131–140 of 288 posts
Or, to put this into perspective, that 1/250th of their cash on hand. http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/02/investing/apple-cash-quarter...
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> What's the answer? Protectionism? If you have the means, invest with the wealth makers. I'd buy into SPY or FANG and let these CEOs do the work for me while I relocate to a low CoL location. Does it scale? Probably not. I honestly can't think of any other way to make ends meet one my skills become moot.
What skills of yours do you think could become moot?
My only truly innate talent is my ability to cogently communicate with my local peers better than someone who lives elsewhere. Even that is becoming irrelevant because global companies are homogenizing business communication styles.
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But it's not completely a labor play. Some of it is to skirt environmental protections. I'm not going to assume, but if you consider yourself both a globalist and an environmentalist, how do you personally resolve those two beliefs? Anyone reading this who does, how do you resolve those beliefs? I can vote for all the environmental protections that I want, but what good does that do if it just forces companies to man…
The answer is not very hard. People like to attribute everything to regulation but the reality is that most parts of living standards improve when incomes grows. As China becomes richer they will go threw the same stuff that Britain and later the US did. Maybe I don't fit the bill as 'envoirmentalist' but I like to live in a place and country with a clean envoirment. China will have to fix its own problems, and Im su…
Unemployment in the US.
Globalism sounds great.
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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…
Just doing the numbers from a stat standpoint, assuming you need to be in the top 2 percent of intelligence to code, there is a latent pool of 42 million developers in China/India waiting for their "go" signal. Best thing to do imo is hoard and deploy money to investments, because capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.
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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…
This is the same alarmist outcry that happened in the 90s... "India has a billion people who are educated and cheaper! Outsourcing will kill all the tech jobs!" I think the thing that folks keep missing is that technology isn't a zero sum game. So what if there are a shitload of people in the east doing programming cheaper? 9/10 of the 'type' of programming they're doing is grunt work that no one really wants to do a…
And it will -- as it already ate lots of service and call center jobs. But these things take time, and India's schools are not exactly best of class.
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> 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 proce…
So basically you think the US government has been highly influential in developing 'globalism' and it's not entirely a natural phenomenon as a result of air travel, telecommunications, mature financial markets, lack of global war/conflict, the opening of the east to global markets, etc? Most of the things you mention, poor enforcement of tax havens, immigration policy, low taxes on capital, massive military spending,…
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What, being rational and objective instead of acting on purely egotistical considerations?
I would make the exact opposite argument in fact. I would argue it is entirely irrational to perpetuate this bizarre notion that living in a prosperous nation is some sort of original sin that must be atoned for by self-flagellation. Prosperity is not a finite resource. I believe equilibrium doesn't necessarily have to come at cost to anyone.
whether it's original sin aside (though i do believe it is) where do you see self-flagellation? i'm simply saying i'm okay with china becoming more competitive and market forces taking their natural course.
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> 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 phon…
Manufacture IPhones in China to sell to the rest of the world.
I bet that whats Apple is going to do.
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> 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 proce…
So basically you think the US government has been highly influential in developing 'globalism' and it's not entirely a natural phenomenon as a result of air travel, telecommunications, mature financial markets, lack of global war/conflict, the opening of the east to global markets, etc? Most of the things you mention, poor enforcement of tax havens, immigration policy, low taxes on capital, massive military spending,…
On further thought, you're right about this. I was rather inarticulately trying to remark on the fact that the supposed "inevitability" of market trends is always used as an excuse to avoid pro-labor legislation, but never pro-business legislation.
> I hardly see globalism as something that's detrimental to America as a whole
Well, we're increasingly seeing that there's no such thing as America "as a whole". There's capital, who it's good for, and labor, who it may be good and bad for in various ways, but a net bad, I'd say. Good for your 401K and the cost of your iPhone, not so much for your salary or employment prospects.
If you take "good for GDP" to mean "good for America as a whole", then yeah, it's probably good. Problem is where that GDP growth is going.
> you think the US government has been highly influential in developing 'globalism'
Yes and no. I think the gov't has been highly influential in ensuring the gains from it go to capital and that its negative effects on labor are not reined in. Globalization would have happened anyway but the govt's approach to it has resulted in more inequality and dislocation than was necessary.
As for whether the government could have slowed or did hasten the process, hard to say, but I think so.
+ Advanced manufacturing jobs are done by robots.
+ $1 billion builds one moderately sized manufacturing plant (Tesla's Gigafactory is $5 billion [1])
+ There's a scene Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery I wish the press would review before reporting so breathlessly.