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Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

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Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#361

Post by fooker »

fragmede wrote: post #243
fooker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That money could have been spent on America This is wishful thinking, and similar to how how video game producers think if they stop N people from pirating a game, there will be N more copies of the game sold. No, instead of that the game will be played less. And analogously, less iPhones would be produced. You could argue that less iPhones would be good for the world, but that’s orthogonal to the topic.

Interesting take. I would happily give up my iPhone if, instead, the US Department of Education got an extra $55 billion/year and US would pay people to go to college.

US pays people to go to college, but just the outliers.

It's an interesting tradeoff, make the outliers the best in the world at what they do, or make the average person slightly more competent.

I think it's difficult to design a system that makes both outcomes true at the same time. The countries that have succeeded in doing it so far have a tiny population compared to the hundred millions of students US/China/India has now.

China seems to be slowly moving to a system comparable to the US one where outliers are prioritized. India has avoided it so far, which is why we see so many generic software engineers from India. I wonder if that stance will change with that category of jobs rapidly shrinking.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#362

Post by stray »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #263
cpursley wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN sure does like beating up on folks in the Southern US by painting us all with the same brush, it's the worst kind of ugly.

I'm a liberal and I've lived in Texas (Austin) for 20 years. It is infuriating when I am on some liberal-oriented forum, someone says we should force Texas out of the union or whatever, and everyone cheers. ~40% of Texans didn't vote for Trump, and in absolute numbers are a greater number of liberals than most other states in their entirety ... yet my supposed fellows want to write us off. Ugly indeed.

Austin is the Lawrence (Kansas) of Texas.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#363

Post by adastra22 »

runako wrote: post #36

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?…

> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.

This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#364

Post by triceratops »

mothballed wrote: post #207
afavour wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it would be.

The jobs also generally suck. I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like general labor building houses or working on fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that stuff wasn't nearly as rote. You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you think that sou…

> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets

As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide.

Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#365

Post by bpt3 »

volkadav wrote: post #229
jonhohle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure the original 10+k/yr/employee for good ppo coverage is a radical underestimate, for what it's worth, though I guess "way more than ten" is technically part of the "ten+" range, haha. The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for…

Just as an FYI, that is a massive outlier based on available data.

My employees are about $500 per month in a major metropolitan area, and a family of 4 can run up to $2000 a month for the most expensive plans (I cover individuals and their spouses in full for standard plans, and could cover one dependent for basic plans).

I looked at marketplace plans in WA because I was curious, and it looks like it's about the same as where I am but nowhere near what you were quoted 5 years ago.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#366

Post by lgleason »

The political dance of NVIDIA:

1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#367

Post by dangus »

potato3732842 wrote: post #146
codegeek wrote: post #48

This doesn't make sense. Nvidia literally has offices all over the world including India (a country that gets the most flak for offshoring). So why now ? Suddenly, "offshoring bad" ? I don't buy it. I think it is more about AI data centers. I could be wrong.

Just because everyone is doing something to be competitive doesn't mean they like it or think it's a good thing long term. A fair number of the executives who shipped the jobs overseas 10-40yr ago lamented that the numbers simply didn't make sense any other way.

Of course “the numbers didn’t make sense” could just mean “we wanted to make $4 billion in profit instead of $3 billion in profit.”

Racing to the bottom, essentially.

Corporations control congress, if they really lamented offshoring they would have done something about it.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#368

Post by jillesvangurp »

potato3732842 wrote: post #180
jillesvangurp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2-3%/year economic growth that has been common since the 1980s. People getting rich is nothing new. You can go back 50 years, 100 years, 150 years, etc. and find the same kind of debates. The difference is that people work less than ever and obesity is now a sign of poverty rather than wealth. Depression era US had people actually starving. The relative wealth of the middle class in the sixties and seventies is s…

This is the "but iPhones and avocado toast" argument. Calories and consumer goods are cheaper than ever. Housing, education and healthcare are more expensive than they've ever been. There has been a marked decrease in the amount of personal and economic autonomy available to the middle class and below over the past 40yr. Look at how medium skill level workers lived in the 1980s. It's basically a foreign country compa…

What people want never existed. You always find people that want more. But the same apartment that currently houses a couple of people used to house entire families. And it wouldn't have had a lot of the comforts people take for granted these days.

What you describe are first world problems.

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#369

Post by filleduchaos »

adastra22 wrote: post #363
runako wrote: post #36

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?…

> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.

This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does (general) better living and working conditions arising from better technology and cheaper energy have to do with which jobs are considered "good" and "bad"?

Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring

#370

Post by AlexB138 »

cootsnuck wrote: post #303
closeparen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene? Th…

> The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours And if everyone else's time has become more valuable then too has the time that is being saved by buying services. If my time as a programmer is worth significantly more now than it was 25 years ago, then the time I save by buying services is worth more. There's a reason that someone making $1mil/year is going to be…

You're only looking at half of the equation here. Following your logic, if my time is worth $100/hr, I should be willing to pay $99/hr for a haircut. But reality is that a haircut isn't just worth some utility value based on time saved, it's worth the lowest amount where suppliers' willingness to provide it at a given quality and buyers' willingness to pay meet.

So while the $99/hr haircut might technically save me money/time, suppliers of haircuts are generally willing to give the same haircut for $30/hr. If one supplier tried to pin their prices to the growth of their customers' income, they would go out of business. That is because the value of the suppliers time isn't increasing at the same rate.

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