I work in a factory. I'm there right now. It's ok
Are the margins as high as people say
It depends on the product, but generally, yeah.
The US is building factories at a fast rate
301–309 of 309 posts
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human population has overshot in 1971[1], what are you talking about? Carrying capacity has long been exceeded, we’re living thanks to the phantom carrying capacity[2]. 1: https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea... 2: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2005-03-06/dependence-pha...
What's with the acerbic attitude? Is this implied to be common knowledge or somehow obvious in the course of life for everyone everywhere?
Sorry if it seemed too bold. It’s obviously not common knowledge yet in this stage of the Collapse.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get that when you live in a forest all you see are trees, but 99% of software companies are not in rather VC markets, nor have VC competitors. There are massive problems that come with "scale" - problems most people don't want. The VC model is all about the exit, whereas, again, 90-something-% of businesses, trades included, are focused on long-term sustainability, not on the "exit". Sure, the VC space us very visi…
My experience is that you are either in/will be in the vc space - or you are in a specialized/regulated industry (finance/health) or you are a consulting firm. Even living outside of SV I don’t see a lot of in between firms.
I guess that's a limit of your experience :)
I'm in a space that doesn't remotely interest VCs, it's not a regulated industry, and we're not a consulting company. Actually we're in 3 such spaces.
I also teach other (working) developers and while some are in health care the vast majority are unregulated.
But to be fair, you've likely never heard of us, or our ilk. We do the boring office software that underpins every boring industry. We're not self-driving cars or exoskeletons, we're data in, data processing, data out.
Our market isn't sexy enough, or wide enough for VCs, we don't need millions of $ anyway, so we've never bothered to ask for it. We do boring things like make a profit, and fund growth out of cash-flow. We hire slowly, and we don't do layoffs.
We have lots of competitors just like us.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is that you are either in/will be in the vc space - or you are in a specialized/regulated industry (finance/health) or you are a consulting firm. Even living outside of SV I don’t see a lot of in between firms.
I guess that's a limit of your experience :) I'm in a space that doesn't remotely interest VCs, it's not a regulated industry, and we're not a consulting company. Actually we're in 3 such spaces. I also teach other (working) developers and while some are in health care the vast majority are unregulated. But to be fair, you've likely never heard of us, or our ilk. We do the boring office software that underpins every…
A good test for me of whether you are a consulting firm is “how many customers do you have?”, “How many of them provide significant revenue?”, “how much work serves only one customer?”
There are many boutique SaaS firms - but if you only have a few customers, the business looks more like an outsourced internal team then an independent concern.
happy to be proven wrong on this point, would give me some ideas for my career :)
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#305There is a mother of all recession happening soon coupled with intense effort to dedollarize. Those factories will end up abandon without recouping their original investments. I have seen how this playout. In the 60s and 50s there were doable because things are cheap and Americans have the Japanese-like ingenuity and innovation. In the 90s, Internet happened and end of cold war. In the 2000s, Chinese supplement worldwide inflations with their cheap goods and students as American human resources together with Indians. In the 2020s USA lost huge chunk of Asian human resources and facing high inflations. Americans still able to hold off due to residue economic growth from Clinton-Bush era. Coming decades they will face immense headwinds with their poorer quality of non Asian immigrants, lack of resources (oil and rare earth no where at Russia level), lack of gold (Fort Knox havnt been publicly audited for more than half century), military weak (Talebans humiliated pentagon and inpending Ukrainian defeat as American sponsored proxy state), population disparity (India+China+Russia+Asean) going to make America looks like 3rd world country population or Monaco at best. Already working in HR fields, I am seeing a lot of capable Americans execs sending their kids to Asia. Some even ditched American citizenships. You can search for extreme end of examples like Severin and Dyson. But those in the "millionaires" range make up the huge bulk of these well to do American leaving western world.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#306The reason all the factories left the US is because of unfair Chinese currency manipulations. The Chinese have pegged the Yuan to the dollar at a rate of 6 to 1. Since the dollar defines unit labor costs, what pegging the Yuan means is a CEO gets 6 Chinese workers for every 1 American worker. It's really like 4 to 1 when you take into account shipping costs for Ocean and Air freight. Other countries do not enjoy most favored currency status. In other countries, the value of the dollar would change if we had a huge trade imbalance which would eventually equalize. But not with China. But pegging the Yuan is only half the problem. The bigger problem is artificial intelligence and automation. With automation, every job becomes menial and corporations can pay less wages. And eventually, corporations will have total automation where workers are no longer needed. But workers are also consumers. And without consumers having money, our economy will collapse. So every year as we move closer to total automation the workers are begin driven closer into poverty. At some point, to prevent total economic collapse, there needs to be a new source of income for consumers. Consumers need to become the new workers doing the hard work of consuming. Consumers need to be paid for consuming is the only answer for ensuring enough economic velocity so everyone has enough money to get their needs met.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
inheritance tax kicks in around 10 million dollars. it doesn't touch the middle class. it touches billionaires who die and leave a hundred million to everyone in their family.
Billionaires have trusts and foundations and lawyer knows what else. It doesn't touch them at all. Also a 700 acre farm, which is an at most medium size family farm, could easily have a nominal value north of 10 mil even though there's no way it's returning 1 million a year net. Same for a modestly profitable small business.
Shouldn't small businesses and farmers plan ahead and create a plan for divesting before they die or purchase life insurance with a payout large enough to cover the taxes at death? It seems like these problems are easily dealt with.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you increased tax receipts you could justify more government building and partnerships or grants. Make those grants pay union scale or require union contracts.
US federal government spending obviously isn’t constrained by tax receipts. You’d think that would be clear in this day and age of consistent trillion dollar annual deficits. Thus spending programs should be judged based on outcomes and not nominal cost. I’m all for a strong middle class. However, I don’t see how an inheritance tax that forces children to sell their parents farm or business to pay estate taxes is sup…
We are constrained by our politics which mean in practical terms that whichever side is out of power pretends to care about deficits. "Free" chunks of money are up for grabs to spend with impunity.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#309There is a mother of all recession happening soon coupled with intense effort to dedollarize. Those factories will end up abandon without recouping their original investments. I have seen how this playout. In the 60s and 50s there were doable because things are cheap and Americans have the Japanese-like ingenuity and innovation. In the 90s, Internet happened and end of cold war. In the 2000s, Chinese supplement world…
Are you sane? Oil-wise, America's proven reserves are around 47 billion barrels and russia's 80 billion. Rare metals? See the news piece about the fairly recent Japanese discovery of a huge deposit in their territorial waters (yeah, hard to mine and extract from under seabed but still possible). Population? Russia's population is predicted to fall to ~83 million by 2100, and China has the 2nd worst birthrate in the world after South Korea, ~1.2 (the US has ~1.7, the replacement level is 2.1, but the US compensates it by attracting migrants where China can't, they want maintain their homogeneity to maintain stability, they can't have too much diversity with races, ethnicities, religions, languages and are racist towards immigrants), worse than Japan. It's actually possible (not guaranteed, but still possible) that by the end of the century the US will be more populous than China. russia is entirely irrelevant (except for nukes and raw materials), China is strong but faces too many hurdles. Seems like usual standard anti-Americanism at work. But I agree that India has chance to overtake America (demographic benefit, native exposure of English, democratic governance, huge investments into infrastructure since Modi, etc. They need to keep pumping money into infrastructure, increase spending on education to eradicate illiteracy, on R&D, ensure gender equality, resolve intercommunal tensions and violence between Muslims and Hindus (since religiosity levels tend to fall with growing economies, they'll secularize and become less religious), less red taping, and eventually they'll be on par with America or even stronger). If you're looking for the eventual new superpower, in the long term it will likely be India, not China (let alone russia).