That's all well and good, but he is literally at this moment attempting to export industrial capacity to China at a direct tradeoff to it's availability to the US, even when he could sell it at the same price.
Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
51–60 of 527 posts
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#52Ross Perot in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4 We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for yo…
It’s true that American companies have benefited from sending jobs overseas. Instead of trying to stop them, perhaps we could explore ways to share this money more fairly across the country.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes that leadership has a vision beyond the next quarterlies. Offshoring is seen as a solution to organized labor, unfortunately. Exec compensation above a reasonable salary needs to to tied somehow to longer term outcomes.
Forgot the whole crux of my point. Labour needs to be empowered globally, to minimize the benefits of offshoring.
If your plan relies on total coordination of the the entire globe you have no plan.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#54"Corporate welfare recipients that got free money to build data centers, testing the water on asking for more free money to hire employees."
The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#55Ross Perot in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4 We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for yo…
It’s true that American companies have benefited from sending jobs overseas. Instead of trying to stop them, perhaps we could explore ways to share this money more fairly across the country.
Everyone in business seems allergic to "pay domestic workers living wages and provide flexible working arrangements with good work life balance" so we will only arrive there through politics, unions, and structural labor shortages as the prime working age population cohort continues to shrink, imho.
Honorable mention to Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio for introducing legislation to tax outsource payment flows.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
(US centric perspective)
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#56Ross Perot in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4 We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for yo…
It’s true that American companies have benefited from sending jobs overseas. Instead of trying to stop them, perhaps we could explore ways to share this money more fairly across the country.
We did, by lowering prices and returning shareholder value.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgot the whole crux of my point. Labour needs to be empowered globally, to minimize the benefits of offshoring.
If your plan relies on total coordination of the the entire globe you have no plan.
I guess, but the real issue here is that capital will mount a concerted, decades long effort, to prevent global organization of labor. Its not like its per se impossible to get enough global labor organization: its just profoundly, aggressively, even murderously, opposed by people who have power.
I guess we could think of that as just "part of the reality," but I think its a little silly not to at least mention it.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about Jensen specifically, and I can't remember the guy at the moment, but there have been a few tipped hands including one where the guy on national TV said something about "Americans should be gluing the iPhones together in the factory, not Chinese" and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in American factories. That's probably not the whole vis…
That was Howard Lutnick. He's said a lot of, let's say "out-of-touch", things. He's not living in the real world, though. Motorola tried that not too long ago. Didn't go well. If you want to decimate American wages, you could do it, but if you at the same time deport people who were the most ready to work for a pittance, it's going to be hard to do this without riots. Then again, Stephen Miller wants those riots, so…
The old chestnut that Henry Ford didn't actually say comes to mind though: "I wanted to pay my workers enough so they could afford the cars they were building."
If they were making them in the US, Tim Cook could pay them enough to afford an iPhone on a payment plan with Verizon or AT&T. Even if he didn't want to, there's a federal minimum wage US workers employers are required to pay. What's frustrating is the investment Apple made in China is double the size of the Marshall plan the US invested in rebuilding Europe after WWII. That money could have been spent on America, but Steve Jobs spent it on China instead.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#59Ross Perot in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4 We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for yo…
One of my main arguments for a universal health care scheme in the united states is how horrendously expensive, for employers, health care is. Lets totally ignore efficacy, moral arguments, expense for the patient, etc. If you are a company in the US a large percentage of the effective compensation of employees is healthcare. A moderately good PPO is like ~$10k+ a year per employee. You can pay workers in some other…
As someone paying for a family on a marketplace bronze plan, that’s a bargain! I think our premiums will exceed $20K this year.
With all of the medical group consolidation, all of the wait time woes our Canadian friends always complained about are the reality here now as well. So I’m paying more than anywhere else on the world and have to wait 6 months for a PCP appointment. We have the worst of both worlds.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#60Ross Perot in 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4 We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for yo…
Indeed, this was one of the first things I thought of too. I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently used to dismiss his views. I'll never forget talking with an educated Perot voter (a friend of mine) at the time and actually being confronted with the real views, not a shallow strawman, and realizing I didn't have any good answers because I hadn't actually thought about it. That was a good matura…
>I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently used to dismiss his views.
Was he crazy or was he made to look that way as an excuse to dismiss his views? Sitting here in the 2020s knowing what we know now about "how it all works" it sure does cast a lot of doubt upon the past.