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Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#91

Post by jdmichal »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #66
no1youknowz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house. There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by…

> There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. One of my clients is one of the largest multinational corp. in the world. They're excellent at getting things done, above average at remote work, and obviously have offices around the world. Their primary industry has a drastically changing demographic in the US which is p…

And who will buy all the neat gadgets that they're producing? It won't be the US; no middle class means no disposable income. It won't be the Chinese; they make everything in house. It probably won't be anyone else in Asia because they'll just buy it from China instead.

Devastation of the middle class is about equivalent to devastation of the entire US economy. After we've willingly and successfully transferred all our manufacturing and engineering knowledge and processes to other countries... The only playing chip the US will have left is food exports.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#92

Post by xaa »

dmix wrote: post #38
pm90 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. From a long term perspective, its absolutely amazing that the US has managed to export all the factory level jobs to other countries and yet managed to keep the better paying jobs back here in the states. The current lack of (low skilled) jobs in manufacturing has made it clear to those Americans willing to listen: t…

> American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow This is an important and underrated idea that so often gets lost thanks to politics. Much like the drug war, people think that market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled - people can simply just choose not to make that c…

> market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled

This double standard galls me. If a trend is detrimental to American workers, it's market trends, like the hand of God, irresistible. If it's beneficial, it's a historical fluke (post-WWII boom).

I might buy this if the U.S. government had been a neutral bystander in this process of globalization and the hollowing out of the middle class. In that case, we could say that it was just economics. But, in reality, the government:

- Incentivizes and fails to do anything about offshore tax havens

- Doesn't bust trusts

- Has low tax rates on capital

- Sets immigration and trade laws favorable to corporations

- Spends tons of money on pork, including the porkiest pork of them all, the military

and so on, ad infinitum. Would this process have happened anyway? Maybe. But our government, and the companies running it, actively accelerated it in every way they could. If these trends can't be controlled to some extent, why have so many lobbying dollars been spent to accelerate them?

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#93

Post by georgeecollins »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #9

> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” In that interview he also said that the jobs weren't coming back. This is one of the most powerful statements uttered on American labor and employment trends in recent memory. I have shared thi…

I didn't see the show so I don't know how big the room was. But I think it is an exaggeration to say you can fit all the tool & due makers in the US into one room. If you live in a major city, try googling how many companies around you advertise their machining operations as Tool & Die. This is not including all the engineers and artists who have most of the skills required, if not the experience. That's not saying they want to work in your factory, which is another part of the problem. People who have those skills in the US probably don't want the job. People who want the job don't have the skills, partly because the job that would have trained them wasn't available.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#94

Post by holly2 »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #9

> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” In that interview he also said that the jobs weren't coming back. This is one of the most powerful statements uttered on American labor and employment trends in recent memory. I have shared thi…

China has used more concrete in the last two year than what the US has used in the last hundred. That was from a Nial Fergusun, Samantha Powers talk recently. Bottom line there is global power rebalancing occurring that is going to take a decade or two.

The US middle class had it good for a while now, but it's time they loose some weight, stop buying all the unnecessary garbage they think they need and live a little like the middle class of the rest of the world. In a globalized world you can't have different definitions of middle class depending on where a border gets drawn. The rest of the world is also learning as they mindlessly try to emulate the American middle class, that there is no free lunch. They need their source of exploitable cheap labour too and it's creating all kinds of internal social upheaval across many different country.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#96

Post by datatan »

CPLX wrote: post #78
nickik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who make argument like yours simple sound like "ignore problem, everything will be fine". A company that does not move to cheaper labour will go bankroupt and a new all China company will simply take over. So you have unemployed anyway. The typical solution to this is that you start walling of these industries with tarrifs or to subsides. What you eventually have is a huge sector of the US economy that liv…

Not really. Germany and Switzerland have managed to maintain high wages and high standards of living in a globally competitive manufacturing sector. The idea that all this change is inevitable or impossible to avoid and we can't pay workers properly is just bullshit, it's the messaging of a multi-decade well financed public relations effort by people in the U.S. with a vested interest in making the public believe it.

Worse, they say this while giving them selves multi-million dollar salaries and stock bonuses worth billions. It's outrageous. We're told we're replacable, that theirs third worlders that can do what we do for less but somehow the executive is a unique snowflake worth billions of dollars.

I watch VP's get million dollar bonuses while laying off workers. I watch execs outsource whole departments, watch quality tank, and they get millions.

The center can not hold. It will come crashing down.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#97

Post by k-mcgrady »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #9

> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” In that interview he also said that the jobs weren't coming back. This is one of the most powerful statements uttered on American labor and employment trends in recent memory. I have shared thi…

>> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker.

This doesn't make sense to me. That one bad aspect of it does not negate all of the good that has also come from it. I would argue that the people affected by this (a lot of the people Trump appealed to - for example coal workers) weren't let down by globalization but by their government. They should have been retrained, for free, by the government. Instead, they were forgotten about.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#98

Post by DougWebb »

colordrops wrote: post #70
david-cako wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the answer? Protectionism? That's the thing I don't get, so many people will advocate "fewer regulations", yet are perfectly content with prohibitive tariffs from the place that allows people living in section 8 to afford iPhones. You're 100% right, but i just don't see a good answer other than coming to terms with the fact that cheap labour overseas and automation WILL back us into UBI in the very near future…

> protectionism Why not? It works for so many other countries. Is it not a fundamental characteristic of government to prioritize its citizens over others? Without that, we've got a de facto world government with dissolved borders but that only benefits the rich and powerful. If we truly want to give equal rights and privileges to everyone on Earth we should make global governance explicit to make sure the poor and d…

Protectionism only works when two things are true: - Other countries can't produce the product better than your country can - Other countries can't sell the product to markets besides yours

If we were to enact a tariff on foreign-made smartphones that was so high that they couldn't compete with domestically-made smartphones, the smartphone manufacturers in China and the rest of the far east would just sell their phones across the rest of the world, where they would out-compete our phones on price (initially). Our domestic manufacturers would have a smaller market and less access to materials and technical advancements, causing our phones to become inferior in quality as well as overpriced. And that would eventually hurt our people and our entire economy as well, because we won't be able to enjoy the technological advancements and lower-cost goods that the rest of the world is benefiting from.

The Soviet Union used to have a pretty self-contained, very protectionist economy, and the low-quality of their goods was a standing joke in the US for decades. That's what protectionism gets you if you're not the sole manufacturer or sole market for a product.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#99

Post by dmitrygr »

a-fake-account wrote: post #39
no1youknowz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house. There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by…

Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine. I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.

Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.

Re: Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S

#100

Post by zzzeek »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #9

> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” In that interview he also said that the jobs weren't coming back. This is one of the most powerful statements uttered on American labor and employment trends in recent memory. I have shared thi…

To be fair, the theory of globalism includes that by exposing developing nations to the global economy and working towards treaties and agreements that require their work environments to meet certain standards, the worker populations in those countries would eventually be more wealthy and have wages more comparable to that of a fully developed nation.

Clearly it's not that simple, but globalism does attempt to accommodate for this problem at least in theory.

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