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

washingtonpost.com

191–200 of 288 posts

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

#191

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…

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.

> capital is set up to clean labors clock in the coming decades.

I think this is true, and I think it will result in massive civil unrest. Economic landscape is not the only thing that will change.

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

#192
post #147

> 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…

Since NAFTA and the opening up of China we in the USA have become far richer, in total GDP and per capita. The problem is that the gains have gone disproportionately to the 1%.

I remember clearly during the 80s and 90s that the pro free trade argument from economists was that there would be winners and losers but since we would be richer overall we could use taxes to help out the losers via unemployment, retraining, relocation help, etc.

But what the economists ignored but is so obvious in hindsight is that this country has a strong anti-tax anti-government strain and we refuse to have any social safety net or government assistance. So what we've ended up with are super-winners and millions of permanent losers. And the super-winners are using their wealth to become more politically powerful, increase their propaganda spending and destabilize democracy.

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

#193
post #154
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aren't the top 1% chinese students/teachers aware of the problem and can do something about it ?

The top 1% send their kids to the West, and often move themselves as well.

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

#194
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what exactly is the problem with this? a 50% pay cut is still a fantastic wage (globally relative). what exactly is wrong with the standard of living going up in other places while ours gets a little worse? also if the tech sector really loses half of it earning power the markets that cater to those people will simply deflate. globalization /is/ good in the long run because it brings supply/demand markets to an equil…

This is quite objectively true. Take a 50% paycut but along with that also cut down the cost of living. Something like Germany today, wages are smaller than in US but the costs of living make their citizens happy(er). Then there will be less wage discrepancy compared to China and co and jobs start coming back.

Add in our need to reduce carbon output, locally produced products will have some advantage.

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

#195
post #147

> 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…

Perhaps you ought to take note of consumer debt, cost of education relative to income, cost of housing relative to income, cost of child care, cost of healthcare?

Yea, the country can chug along while population gets ever impoverished and averages can continue looking just peachy as the income gap grows.

I'll just throw in an anecdotal email from the local school district about how they will no longer permit elementary students to purchase lunch if their lunchroom balance is negative. Think about that next time you strut out the "exceptional country" argument.

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

#196

> 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…

But Cook is wrong in saying "the jobs aren't coming back". The situation has been rapidly changing because of automation. Imagine if a clothing company could have new product responding to trends available in a week. Nintendo is currently having difficulty keeping up with the demand for Nintendo Switches, imagine if they could rapidly produce more near their intended markets. Automated small batch production could ev…

> Automated small batch production could even make things like ordering the exact same shirt you bought 10 years ago affordable.

Automated production does not imply that setting up the production line is automated. You can't just reconfigure a production line because you don't have machinery on standby (these would be dead assets in the 10 MM range). High precision molds used for Lego, for example, are in the 250000 EUR range. You don't have these laying around and cannot order special tools with a lead time of less that a quarter year.

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

#197
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's not as cut and dried as your last paragraph suggests. It was the libertarians and liberal economic establishment who claimed it was cut and dried that unrestricted free trade was better for all Americans. Anyone who objected (Buchanan, Perot, now Trump) was obviously stupid, and probably racist.

No economist makes the argument that free trade is better for all americans. Thats simply not what economic theory says. Economist have studid the problem for a long time and the wastly overwhelming majority still support it. They have actually fought about the problem quite a bit. You would do well to actually understand the argument instead of mischaracterising it.

While agree with you - it was always noted in the fine print that there would be losers in the globalization game - it just wasn't stated that 95% of us would lose, while .1% would win bigly.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of us thought that economic indicators would make it hard for the republicans to make the case that things were bad and they could make things good but we forgot unfortunately that perception is all and the actual numbers don't mean anything. Under 5% unemployment doesn't mean anything if you can find enough salt-of-the-earth middle class white people who are struggling, because that is enough to convin…

But the policies of this administration and the Republican Capitol Hill have been the opposite of what you describe. They've stayed away from a strong protectionist turn so far. And they're definitely not enacting policies to address income inequality... the healthcare bill passed in the House today is quite the opposite. edit - I agree with your point that voter perception matters a lot. But I think the Republicans…

I might not have made my point very clear, I agree with you, its all a big smokescreen and at the end of the day they do what they've always done - cut taxes on the wealthy. The people who felt Trump was a protest vote was really just a vote for the same party and the same results that haven't helped them in decades. Its sad for me because my family (who usually fall for the gun-control fears part of the platform) keep doing the same thing and expecting different results but don't bother to blame the people they've been voting for year after year and instead blame the people that the people they voted for work against year after year.

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

#199
post #139
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> So the dichotomy between historical fluke and market trends doesn't really exist. Historical flukes are market trends. 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 detri…

> 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.

This is most certainly true. And I think dmix hit on a very important point when he mentioned that its hard for politicians to sell a future thats not all rosy and prosperous for everyone.

Off the bat, one of the things the US Govt. could most certainly have done is provide Universal Healthcare and some kind of funding for expanding basic education. I think about all that money earned by US corporations lying abroad...if you think about it, if we had a better taxation system, the strength of US corporations, their ability to generate such profits from around the globe could have been deployed to make all (or most) Americans have better healthcare and education.

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