191–200 of 527 posts
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Even with a good labor representation, is making cheap tshirts a job people want to do / a good job? I’m not convinced it is, or that it lasts.
I bet many people would find that job a lot more appealing than risking your life doing shopping gigs under time pressure, without even getting health insurance.
There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country. For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning?…
Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
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The problem is that nothing really stops people from going up the ladder. You mention leeching off technological progress but the reason some are concerned is because they will simply conquer the whole supply chain. Take an example of tesla vs byd. Heck, The electric MI car I saw looked so good and nice, its wild Most of the money I feel like America's still has lots of influence is probably from well established tec…
Yeah I’m saying drop the concern for another country conquering the supply chain. Let China dominate. Europe is unconcerned. And they benefit from that. I mean real benefits like work life balance not benefits like talking points about which country has the bigger dick. Do you really want America to be number 1 while you’re slaving away at your job 996 in pollution infested cities?
I wouldn't say Europe is unconcerned either. Europe has less issues than America because its collective debt feels very low compared to America
France recently went into all out stalemate of sorts and in countries like UK as well there are some really systemetic issues and not vice versa
Namely the most heard is the lack of innovation. People (here on HN) have compared Europe to a colloseum, saying its stuck in time and that there is a lack of innovation.
The startup culture is disfragmented etc.
There are some real concerns about Europe as well being impacted because a huge chunk of jobs were in the manufacturing business (think cars) and with things like BYD etc., Europeans themselves are worried about being able to compete with their price.
the point being that Europe has some concerns as well and they stem from their decision. The regulations make businesses genuinely hard to start.
(Note that I still believe that Europe is really good compared to America in a lot of genuine metrics in my opinion as well but then again, its not really a fair discussion if we don't discuss both sides of the coin)
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Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign actors. Unless we want to return to mercantilism a global empowerment of organized labour globally is the only real way to fix this.
> Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign actors. Or it's a great way to spur innovation in automation, which has other beneficial downstream effects. This is what people always seem to forget to consider, and I don't know why.
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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…
Asking as not an American - $10k per year, how much % of a yearly salary is it? In Europe (here: Germany example), which is frequently seen here as the ideal example of healthcare spending: Employees and employers typically split around 14.6% of gross salary for public health insurance. [1] [1] https://feather-insurance.com/blog/germany-healthcare-statis...
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Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or p…
I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the customer. We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, trans…
There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country. For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning?…
The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine.
The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
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the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is high. I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive. Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energ…
>To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. I'm worried that if we were to double energy production, all of the new surplus would be soaked up by data centers.
Ross 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 the debates around the time, though, and what most people said was that shipping manufacturing jobs out of the united stated would actually create prosperity here so that the manufacturing types could "move up" into less menial work. They're saying the same thing now, and although it _does_ seem that that did happen in the 90's when all the manufacturing jobs went offshore, it doesn't seem to be happening now.
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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.