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

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

#141

Post by silverbax88 » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

thevtm wrote: post #133

nickik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Polution and slave labour in China. Unemployment in the US. Globalism sounds great.

Globalism is, and will continue to, happen no matter what the US does. The US needs to figure out how to make it work for the long term. Protectionism won't work. You might as well be a cooper or haberdasher trying to pass laws to keep people using barrels and hats.

People keep trying to either spin globalism as evil or good, but it's neither. It's just something that was going to happen no matter what. The US does not have a say in whether it happens. If the US doesn't figure out a way to make it work for them, then they'll be replaced by whichever country does.

The answer is not passing laws for tariffs or thinking the US can race to the bottom with low wages and manufacturing. The world desperately needs advanced technology and medicine, and the US should be focused on that, not stupidly trying to compete with literally every other single country on Earth on things any country can produce.

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

#142

Post by notlefthanded » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:40 PM UTC

thevtm wrote: post #138

DougWebb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 US to sell in the US. Manufacture IPhones in China to sell to the rest of the world. I bet that whats Apple is going to do.

That didn't work too well with blackberry in Argentina. It's kind of an extreme case, but there are parallels that can be drawn.

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

#143

Post by bgee » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:46 PM UTC

Akkuma wrote: post #69

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…

I think this is overestimating how qualified the coders are in the east compared to their western peers. Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China. They said the education comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization, and the inability to handle scenarios not covered by that. I'll be more concerned once leading technologies that are used by the rest of the world come o…

> Everyone I've known from Hong Kong decried the education of mainland China.

I'm not surprised such comment came out from someone in Hong Kong but the truth is the education system in Hong Kong is even more "comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization".

Actually, most East Asian education systems have a heavy focus on "book knowledge, so just memorization". Lack of innovation? Just look at Japan.

Disclaimer: I'm from Mainland.

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

#144

Post by arjie » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

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 is just wealth redistribution from the consumers to the suppliers. Most importantly it's wealth redistribution proportional to consumer spending.

So you take less (percentage-wise) from the mega rich than you do from the middle class because large capital doesn't spend a large percent of its capital on consumer goods. That's regressive.

Why don't you go take the money from the rich instead of coming after the middle class? You want the guy who's making $50k a year to pay $200 more for his iPhone and you want the guy making a million a year to do the same. Both of them are only going to own the one iPhone. Straight up regressive.

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

#145

Post by BearGoesChirp » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

david-cako wrote: post #34

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…

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…

>What's the answer? Protectionism?

Fairness. If some major corporation can go somewhere where they pay people $.80 a day for their labor, let me hire people for that amount to do what ever I want. Or we enforce our current laws onto the entire supply chain. Every single person whose labor went to making some product had to be treated a certain legal bare minimum standard.

At least with automation it does largely become available to more people (granted we have to ensure the legal system isn't used to shut it down, such as with the DMCA or the patent system).

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

#146

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by tn135 » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

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.

Lump of Labour fallacy.

The way both Liberals and Conservatives speak as if USA is marred with some wide scale unemployment. It is as if Americans would love to have sweatshops where pregnant women will be working 14 hours a day.

USA continues to enjoy very good employment, better than most developed countries with comparable scale and diversity. People all across the world are flocking to take those US jobs and you have to close the gates to prevent them from coming.

I find the constant self loathing pretty disgusting on part of a country that is home to such exceptional economy.

All those jobs are not coming back and it is a good thing.

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

#148

Post by frgtpsswrdlame » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #56

theptip wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade has certainly fucked _some_ workers. But it helped others; it's just a lot harder to see the ways in which the average American worker is better off, because the benefits of trade are spread across the economy, and the costs are concentrated among a smaller number of individuals. Here's a libertarian making this point: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/does_trade_with.... "Using novel data on firms fr…

That's exactly the right frame. Globalism "totally fucked" the american worker in the sense that the western working class broadly hasn't seen any net improvement in quality of life over the last two decades or so. Certainly nothing to compare with the gains seen in the western professional classes. Globalism also quite literally lifted hundreds of millions of non-western (mostly, not exclusively chinese) workers out…

Every country has it's own citizens as a first priority. If a working-class American is harmed to make an already wealthy american wealthier and to make the 5 Indonesians/Chinese/Africans/etc. that wealthy american hires better off then our country should rise up to reject that.

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

#149

Post by flubert » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

abritinthebay wrote: post #111

flubert wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.” The BLS seems to think there are 72,000 tool and die makers in the U.S.. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm#(1) >I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person…

I think Cook was more talking about representatives from each company - not everyone employed by them. There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China anyhow so, even if you do use that as a metric, the broader point still stands.

>There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China

Do you have a recommendation for a source for employment statistics like that for China? In English? A quick search hasn't turned up much, but there must be something out there like that.

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

#150

Post by ntsplnkv3 » Thu, May 04, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #99

a-fake-account wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me.

If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done.

It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.