jeans from companies like
| 3sixteen and Raleigh Denim retail for ~$200+, which is a
| far cry from the $30 to $50 that most people think jeans
| "should cost" (and that companies like American Eagle,
| who have long since outsourced their manufacturing, are
| happy to provide). Sure, it's not as if MiUSA jeans HAVE
| to be a few hundred dollars (I believe there are some
| Gustin's jeans you can pick up for $120 or so), and there
| are offshored jeans like Levi's which are already
| overpriced. But you'd have to be very naive to think that
| there would not be a massive and quite frankly unbearable
| sticker shock for the vast majority of people if you were
| to somehow force all domestic clothing demand to be met
| through domestic production. You could _maybe_ sell it
| with some very effective austerity propaganda, but good
| luck with that.
| brightball wrote:
| Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the
| manufacturer with them.
|
| The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile
| capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when
| the entire industry offshored.
|
| BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt
| this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply
| chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy
| but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity
| here.
| christophilus wrote:
| Yep. I live here, too, and it's a great place. My primary
| concern is that we're pretty reliant on just those two
| companies. If they decide to leave or make major changes, the
| impact on me (even though I work remotely as a software
| engineer) would be huge. I hope we manage to diversify.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the
| manufacturer with them.
|
| Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the
| entire supply chain is usually spread around the world.
|
| One example for a cotton shirt
| (https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/): the cotton is grown in
| Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the
| cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough
| cut and sewing. The shirt is shipped to Colombia for final
| assembly. And finally it's shipped to the USA for purchase.
| Move any one of those steps to the USA, and the other steps
| may still be located elsewhere.
|
| Same is true of other items, like cars. Ford may
| "manufacture" in the US, but the parts and tooling are
| sourced from elsewhere. It can't manufacture the chips here,
| because the tooling and process are exclusive to Taiwan. Even
| if you bought the plant and moved it here, the making of the
| tools and the processes are still specific to Taiwan. And
| some steps may be impossible to "bring home", either because
| some other country has all the raw materials, or all the
| expertise, or local laws prohibit some part of the process
| being done here.
| mc32 wrote:
| Then why is Germany bemoaning and suffering from their
| Mittelstand jobs going to Eastern Europe and Asia?
| almosthere wrote:
| They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet
| people wore shirts. Those steps can come back.
|
| For cars I found it interesting that my water pump on my
| Dodge Ram is stamped with Made in Italy. Yet the part is
| fairly small that even if Italy continues to make it, they
| can ship 50k water pumps in one shipping container to
| Detroit, and the truck can still be assembled here. That's
| not an issue. The issue is when the truck is made in Mexico
| entirely (which I think they still are). I know that's not
| "the entire supply chain" but it certainly becomes a center
| of gravity.
|
| Last year many people were talking about dev shops changing
| their "center of gravity" from the US to other places like
| Poland. In other words, CEO here, EVERYTHING else is in
| Poland. Wherever that center of gravity is, that's the
| country that will benefit the most. They may even hire a
| remote worker in the US that is up all night - but it will
| be the exception, not the rule to hire US people.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Clothes are much cheaper than they were in 1960. You
| could bring the garment industry back to the US but you
| wouldnt be able to sell your products because they
| wouldnt be price competitive with sweatshop products.
| rayiner wrote:
| You can just ban imports of the sweatshop products.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The problem is that people like sweatshop products. If
| you ban them you get voted out because of massive
| inflation.
| bdangubic wrote:
| like all Apple products?
| rayiner wrote:
| Most clothing worn in the U.S. was made in the U.S. even
| in the 1990s. In the 1980s it was over 70%.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| For return to happen you need to have a creative economy,
| not an extractive economy.
|
| Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's
| cheaper and more profitable.
|
| For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism
| extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means
| selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.
|
| What offshoring revealed is that _the US is not a
| culturally integrated country._ The culture of the top 5%
| or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.
|
| It's a political fault line that was always latent, was
| somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then
| came roaring back with Reagan.
|
| Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels.
| The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few
| dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble,
| are keeping the lie spinning.
|
| There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a
| cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the
| owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a
| cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to
| change that.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think if the wealth class wants to avoid communism and
| heads on pikes in the longer run, they should absolutely
| start to be more concerned with community and move beyond
| the tunnel blinders of the next quarter over long term
| stability.
|
| This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure
| domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential
| infrastructure.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Unfortunately that's a wall street problem. I don't think
| wall street can be fixed, at least I don't have any clue
| on how it's possible to fix it outside of destroying it.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Offshoring happened because people dont want to buy goods
| that cost 3x as much just because they were made in the
| US. If a clothing company tries manufacturing
| domestically no one will buy their clothes unless theyre
| already an expensive brand.
| losvedir wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're arguing against, isn't that the
| point of the GP? That we can bring all that stuff back?
| Tesla makes things predominantly in-house and didn't use a
| supply chain all over the world. There are still garments
| grown and made entirely in the US, eg Duckworth. They're
| just expensive because there's not a lot of it left.
| antonymoose wrote:
| You're cherry-picking examples. Manufacturers can and do
| relocate the entire chain (or a super majority of it). I
| live outside of Greenville, SC also (previously Charleston)
| and when Boeing or BMW or Mercedes or Volvo bring a product
| out here they also bring hundreds of small time suppliers
| with them. Maybe the cotton for the cloth seats still come
| from Egypt but this is immaterial to the overall operation
| and the jobs it brings to a community.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| >> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the
| manufacturer with them. > Not really... Manufacturing today
| is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually
| spread around the world.
|
| You're both right but you appear to differ on
| particularities, like if it's good to bring _all_
| manufacturing onshore.
|
| I'd rather address Jensen's could-be-apology which pretty
| much mimics Grok's "Oops, I made some pedo images, sorry...
| but move on, nothing to see here."
|
| Yes, Nvidia, Apple and AMD are the companies that drove the
| US chip manufacturing overseas. The problem is, thanks to
| that, they are now forcing us to pay for their enormous
| margins and for bringing chip production back here, all the
| while they swim in money.
|
| On top of that, we are now supposed to appreciate their
| newly acquired wisdom and be thankful when they lecture us
| about what's good for America.
| bflesch wrote:
| So European companies brought new jobs and prosperity to
| Greenville, SC, and the local Americans thanked Europe by
| voting 60% for Trump in the last election.
|
| How do you explain that? Why do the locals vote against the
| countries that provide them the jobs? Are you also pro-Trump
| because you live in that town?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| They extended their operations there because Biden lured
| them with insane subsidies.
|
| Don't commit the mistake of thinking Trump politics is a
| rupture from what came before when it comes to how the US
| treats Europe.
|
| It's been economic aggression after economic aggression
| from both parties since Obama. Different styles, same core
| ideas.
| nonford150 wrote:
| The subsides were during Clinton and Bush 2. BMW and
| Mercedes were here long before Biden and Obama. It makes
| good sense to manufacture your product in the area it is
| sold - that's the real reason for their mfg base
| establishment.
|
| Not only the direct jobs, but also the other support ones
| - automation, suppliers, maintenance, facilities work,
| etc.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Absolutely, especially with larger/heavier items like
| cars... I'm frankly somewhat surprised there aren't more
| assembly plants across the US just to reduce the shipping
| costs of the final product. Even with a more globalized
| supply chain of the component parts.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I'm talking of the Biden-era IRA here. BMW had to invest
| 1.7 billions in 2022 to manufacture most of its EV
| directly from there as you can compete in the US market
| without the IRA subsidies and the conditions severely
| limit even which parts you can import.
|
| That's a significant shift moving from final assembly to
| forcing most of the supply chain to be relocated.
| bflesch wrote:
| Good point. "Free trade between free countries" is a nice
| concept but unfortunately Americans have cancelled that
| subscription.
| tracker1 wrote:
| What countries, beyond the US, are you speaking to? I
| mean, I'm interested in what countries you're talking
| about that don't leverage tariffs and other restrictions
| to favor domestic industries in those countries.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Most countries had tariffs before trump, including USA.
| None have dumbass tariffs like trump though.
| bflesch wrote:
| There is EU / Schengen which immensely boosted local
| economies. We had TTIP but unfortunately it was killed by
| opposing forces, and there is still MERCOSUR. However,
| Germany with it's brilliantly corrupt leadership, changed
| that strategy to "trade facilitates change" ("wandel
| durch handel") and went all in to removing trade barriers
| w/ russia and china because the idea was to convince them
| if we trade they won't try to kill us. Obviously this
| approach failed.
|
| Strategically, it does not make sense for democratic
| countries to have higher trade barriers with each other
| than with autocrat states. But over time the hybrid
| warfare by autocrat states leveraged social media to
| convice people to vote against their own interest e.g.
| brexit.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > They extended their operations there because Biden
| lured them with insane subsidies.
|
| Biden, really? If you're attempting to stop
| disinformation, please start with yourself.
|
| Michelin opened their US headquarters in Greenville in
| _1984_. BMW opened their plant in South Carolina in
| _1994_.
|
| How was (at the time) Senator Joe Biden of Delaware
| responsible for that in any way? Why would he care so
| much about South Carolina?
|
| The real reason is shipping tires and vehicles across
| oceans is expensive.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I said "extended" not "opened". That's indeed
| intentional. Please don't use a strawman to avoid
| addressing the point I'm actually making.
|
| Michelin invested significantly in the site recently and
| BMW added a ton of EV manufacturing capacities, we are
| talking of a 1.7 billions dollars investment.
|
| All of this is linked to subsidies they got through the
| IRA on top of local South Carolina subsidies. They had to
| do these investments to remain competitive in the US
| market as the subsidies are tied to local manufacturing
| and the conditions significantly limit what parts they
| can import. It was a direct attack on European
| manufacturing masquerading as green investments.
|
| Guess which president passed the IRA.
| cpursley wrote:
| HN sure does like beating up on folks in the Southern US by
| painting us all with the same brush, it's the worst kind of
| ugly.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I'm a liberal and I've lived in Texas (Austin) for 20
| years. It is infuriating when I am on some liberal-
| oriented forum, someone says we should force Texas out of
| the union or whatever, and everyone cheers. ~40% of
| Texans didn't vote for Trump, and in absolute numbers are
| a greater number of liberals than most other states in
| their entirety ... yet my supposed fellows want to write
| us off. Ugly indeed.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Are you...doing to liberal-oriented forums what they do
| to Texas? Tarring everyone with the same brush?
| bflesch wrote:
| Would you even call HN a liberal forum? It is full to the
| brim with profiteers who have no ethical framework except
| making money for US-based VCs.
|
| The past years have shown that many have no problem to
| change affiliation with the zeitgeist. I feel many
| Americans are secretly pro-Trump as long as they make
| money. If there would be more liberals in US tech we
| would see much more leaks coming from companies such as
| Apple, Facebook, Reddit, Google, about how the senior
| leadership is supporting the government policies.
|
| For example with Facebook it needed a woman to get
| sexually harrassed out of her job and write a book called
| "careless people" so that it is reported that Facebook
| engineers were actively embedded with the Trump campaign
| while at the same time democrat voters (black people)
| were shown literal fake news ads to keep them away from
| voting.
|
| I have not seen one Facebook senior engineer being
| ostracized on HN for working on the trump campaign.
| Everbody made their millions and joined the next big
| thing, with us worshipping their amazing FAANG
| credentials.
|
| If the people who worked on DOGE do a "SHOW HN:" nobody
| would call it out.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Would you even call HN a liberal forum?
|
| I just look at the patterns of things that are downvoted
| to death. Comments that would come out of Peter Thiel or
| Elon Musk's mouth any day of the week are regularly
| downvoted to hell here.
|
| It's not a matter of 'liberal' vs whatever anymore, it's
| a matter of expertise and basic ethics versus corruption
| riding upon anti-intellectualism, cloaked in naked
| bigotry. Say what you will about the prevailing value
| system among HN commenters, this place isn't _that bad_.
| jghn wrote:
| My observation over the last 10-15 years here has been
| this is partially true. But what's more true is the
| Overton window has shifted. To use your example, the
| things that would come out of their mouths, especially
| Elon, has taken a decidedly right wing turn over time. So
| keep in mind you're also seeing people who have largely
| stayed the same discussing a culture that largely has
| not.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| In a word, no.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I am?
|
| Am I saying they should be disenfranchised from the
| country? Have I said they I have no empathy for their
| concerns and hope the worst for them? No.
|
| What I said was it was infuriating when they are doing
| those things to the ~40% of Texans who are liberal. I
| didn't say it happens on all liberal forums, I'm
| complaining about the cases where it does happen. And
| please don't shift things because I said "everyone
| cheers" because it should be obvious it is a common
| phrase and doesn't literally mean I checked and every
| person on the forum commented.
| stray wrote:
| Austin is the Lawrence (Kansas) of Texas.
| bflesch wrote:
| Stop playing the victim. When you have time to hang out
| on HN you're obviously part of the privileged class. The
| area is hugely profiting from "stolen" EU jobs, which
| according to Trumpistan logic is something that is not
| good. I don't see any uprising of all the "folks in the
| Southern US" against the lawlessness of your government.
| And if you're called out for it the victim reflex sets
| in.
| amalcon wrote:
| To be fair -- there are a lot of people in the southern
| US who do the same thing to various demographics that HN
| users are likely to belong to. You can actually see
| serving politicians do that on TV, and have been able to
| see that for a long time. Not everyone does it, but not
| everyone on HN does it either. Indiscriminately doing the
| same thing back isn't _good_ , but that kind of ugly
| seems to just be human nature.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| It's not called the Southern Strategy for shits and
| giggles.
| hollerith wrote:
| Because when an American votes for a president, asking how
| his choice will affect Europeans is not his top priority.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| To answer the GP, you'll have to take a look at why the
| entire industry offshored at the same time.
|
| What makes you think the problem that caused the industry to
| go won't also cause it to fail if somebody forces them to
| stay or tries to bring them back? Also, why one industry
| leaving made people there destitute?
|
| Those things are always more complicated than they seem.
| brightball wrote:
| Yep, it's definitely complicated from an economic
| standpoint.
|
| There was a strong dollar making imports cheaper and
| exports more expensive. At the same time there were
| reductions in tariffs (Tokyo Round of GATT) as well as
| increased quota allowances from other countries,
| particularly China, than were previously allowed (the
| Multi-Fiber Arrangement).
|
| At the time, this particular area of the country had turned
| into a global textile hub and it was devastated as a
| byproduct (over-saturation of a single industry). Now if
| you come to the area, you will see all of the old mills
| converted into apartment complexes, coworking spaces,
| wedding venues, etc just to preserve the architecture.
|
| The whole area is beautiful now and has been one of the
| fastest growing parts of the country for almost a decade. I
| moved here 25 years ago when the changes were just starting
| but the natives will tell you the whole story. I think a
| PBS documentary was being made about it too.
| yibg wrote:
| We should still differentiate between low value and high
| value add manufacturing though. Building automobiles and
| automobile parts, great. Relatively high skill, high value
| add jobs. Spinning cotton, not so much.
|
| If we have an infinite supply of labor with no better place
| to allocate them then sure, any additional job is good. But
| that's not the case. We have a constrained labor supply, so
| is it better overall to focus on high value, high pay jobs,
| even in manufacturing instead of aiming for the entire supply
| chain for everything?
| loudmax wrote:
| For manufacturing in the US to be economically competitive on
| the global stage (or even on the domestic stage), the actual
| work will mostly be performed by robots, not by humans. This
| will bring back profits, but not a lot of jobs.
|
| In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to
| Taiwan, a democracy, and one of our geopolitically closest
| allies. This business went to TSMC because they did a better
| job producing these chips than either Intel or AMD (or AMD's
| successor, Global Foundries). The Twinscan machines that fab
| the chips are from ASML in the Netherlands, another democracy
| and geopolitical ally. The parts for those machines come from
| a truly global supply chain. Modern chip manufacturing is an
| absolute marvel of global integration.
|
| American consumers and businesses benefited from this
| arrangement in the form of very competitively priced
| hardware. Most of the manufacturing was in Asia, but most of
| the profits were to American companies. This is why America
| is today the richest country on Earth. It simply would not
| have happened like it did without free trade.
|
| China's low wages and integrated supply chain can beat
| American manufacturing. China _cannot_ beat the combined
| talent of the free world. Along with immigration, from the
| likes of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, free trade and an
| open economy was what once made America great.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was
| to Taiwan
|
| In the context of Jensen's would-be-apology, it doesn't
| matter where the offshoring went. Nvidia, Apple and AMD
| drove the US chip manufacturing overseas, and thanks to
| that, they are now a virtual cartel which commands enormous
| margins, so they can "mercifully" argue about bringing chip
| production back here... at our expense of course.
|
| While paying through the nose, we're also supposed to
| appreciate their crocodile tears and listen to their drivel
| about what's good for America.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working
| those jobs are not deserving of prosperity.
|
| I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as
| a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on
| whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person,
| IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more
| education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth
| more and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some
| amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve
| himself and get a better job the school would presumably find
| someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line
| is that _they_ expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that
| most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some
| point it 's not about _him_ needing to upskill it 's about
| expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects
| a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages.
|
| I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers _can
| 't_ pay more because it's become structural and they don't
| actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to
| agree with parent poster:
|
| >> There are so many underlying changes to the established
| relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be
| a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively
| make us a completely different country.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It used to be 'America, land of the free' and we hero
| worshiped homeless dudes who happened to chase after cattle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy
|
| Now it's 'America, land of the greed' and fox news talking
| heads say homeless dudes should just be executed.
|
| Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people
| should receive "involuntary lethal injections"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you upskill enough people, companies will need to start
| paying more for those services. And once they need it, they
| will find the money.
|
| There is a reason unemployment numbers are always within the
| same small band. There's always money to employ around the
| same ratio of the population. And when people get richer,
| that ratio gets slightly smaller, not larger.
| runako wrote:
| This really doesn't work because there is not enough demand
| for people to upskill. Even during boom periods like 1999,
| there were still janitors. Janitors did not suddenly earn
| more money because white-collar hiring was exploding.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| "We" have not "decided" anything other than collectively making
| decisions about what we are willing to pay for a given service.
| That ultimately is what sets wages. The only reason software
| development pays so well is because the market will bear it,
| and the market isn't some cabal of fat cats in top hats,
| monocles, and tails (or hoodies and Patagonia for that matter).
| It's the collective decisions of 330 million people.
| almosthere wrote:
| The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a
| cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out
| smaller companies from having access to software engineering
| resources at such a cheap rate and eventually get taken out.
|
| I get that from another perspective your answer is also
| correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that
| EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45
| software people that want to make their own amazing game does
| not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather
| than collectively start a game company now.
|
| What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if
| the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army
| companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc...
| because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast
| and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having
| a say".
| runako wrote:
| We make decisions through purchasing, yes.
|
| There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually
| through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary
| to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long
| periods of time. So over time, the policies that are
| continually ratified do reflect our collective choices.
|
| And for at least the last several decades, yes we have
| collectively decided through our policy directions that there
| are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of
| material prosperity.
| duxup wrote:
| Even with a good labor representation, is making cheap tshirts
| a job people want to do / a good job?
|
| I'm not convinced it is, or that it lasts.
| foobarian wrote:
| I bet many people would find that job a lot more appealing
| than risking your life doing shopping gigs under time
| pressure, without even getting health insurance.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not convinced that Tshirt job would exist long or in
| quantities that matters.
| bpt3 wrote:
| How exactly is doing instacart runs "risking your life"
| without using a definition for that term that involves any
| task where you're required to leave your house?
| naasking wrote:
| > What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of
| "good jobs" everyone is envisioning?
|
| They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to
| keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us
| since automated systems require engineers to design them and
| technicians to maintain them.
| scythe wrote:
| I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing
| jobs. The important question is whether they have positive
| externalities. According to one argument (which I'm
| reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves
| dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers
| to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to
| provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the
| position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy
| level is not obvious.
|
| (OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an
| important negative externality -- pollution)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The service economy has a few problems.
|
| The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food.
| People can do without it much easier than doing without a
| washing machine.
|
| The second is, for many services, such as child care and
| elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality.
| This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in
| manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are
| humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this
| either.
| loeg wrote:
| Manufacturing jobs were only "good jobs" in comparison to the
| alternatives available at the time. The other options in the US
| have gotten better in the last 50 years. As much as people hate
| on service industry jobs, they're much less physically
| dangerous than working in a mid-20th century manufacturing
| plant.
| closeparen wrote:
| A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser
| delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker
| watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25
| years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol
| effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the
| relative positions of these workers _not_ fall as all these
| tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
|
| The whole concept of buying services from people is either that
| their time is worth less than yours, or they have special
| skills that you need and lack. "No such thing as unskilled
| labor," ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful
| people's skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or
| replicate.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How
| could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all
| these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the
| scene?
|
| Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was
| small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages
| could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if
| for example so many people moved into high productivity work
| that only a small percentage remained in low automation work.
| But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a
| constant influx of people willing to do low automation work,
| that doesn't happen.
| closeparen wrote:
| That's the Baumol effect. The rising tide does lift all
| boats to an extent, but not the same extent.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I agree, I'm just saying the extent is influenced heavily
| by the increasing availability of workers at the lower
| end of the automation distribution.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| The line cook is relatively as valuable as they were in the
| past, they're just being out leveraged by people asserting a
| self-centered entitlement mentality.
| ctoth wrote:
| I didn't realize that self-centered entitledness was a new
| phenomena?
| amluto wrote:
| > How could the relative positions of these workers not fall
| as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on
| to the scene?
|
| I'd like to see this worked out for real.
|
| On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of
| hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker
| produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.
|
| On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker
| should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more
| haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years
| ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more
| haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or
| more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in
| the last 50 years.
|
| So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability
| of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system
| such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid
| compared to lower-productivity workers.
| sudosteph wrote:
| You seem to just be describing Marx's Labor theory of
| value.
|
| It sounds more fair to pay people according to how much and
| how hard they work, but economically it tends not to work
| out.
| amluto wrote:
| I'm thinking more of paying people on the margin or of
| some kind on tax system that compensates for inequality a
| bit.
|
| Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100
| people in the population, and a bunch of them are
| ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing.
| If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would
| do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid
| 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and
| the employers would reduce wages. (I've occasionally
| contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon
| Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive:
| they can afford it, so they might as well, because it
| makes it more expensive to compete with them.)
|
| Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so
| that owning more than one house were highly discouraged
| (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to
| rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot
| of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build
| houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different
| jobs with very different salaries would could still
| result in having enough income to afford to live in
| approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and
| some might afford one that is much fancier than someone
| else's, but if the pressure that makes someone like a
| hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech
| worker to pay for a similar house went away, the
| situation could be much improved.
|
| (California, like many places, has strictly too few
| residential units in the places that people want to live,
| so just adjusting prices won't help much.)
| cootsnuck wrote:
| > The whole concept of buying services from people is either
| that their time is worth less than yours
|
| And if everyone else's time has become more valuable then too
| has the time that is being saved by buying services.
|
| If my time as a programmer is worth significantly more now
| than it was 25 years ago, then the time I save by buying
| services is worth more.
|
| There's a reason that someone making $1mil/year is going to
| be willing to pay more for the exact same haircut that
| someone making $70k/year also gets. The time being saved is
| worth more to them.
| AlexB138 wrote:
| You're only looking at half of the equation here. Following
| your logic, if my time is worth $100/hr, I should be
| willing to pay $99/hr for a haircut. But reality is that a
| haircut isn't just worth some utility value based on time
| saved, it's worth the lowest amount where suppliers'
| willingness to provide it at a given quality and buyers'
| willingness to pay meet.
|
| So while the $99/hr haircut might technically save me
| money/time, suppliers of haircuts are generally willing to
| give the same haircut for $30/hr. If one supplier tried to
| pin their prices to the growth of their customers' income,
| they would go out of business. That is because the value of
| the suppliers time isn't increasing at the same rate.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm mostly bald... I got tired of paying as much as I did
| for haircuts and now mostly just use a pair of clippers
| on myself, since my goal is to take off all of it. I've
| paid for more beard trims the past few years than
| haircuts, though I mostly do that myself too.
|
| Note, I usually use clippers on myself about once a week.
| Sometimes I'll use a shaver to get a closer shave, but
| generally doesn't matter as I don't care if there's a
| little growth, which is noticeable unless I literally
| shave daily anyway... which I'm too lazy to do, and
| definitely not able to pay someone else to do.
| yibg wrote:
| But the relative value of those same labor (hairdresser,
| daycare worker) changes. If my labor as a tech worker was $50
| / hour I'm willing to pay $30 / hour for a haircut. But now
| if I make $100 / hour I'm willing to pay $60 for the same
| haircut. And in both situations I still need a haircut and
| the hairdresser is still the place to go to get one.
| closeparen wrote:
| Sure, but the gap between your hourly wages has doubled.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor
| movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
|
| There's something to be said that the labor movement was
| destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the
| labor back would see the labor movement return.
| runako wrote:
| People still work, so this is a very bizarre comment to make.
| NickC25 wrote:
| >we have just decided that the people working those jobs are
| not deserving of prosperity.
|
| We've also decided that labor needs to be taxed more heavily
| than capital, which is fucking stupid.
|
| Taxing the lower end of society who actually works at a higher
| rate than wealthy people is just so shortsighted.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I think even more important than the difference in taxation
| is the difference in freedom of movement. There are heavy
| restrictions on labor moving between countries, capital has
| no restrictions at all (except kinda in China) and can move
| instantly to wherever it is most useful, i.e. wherever has
| the most human rights violations and lowest wages. We need to
| eliminate this asymmetry: either get rid of all restrictions
| on freedom of personal movement and selling ones labor, or
| lock down the flow of capital with serious capital controls.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Every healthcare post: 'this isn't the biggest cost in
| healthcare' 'this isn't going to fix things'
|
| Every jobs post: "this doesn't fix X" 'this isn't the biggest
| issue'.
|
| And the republicans keep dog walking straight to their goals
| while we talk about the best arrangement for deck chairs.
| stanleykm wrote:
| Because nobody actually wants to talk about the core of the
| problem or how to address it. They see different, seemingly
| unrelated problems depending on what their priorities are.
| The democrats are also not on the side of actually solving
| the problem.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think with the advancement of manufacturing techniques the
| future is in small run manufacturing. Manufacturing won't
| return with a few companies employing thousands of people. My
| thinking is that manufacturing will return with thousands of
| companies employing around 10 people. The future will be more
| customized solving detailed problems with unique specification.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means
| "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital
| these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more
| but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it
| takes more resources diverted from workers to support this
| larger non working population. This problem can be solved with
| more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to
| share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
| stanleykm wrote:
| I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what
| people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking
| about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on.
| People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of
| the funds are managing the retirements of working people but
| that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those
| retirees have any active ownership of the companies those
| funds invest in.
| runako wrote:
| There's been a lot written on Labor vs Capital, so I will
| just suggest you research the topic because you are not on
| target here.
| flerchin wrote:
| Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce
| further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this,
| and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.
| largbae wrote:
| Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different
| amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or
| respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are
| rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done.
|
| If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and
| licensing) then scarcity can be created.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >e.g. by training and licensing
|
| For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the
| profit of having government violence chase away much of the
| "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the
| demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your
| training or license or belong to your professional group or
| whatever.
|
| And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of
| having supply be constrained because the state forces that
| constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the
| taxpayer.
|
| Something something privatize profits something something
| socialize cost centers.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor
| movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
|
| This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true.
| The competing narrative that better living and working
| conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is
| just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it
| also explains the post-1971 decline.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does (general)
| better living and working conditions arising from better
| technology and cheaper energy have to do with which jobs are
| considered "good" and "bad"?
| monocasa wrote:
| How does the explanation without labor power dynamics explain
| the post-1971 decline? Electricity is cheaper inflation
| adjusted than it was then, and technology has certainly
| progressed since 1971.
| edude03 wrote:
| > There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay
| more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
|
| There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make
| more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone
| something if they can make money from it.
|
| If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell
| the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome
| for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my
| elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't
| make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my
| elderly parents.
| runako wrote:
| Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the
| effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule
| in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in
| the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the
| impact of regulation.
|
| It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees
| so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are
| free to make different choices.
| tracker1 wrote:
| To some extent, the pay rate for a lot of jobs comes down the
| available candidate pool for those jobs. The easier/simpler a
| job is for anyone to step into, the more likely it is to have a
| lower pay associated with it. As an addition, regarding service
| jobs, a lot of the times, you get what you put in... at this
| point, most customer service interactions I've generally seen
| have been poor at best.
|
| Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a
| good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at
| this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay
| into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts
| to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I
| think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that
| force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there
| really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then
| pay up.
|
| Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel
| visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything
| resembling longer term health of a company and the communities
| they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing
| industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those
| sectors collapse altogether.
|
| Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the
| people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the
| same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require
| competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should
| require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to
| be domestically supplied as well.
|
| I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to
| refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip
| service... just actually considering organizational and
| community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only
| grow and take over.
| ctoth wrote:
| > There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay
| more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
|
| There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real
| bitch.
|
| Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker
| today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly
| care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive
| through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by
| the nature of the work.
|
| Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector
| wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-
| productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are
| _borrowed_ from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.
|
| This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It
| means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity
| growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > It means wanting isn't a mechanism.
|
| Well we still have _demand_ in the equation. If demand for
| service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so
| will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is
| there.
|
| People with more disposable income (the high-productivity
| ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be
| whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the
| compensation to where we want it to be.
|
| What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs
| being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation.
| Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage
| therapists?
| spdionis wrote:
| And then you get to the reason why everyone complains
| childcare is expensive.
| SgtBastard wrote:
| Thank you, I learnt a new term today.
| runako wrote:
| I thought about addressing this in the original post, but I
| want to address part of your response:
|
| > one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in
| 1950. Elderly care doesn't
|
| Indeed, this is a core component of Capital vs Labor issue I
| mentioned. Productivity increases, workers generate more
| value, but Capital's share of the results increases
| nonetheless. The change in this relationship is why I would
| expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated
| by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for.
|
| (There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The
| benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of
| other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker
| has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing
| high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of
| the country.)
| rayiner wrote:
| What you're overlooking is that productivity doesn't
| increase uniformly. The low paying service sector jobs
| aren't any more productive today than they were 50 years
| ago.
| pixelready wrote:
| It's almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on
| the labor marketplace as the primary "prosperity" distribution
| mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between
| labor and capital will determine the average person's level of
| prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor:
| collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero
| (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following
| increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel
| action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws.
|
| Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible
| "prosperity" is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost
| of goods and services will factor in.
|
| So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra
| concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors:
| enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor
| protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than
| regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper
| mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the
| capital class make this difficult but not impossible.
|
| We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural
| memes around individual merit and everyone "deserving their
| fate" to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism
| would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a
| bonus.
| kjshsh123 wrote:
| I think you should read up on comparative advantage and the roy
| model of labor. Forced onshoring is likely to hurt US
| productivity and large wage gaps arise because of self-
| selection driven by correlations in productivity across jobs.
| rayiner wrote:
| Jobs aren't good or not because they government declares it so
| by fiat, there's substantive differences between different
| kinds of jobs. "Service jobs" are bad because they typically
| require little skill, just a human body physically present in
| the U.S.
|
| In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack
| the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job.
| Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians.
| Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
| ck2 wrote:
| lol
|
| "AI" is going to coincidentally collapse the same time this
| tyrannical presidency ends
|
| what drugs are you doing where you truly believe eliminating
| millions of jobs is going to bring "prosperity"
|
| it's going to "silo" wealth even further and make everything more
| unaffordable
|
| next generation won't even be able to own a car forget a home
| catigula wrote:
| AI isn't going to collapse. It's the real deal.
| tharmas wrote:
| Sure, like the dot com bubble it will burst. But like the
| internet, AI is here to stay. The real bottleneck is
| electricity supply. CEO of Microsoft has even said, we have
| the chips but not the electricity to power them. The chips
| are sitting idle.
| catigula wrote:
| The capabilities of AI are on an exponential curve.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Onshoring manufacturing and bringing back the US manufacturing
| base is a critical issue. This is from a social and security pov.
| Having millions of young men wallowing around playing video games
| and drugs all day and not working, raising families, is
| disgusting and a sign of collapse. We need manufacturing back in
| a big way, unfortunately I don't think that Trump, despite also
| thinking that, has the vision or ability to make it happen.
| m000 wrote:
| > In a recent speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined his plan
| for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America: force companies
| to build AI infrastructure in America.
|
| Not self-serving at all.
|
| > Since founding Nvidia in 1993, he has overseen its
| transformation into a central supplier of computing platforms for
| AI, data centers, and high-performance systems. That position
| provides direct exposure to the industrial requirements behind
| digital innovation, including power generation, fabrication
| capacity, and workforce availability. From this vantage point,
| energy is the basis of the economy from which everything is
| built.
|
| This reads just like AI slop: I am applying for a government
| advisor position. Can you please write me a short paragraph
| linking the work experience listed in my resume with the
| position?
| Surac wrote:
| Maybe he doesn't like to be the next Maduro dragged out of bed at
| night by marines. So he complies to everything Trump wants him to
| say?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > not just those with PhDs and college degrees.
|
| Don't worry, soon they'll earn as much as those without PhDs and
| college degrees thanks to LLM overlords. What an absolute clown.
| codegeek wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. Nvidia literally has offices all over
| the world including India (a country that gets the most flak for
| offshoring). So why now ? Suddenly, "offshoring bad" ? I don't
| buy it. I think it is more about AI data centers. I could be
| wrong.
| scotty79 wrote:
| He's just lying because he's expected to.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Just because everyone is doing something to be competitive
| doesn't mean they like it or think it's a good thing long term.
|
| A fair number of the executives who shipped the jobs overseas
| 10-40yr ago lamented that the numbers simply didn't make sense
| any other way.
| dangus wrote:
| Of course "the numbers didn't make sense" could just mean "we
| wanted to make $4 billion in profit instead of $3 billion in
| profit."
|
| Racing to the bottom, essentially.
|
| Corporations control congress, if they really lamented
| offshoring they would have done something about it.
| blitzar wrote:
| Raise the drawbridge
| Rzor wrote:
| Either political posturing, or he sees the United States
| beginning to rapidly accelerate ($$$) certain sectors or
| companies as part of a strategic development effort, much like
| China often does. Possibly a mix of both.
| poplarsol wrote:
| That's all well and good, but he is literally at this moment
| attempting to export industrial capacity to China at a direct
| tradeoff to it's availability to the US, even when he could sell
| it at the same price.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| "Corporate welfare recipients that got free money to build data
| centers, testing the water on asking for more free money to hire
| employees."
|
| The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs
| hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will
| take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.
| khuey wrote:
| I used to agree with this (at least the headline), but then I
| lived through the Biden administration.
|
| Fundamentally Americans want to consume more services and
| especially goods than the people living in America produce. The
| only ways to square that circle are
|
| 1. To get more people. But by 2024 prime age labor force
| participation was at essentially record numbers[0] so there
| aren't more people available domestically, and we saw in the
| election that swing voters are not fans of mass unskilled
| immigration.
|
| 2. To produce more with the same people (i.e. increase
| productivity). But in most cases this is up to technological
| advancement and not in the hands of policymakers. There are
| probably some sectors that could benefit from deregulation (e.g.
| construction) but those regulations have their own constituencies
| that don't want to see them go.
|
| 3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters
| _hate_ this.
|
| 4. To import more from abroad.
|
| In the end "offshoring" is the only politically viable option.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
| logicchains wrote:
| >3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters
| hate this.
|
| Inflation from immigration/offshoring restrictions is not
| evenly distributed. It's essentially a purchasing power
| transfer from everyone else to low-skilled workers (who no
| longer face competition from cheaper overseas labor, so have
| more bargaining power and hence can demand higher wages from
| society).
| khuey wrote:
| I generally agree with that, but that makes the politics of
| it even worse because the benefits accrue to the people with
| the least political power.
| cryptica wrote:
| Outsourcing manufacturing was very short-sighted in light of the
| automation which was taking place and accelerating.
|
| No doubt this short-sightedness was the result of our debt-based
| monetary system. The disconnection of money from long term value-
| creation created a cycle of speculative booms and busts which
| made short term bets the most viable strategy to ensure that
| execs would get their bonuses.
|
| Also, the perverse legal concepts of 'corporate personhood' and
| 'limited liability' sealed our fate, ensuring that companies
| could pollute our land and water with chemicals... China was all
| too happy to send children's toys full of phthalates and other
| endocrine disruptors our way, ensuring that the next generation
| would be pacified and struggling with hormone-related issues (I
| leave you to infer cultural implications...)
|
| Seems like China got their revenge for the Opium wars!
| intended wrote:
| Sadly, even the offshoring centers are losing to automation. I've
| personally seen even modest tools automate away 10s of jobs in a
| factory in the 2010s in India. Cutting, Punching, bending and
| moving metal sheets just done by 1 machine.
|
| Today We have lights out manufacturing.
|
| One thing I would highlight, is that the issue with offshoring
| wasn't the loss of jobs as much as it was underemployment.
|
| Going from factory foreman to burger flipper is what hollowed out
| that class of workers.
|
| The Root cause failure for the offshoring model for the
| offshoring nation is retraining difficulty.
|
| If people could be magically retrained into new roles, then
| offshoring would always work.
| cmxch wrote:
| At this point, just cut checks from the firms that got us in
| this mess.
|
| Don't bother retraining, just make people financially whole at
| the cost of those who offshored/outsourced.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You exploited underpaid labor or the globe for the benefit of
| yourself and American customer. Minority of Americans are
| workers, but all are customers. You did well.
| NoSalt wrote:
| And in other news ... water is wet.
| Havoc wrote:
| Remind me where does NVIDIA assemble their cards?
| ta9000 wrote:
| Remind me where Nvidia's products have been built, basically
| forever?
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| There's a huge downside to manufacturing and that is pollution.
|
| IMO, I'd rather china be the economic super power and the US
| leeching off that technological progress and manufacturing the
| same way say Scandinavia or most of Europe currently does.
|
| Those Europeans get 2 months off while china and the US duke it
| out and they get all the technological benefits with no
| downsides. It's genius.
|
| Everyone talks about the US being number one, but no one wants to
| put in the effort. You all want to sacrifice work life balance
| and give up those remote jobs to push the US back to the top?
| Thats what it takes.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| The problem is that nothing really stops people from going up
| the ladder. You mention leeching off technological progress but
| the reason some are concerned is because they will simply
| conquer the whole supply chain.
|
| Take an example of tesla vs byd. Heck, The electric MI car I
| saw looked so good and nice, its wild
|
| Most of the money I feel like America's still has lots of
| influence is probably from well established tech corporations
| or similar but even those get challenged by leaner companies
| but also that all of them have bought into the hype of AI
|
| America's economy is on such a weak line in my opinion because
| the only thing which stops all hell from breaking loose is that
| stocks are doing good just because of the AI bubble.
|
| When the AI bubble bursts, I have a predication that all hell
| might loose free (I sincerely hope that I am not right though)
|
| Ironic that the thing which would in the end hurt america is
| the company selling hype who is trying to doublespeak itself
| into showing something but being completely different when you
| realize the downstream effects of the AI bubble crashing
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Yeah I'm saying drop the concern for another country
| conquering the supply chain. Let China dominate.
|
| Europe is unconcerned. And they benefit from that. I mean
| real benefits like work life balance not benefits like
| talking points about which country has the bigger dick.
|
| Do you really want America to be number 1 while you're
| slaving away at your job 996 in pollution infested cities?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I agree with what you are saying about Europe being better
| in work life balances etc. in my person opinion as well and
| I admit it so I am just going to write a message about the
| things I have been seen written by Americans in the first
| place/gist of them for the sake of providing a (full
| picture?)
|
| I wouldn't say Europe is unconcerned either. Europe has
| less issues than America because its collective debt feels
| very low compared to America
|
| France recently went into all out stalemate of sorts and in
| countries like UK as well there are some really systemetic
| issues and not vice versa
|
| Namely the most heard is the lack of innovation. People
| (here on HN) have compared Europe to a colloseum, saying
| its stuck in time and that there is a lack of innovation.
|
| The startup culture is disfragmented etc.
|
| There are some real concerns about Europe as well being
| impacted because a huge chunk of jobs were in the
| manufacturing business (think cars) and with things like
| BYD etc., Europeans themselves are worried about being able
| to compete with their price.
|
| the point being that Europe has some concerns as well and
| they stem from their decision. The regulations make
| businesses genuinely hard to start.
|
| (Note that I still believe that Europe is really good
| compared to America in a lot of genuine metrics in my
| opinion as well but then again, its not really a fair
| discussion if we don't discuss both sides of the coin)
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| If the metric is happiness, Europe wins.
|
| It's hard to measure this directly but there quantitative
| metrics that correlate. Suicide rates for example,
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/heart-medicine-
| for-a...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Do you think Europe will be able to benefit from this
| forever if current trends[1] continue? I'm not so sure.
|
| [1] https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-
| economic-...
| lanthissa wrote:
| the us is 16% of global manufacturing by value with 4% of the
| population, i dont know how this fact isn't brought up more.
|
| on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value
| than china.
|
| A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of
| world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the
| world was ash.
| wvenable wrote:
| Also US unemployment has been low. The idea that Americans need
| more jobs just doesn't fit the numbers. There are plenty of
| good paying non-backbreaking jobs for Americans but they just
| don't seem to believe it.
| pepperball wrote:
| > There are plenty of good paying non-backbreaking jobs for
| Americans but they just don't seem to believe it.
|
| Where at?
| lanthissa wrote:
| you can get a job as a long haul truck driver in texas with
| no education and paid for training paying 80-100k and live
| in an area where houses cost 300k, within 5 years starting
| from zero with no education you can own a home and have a
| nest egg big enough to become an owner operator or invest
| in a small business.
|
| so thats the floor for anyone willing to put in a few years
| of work.
| 9rx wrote:
| It says non-backbreaking. Truck driving is one of the
| highest risk jobs towards one's back.
| 9rx wrote:
| Also, US manufacturing already struggles to find workers.
|
| The problem, though, is that 70% of US manufacturing happens
| in small town/rural areas, which is not where the people
| looking for jobs are found, so you get this curious
| disconnect.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Whilst this is true, there is some distortion to that statement
| with measuring by value. If I produce a screw for the US
| military (a scenario where supply chains are highly regulated
| and thus may be unable to buy cheap from a foreign country) and
| sell it for $1, I have produced a dollar of manufacturing by
| value, but If I produce exactly the same product in China for
| $0.1, I've only made 10 cents by value, despite the fact I have
| made exactly the same product.
|
| There is a reason why for instance ships and raw materials
| output is measured in tonnage, since that is the actual thing
| produced, the value is secondary to that. That is you would
| want to measure the actual amount of goods produced rather than
| what they sold for, obviously only amongst comparable
| categories.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The counter point here is that the US and EU have benefited with
| a lot of economic growth in the past few decades. The fact that
| this growth effect has now run its course just means that things
| may need to change again and that old assumptions may need to re-
| evaluated. Which might include looking at strategies to re-shore.
|
| Not because off shoring was a mistake 40-50 years ago; but
| because technology now enables automating a lot of the type of
| jobs that we off shored. I'm referring to robotics and and other
| innovations in manufacturing and assembly that reduces the amount
| of cheap labor needed and calls for higher skilled labor that the
| west can still provide.
|
| The higher cost of skilled labor can be offset against the also
| substantial cost of shipping. A typical car from China costs
| between 1-2K $ to transport. And that's of course before tariffs.
| Also shipping is slow and building locally means faster delivery
| of custom orders, which is another thing enabled by modern
| manufacturing technology. There are many valid reasons to re-
| shore and re-thinking supply chains.
|
| The Chinese are moving ahead applying the same kind of
| technologies in e.g. automotive than many other manufacturers
| with the exception of maybe relatively new companies like Tesla
| and Rivian that have embraced a software intensive approach to
| cars already. And that includes spinning up BYD plants on
| different continents. Compared to a BYD factory, GM and Ford look
| like they have a bit of catching up to do. Their lack of
| competitiveness on the international market has a lot to do with
| the fact that they failed to modernize their businesses. Also,
| they seem to be repeating their mistake of the nineteen eighties
| when the Japanese kicked their behinds with better cars and more
| modern manufacturing. Their reflex to blame the Japanese,
| Koreans, Chinese (or whomever) for their own failings is not a
| great one. It's going to yield the same result unless they
| change.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| What growth?
|
| A bunch of assholes in offices (edit: and a handful of C-suite
| above them of course) got rich on RSUs at the expense of the
| entire rest of the economy. The factory shut down and all those
| workers are getting screwed driving for some gig service or
| order picking for ecommerce or whatever.
|
| Number go up only matters if the number going up is strongly
| associated with things getting better.
|
| And it didn't even necessarily get better for the asshole in
| the office. A few of them won but most of them can't afford to
| live within an hour of where he works, have a family, etc, etc.
|
| Whole lot of good it did us.
| pepperball wrote:
| > What growth?
|
| You can get $15/h jobs and cheap, giant spyware TV's now. Are
| you not impressed with your bread and circuses?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I do think that we have built ourselves the perfect circus.
| An Elaborate labyrinth of internet doom scrolling for many
| which is hard to get out of.
|
| Real change feels out of the way so of course people forget
| that that they are capable of change in the first place.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The 2-3%/year economic growth that has been common since the
| 1980s. People getting rich is nothing new. You can go back 50
| years, 100 years, 150 years, etc. and find the same kind of
| debates.
|
| The difference is that people work less than ever and obesity
| is now a sign of poverty rather than wealth. Depression era
| US had people actually starving. The relative wealth of the
| middle class in the sixties and seventies is something you
| might rightfully mourn a little. But even then, there was a
| lot of poverty.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This is the "but iPhones and avocado toast" argument.
|
| Calories and consumer goods are cheaper than ever. Housing,
| education and healthcare are more expensive than they've
| ever been. There has been a marked decrease in the amount
| of personal and economic autonomy available to the middle
| class and below over the past 40yr. Look at how medium
| skill level workers lived in the 1980s. It's basically a
| foreign country compared to today.
|
| Having a robot vacuum to smear your dog's shit all around
| doesn't actually make you wealthier if you can't afford a
| house for the dog to shit in and apartments don't allow
| dogs.
|
| What people want is a comfortable and fulfilling life, both
| of which are assessed on a relative basis. The modern
| economy has given them a rat race and shitty highs and they
| know it. Happy pills don't make depressed people happy.
| They just make them not depressed.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| What people want never existed. You always find people
| that want more. But the same apartment that currently
| houses a couple of people used to house entire families.
| And it wouldn't have had a lot of the comforts people
| take for granted these days.
|
| What you describe are first world problems.
| gadders wrote:
| Makes sense. There is no real functional difference though
| between offshoring a job, or importing cheap (H1B or other)
| labour to do it in the home country.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Globalism was also a big factor in world peace overall.
| cmxch wrote:
| Easiest way to do it is to financially and legally cut off all
| avenues to offshore and outsource.
|
| Then make it litigative open season for any affected or displaced
| person to court mandate a near-blank check to make up for the
| generational contempt of US citizens.
| samiv wrote:
| As long as you have power structures in place in society where
| labor is weak and capital class is strong the capital class is
| going to use all their wealth and power to extract everything
| they can from the rest of the society.
|
| Regardless of whether you bring or do not bring manufacturing
| back you also have to fix these socioeconomic issues before all
| can prosper.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Founder of American AI company believes AI infrastructure should
| be built in America.
|
| Let's see what the United States Secretary of Commerce has to say
| regarding onshore manufacturing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUXedYX7aE&t=17s
| booleandilemma wrote:
| No kidding. We need to abolish the H-1B too. What a disgrace that
| is.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I'm sure Jensen Huang is diligently thinking about serving his
| country every day.
| windowliker wrote:
| Taiwan?
| stillworks wrote:
| Do we (or someone better informed) understand the impact of re-
| shoring ?
|
| In my mind, the reason (or the original intent) for off-shoring
| was to reduce costs to be able to sell more X (because cheaper is
| easier to sell) and selling more X means more profit and better
| market capitalisation (if the company selling X was public)
|
| If re-shoring is adopted, my assumption/understanding is that X
| will retail at a higher price. Oversimplification maybe, but
| higher retail price means lower sales means lower profit (means
| lower stock price if the company selling X was public)
|
| The solution to that would be higher/more automation i.e. less
| (or minimal) manufacturing related jobs I think ?
|
| And now the situation would be that while there was capital-
| return-to-shore happening but went into automation and the jobs
| recovery was not what someone would have expected (both in terms
| of scale and skill)
|
| But because the jobs were virtually re-shored the off shore
| labour market now suffers ?
|
| Thoughts... ?
| mkl95 wrote:
| Could a company other than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
| Company manufacture the chips that Nvidia products are made of,
| and could that happen in America? The answer is yes to both. But
| if Nvidia attempted it today, it would be doomed. Jensen knows
| that sometimes it's more convenient to be Jen-Hsun.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Jensen wants power and resources for his data centers big news
| filloooo wrote:
| I think people are ignoring the reciprocity in the global trading
| system.
|
| People and news articles always talk about goods trade deficits
| for rich countries, but never their almost universal services
| trade surpluses, and the profit margins are vastly different.
|
| For manufacturing, a large part of the revenue goes to materials
| costs, but for services, almost all of it are net incomes.
|
| Yes you can bring back manufacturing jobs, but your services
| surpluses would also shrink, because when you don't open your
| market, countries were not obligated to let you reap profits
| there too.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Similar things can be said about LLMs replacing jobs. I'm all for
| governments regulating such changes, but at best they can only
| slow things down.
|
| But that said, there is a balance to be had. Ultimately, quality
| of goods and services, and the competitiveness of the country as
| a whole must take priority. Not jobs. The whole idea of creating
| jobs for the sake of creating jobs is perverse. It doesn't help
| anyone and harms the public in the long term. If we want a way to
| give people income, UBI or similar welfare-like approaches make
| sense. They might even be more profitable in the long-run.
|
| With offshoring, has the quality of software gone up or down? If
| it has gone down, then these companies are harming the country.
| If they can improve quality by offshoring, then so be it. That
| only means whatever we're doing isn't working in terms of
| generating quality software, and we need to fix that. But I think
| it is a bit more nuanced, offshoring to certain countries tends
| to have higher quality than others, so that should be taken into
| account.
|
| My wish is that we all (not just the US) go back to the 50's and
| 60's space-race era mindset of competitive innovation. I think
| (and I hope it isn't too controversial to say) that culturally
| we've been abandoning nationalism and nationalistic-pride, these
| were the drivers back then. Whether it was Nazi germans, USSR
| scientists, NASA scientists, bell labs,etc.. there was a strong
| sense of country/nation and that our work was contributing to
| that, that something we're building as a collective that will be
| our legacy to be passed on to the next generation.
|
| The offshoring and general enshittification culture today is not
| that. It's Reaganism turned pandemic. The only thing that matters
| it the thickness of the shareholder's wallet. What I expect from
| governments is to take a bi-partisan approach to this, we need
| some sort of nationalistic pride to get us back on track. With EU
| for example, I can see a sense of European identity and choesion
| being formed now that the US is turning more and more hostile
| towards the EU. In the cold-war era, we had russia to unite us.
| Now, we're more concerned about other americans in the US than we
| are about China or Russia, our sense of partisan/sub-culture
| identity is much stronger than the national identity, there is no
| expectation or pressure from the government or the public for
| companies to work in the best interests of the country. At best
| we expect them to be proxies for welfare programs.
|
| In other words, whether it is LLMs or offshoring, we should
| expect them to not do that because the alternative is better. The
| educated workforce in the US is not looking good,it's pretty
| dismal. Even the population attending college has gone down
| dramatically. Companies like TSMC struggle big time when trying
| to open plants in the US because there is no talent here. From
| what I hear from teachers all over, the post-covid situation is
| very scary, it is perhaps more concerning than anything else for
| the future sustainability of the US as a country.
|
| I agree that we've done a great disservice to the country by
| offshoring, but only in part, only in cases where the quality of
| the work was poor. For example,I reckon (and i could be wrong)
| there are more developers and with better talent per-capita (not
| by volume) in certain western-european countries than the US.
| Even in India, for a long time there was this bias that
| outsourced talent there is of lesser quality, but over the
| decades I thing things have improved - but you do get what you
| pay for. My point is, coupled with this sentiment should be how
| we've also done a great disservice to the country by screwing up
| education, government and a several other things. It isn't just
| offshoring, there is a more fundamental mindset that is corrosive
| and must be addressed.
| sharadov wrote:
| STFU Jensen, why don't you stop making circular deals and build a
| Fab with the 5 trillion dollars that you have - rather than
| having TSMC and Samsung make them?
|
| Put your money where your mouth is!
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| "We?"... how insulting.
|
| I've noticed again and again what's missing from the often
| repeated by media blame game of "they're taking our jobs" is the
| fact that it was US corporations purposefully offshoring in the
| name of maximising profits at the expense of paying US wages
| locally, rather than countries "stealing" the jobs ffs! It's.
| Pure. Xenophobic. Deflection. FFS!
|
| "They're stealing our jobs!". No... corporate America applied the
| Ferengi Rules of Aquisition #6 to whole industries for a quick
| buck.
| topspin wrote:
| Andrew Grove, in his later years, held the same view. He
| explained essentially everything we had seen till then and since:
| the decline of US semiconductor manufacturing, the loss of
| talent, critical dependence on foreign nations and companies,
| etc.
|
| It turns out you can't cherry pick the intellectual work and fob
| the rest off on foreign supply and still maintain global
| leadership and domestic prosperity. The whole stack must be at
| least competitive domestically. Only trade policy can achieve
| this.
| t43562 wrote:
| You cannot replicate the situation where the US was the workshop
| of the world at a time when other major industrial powers had
| been smashed by war...unless you try to smash them or encourage
| them to have a war....
|
| Other countries develop and need less of the basic products that
| they can begin to make for themselves, they create trade blocs
| where they can begin to achieve scale greater than the US or they
| simply are bigger anyhow. If the US can substitute imports then
| so can they.
|
| IMO the US has ridden the wave because that was the only sensible
| thing to do and it has stayed rich as a result. Adjustments may
| be needed - it's not safe to not be able to make fairly modern
| chips - but the whole world will get poorer if one splits it up
| and prevents scaling.
|
| What to do now...well....
| tharmas wrote:
| The $US as world's reserve currency played a big part in why
| manufacturing was offshored. As manufacturing processes mature
| they move to the periphery. Because of the reserve currency
| status of the $US, this periphery meant outside the United
| States.
|
| The periphery got the jobs and the US Elite got the $$$'s. What
| should've happened though was the Elites should've invested their
| cash into in technologies. Sure they did to some extent (NVIDIA
| is an example) but mostly what they did was pile their money into
| fixed assets, hence the inflation (e.g. housing) we have today.
|
| The Blame lies with the Investment class elites, the Bankers, and
| the Donor Controlled politicians. Washington D.C. (Donor
| Controlled).
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| What's missing from these conversations are the cost of living.
|
| We've financialized the housing market, meaning the very basic
| needs of shelter now rises in price in accordance to the market.
| If tech workers make 2x or 3x the median annual salary, it makes
| housing prices rise for everybody else in the city.
|
| In order to pay a "living wage" employers have to pay enough for
| their workers to make rent and groceries. In america, one of the
| highest GDP per capita in the world, the "living wage" is
| somewhere between 3x to 10x the offshore salary.
|
| If you could house millions of people at the bare minimum cost,
| if you could provide them food and healthcare at prices that
| aren't inflated, then the living wage doesn't need to be so high.
|
| We talk a lot about raising the minimum wage. What about lowering
| the minimum costs? That would mean a less stressful life for
| workers and cheaper labor for employers.
| nickff wrote:
| The financialized housing market is only a symptom of the over-
| regulation (through zoning and permitting) of housing,
| construction, and real estate in general. This over-regulation
| is itself a microcosm of the petrification of the majority of
| the economy.
| deliciousturkey wrote:
| Traditionally, economy are typically divided into three sectors:
| Agriculture, industry, and services. Service industry contains
| everything from nursing to software development and sales. The
| problem with this division is that there is an extreme
| productivity gap within work in the service industry. A software
| developer's work can serve 100 million people at a time, when a
| nurse can only serve one customer at one specific time.
|
| The reason why highly developed economies have become so service
| driven is because they have become sort of bimodal: The cost of
| labor is such that only jobs that are productive enough
| (profitability per hour) are done in these countries, and jobs
| that absolutely have to be done there to sustain the population.
| Jobs in the middle, everything that is not highly profitable or
| location-dependent, is offshored to lower-cost countries due to
| the cost of labor. This results in these developed countries
| having issues: Cost of living is high due to labor cost and
| there's high economic inequality due to wildly differing
| productivity.
|
| The solution would be to bring these "mid-productivity" jobs back
| to developed countries. However, the main roadblocks still
| remain: The cost of labor is too expensive for most of these jobs
| to be competitive globally. However, I think there might be a way
| to do this in the near future: Advancements in robotics would
| mean a higher level of automation for industrial work, meaning
| more industrial jobs would become viable in high-cost countries.
| Each worker would be productive enough that the cost of labor is
| not critical anymore.
|
| To make this happen, I believe it's important to ensure that the
| country is viable for this kind of manufacturing: Energy supply
| needs to be abundant and cheap, workforce needs to be educated,
| outside the "elite" students, and there needs to be low trade
| barriers. Low trade barriers are needed, because virtually all
| manufacturing is part of a global supply chain where parts cross
| many borders before the product is sold (and (high-value)
| products are sold globally). Additionally, the viability of
| automation will vary between different parts of the supply chain,
| and so you likely cannot automate everything.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > The largest segment of the economy is manufacturing. And we've
| offshored that for too long. For 20 years. We got to bring that
| back.
|
| Lie. The largest sector is Services at 70%. Besides, if it were
| the largest how can you also say it is offshored and needs to be
| brought back?
| publicompute wrote:
| Every country, or coalition of countries, need to have public
| manufacturing run by their respective governments where their
| main purpose is to raise the bar on product quality, r&d, and
| employee care.
|
| Let the private sector battle it out in their race to the bottom
| on everything, but ensure there is an ethical and trustworthy
| alternative to create the necessary competition in the
| marketplace to secure progress, both technological _and_ social,
| over stagnation and eventual necrosis.
|
| This is part of that "national security" we hear so many go on
| about when defending their policies of hate.
| lgleason wrote:
| The political dance of NVIDIA:
|
| 1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of
| incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good
| game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a
| small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are
| here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to
| spend more on offshoring.
| gaoshan wrote:
| If maximizing profits is the primary thing that matters (and in
| the US, amongst other places, it is) then nothing will change
| about this. It's also why unions are so opposed by certain groups
| and it's why we have such an obscene wealth imbalance.
| Shareholders and profits matter more than people.
|
| Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it well when he said, "when
| machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are
| considered more important than people, the giant triplets of
| racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being
| conquered,"
| legitster wrote:
| There are three things that I think go underrated about America's
| manufacturing problems:
|
| 1. A lot of industries offshored simply because the owners of the
| facilities just sold and shipped off rare/expensive/important
| equipment to other countries without a second thought. Especially
| tool and die equipment. So a lot of industries in countries like
| Korea and China or India literally use the exact same equipment
| we used 80+ years ago. Even if we wanted these jobs back, the
| countries & businesses in question are too smart to ever sell the
| equipment back at nearly any price (why we can't manufacture them
| again is a whole other problem).
|
| 2. As Jensen alludes here, the cost of energy in the US dropped
| through the 60s but then flatlined. We became too dependent on
| fossil fuel and "comfortable enough" consumer prices. But the
| energy intensive heavy industry all moved to places with nuclear
| power or heavily subsidized power sectors.
|
| 3. The lack of any sort of public welfare solution is a
| distinctly American industrial policy failure. Manufacturing
| depends on labor force flexibility - both in finding the right
| people for jobs, as well as just dealing with stop-and-go or
| seasonal work. But Americans having their healthcare and
| retirement tied to their jobs and full employment is a huge boat
| anchor on both the workforce and industry.
| ongytenes wrote:
| Hmm Could Jensen's statement be motivated that by forcing
| companies to build AI infrastructure would ensure more of his
| Nvidia AI chips to be sold? I keep seeing him say things that
| makes him appear bias towards more sales. Like dismissing any
| possibility that an AI bubble is growing. To admit the
| possibility may hurt sales.
| paxys wrote:
| "If only we could find the people responsible for this" -
| American CEOs
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