401–410 of 1001 posts
The Asian made shoe of the same model out lasted the US shoe by a couple years. The US made started falling apart less than a year in.
More interesting will be stuff like electronic components. Most of the cheap versions are all made in China. More expensive versions can be sourced in Japan, Taiwan and Korea (likely to do tariff deals). I think we might be looking at the end of very cheap electronics for awhile.
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than m…
(It was also not as absolute as people in the West think. There were exceptions for rural China and minorities.)
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
Any experience or thoughts on Vietnam and Malaysia? Are they also moving ahead?
Malaysia is handicapped by the resource curse (lots of oil) dysfunctional government and race politics that serve to drive out everybody who is not ethnically Malay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would that trend continue for 100 years? No reason to believe that.
Because women are obligated to work 40 hours every week just to stay afloat. Unless you find a way for young educated family to live a decent life on a single husband's income, the trend will continue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i don't understand the obsession with jobs anyway > people don't want a job, they want money and purpose And society will not give them any of that without a job. There, now you should understand "the obsession with jobs." > most jobs barely deliver either And no job delivers even less .
then we should change society that is my point
Until the 90s, that's the trajectory we were on. For life to constantly get better whilst human servitude is lessened over time.
We should be getting ever shorter work weeks and earlier retirement ages. It's the entire point of technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…
> […] are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference. See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy": > I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting…
> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced.
The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing.
The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing.
This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding:
> And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy!
If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are!
Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website.
What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…
Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk.
Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK.
Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here.
Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this because she gives so much to charity?
Quoting Wikipedia's source, Forbes estimated her donations were $120 million to date in 2012. However, she co-founded her own charity in 2005, of which she is the president, and I suspect most of it has been donated in that direction. Personally, I'm always dubious of the rich and famous genuinely finding unmet cases for charitable organisations. Especially when they've made a fortune outsourcing being morally dubiou…
That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.
Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA is also below replacement levels.
Not with immigration.
If the statistics aren't very wrong, it doesn't seem like a solution.