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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

#141

Post by naasking »

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?…

> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning?

They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us since automated systems require engineers to design them and technicians to maintain them.

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

#142

Post by terminalshort »

afavour wrote: post #109
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I don't like to blame corporations for outsourcing. The consumers outsource every time they select for cost.

I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic. Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.

But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see several shirts that looked basically the same and not pick the expensive one without giving it any more thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.

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

#143

Post by scythe »

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?…

I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious.

(OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)

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

#144

Post by terminalshort »

luma wrote: post #93
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?…

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.

That's why we import cheap illegals for those.

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

#145

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #88
tokai wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (thou…

> traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Basically, A company is bound by legal precendence to focus on capitalistic gains. It would be better if we argue the existence of other structures/their prevalence but I don't think that we can blame the entire companies but the darn structures that they are in

A CEO makes 100x (yes its not becoming hyperbole, sad reality) than workers. He is given power and he is given incentives to cut money wherever he can. He sees off sourcing and does this.

But I am not seeing America go towards a path like this, on the contrary, we are seeing America try to actively talk about workers in here and then talk about businesses without doing anything about all the issues in the first place.

There is a fundamental conflict of interests and America's promising both sides. It honestly feels political to me now because the news cycle for America is moving so damn fast (which is really really bad) that nobody comes to question these things in the first place or most aren't because they aren't literally having the time to do such with all the news cycle imo

I don't really know what America can do at this point.

> This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to being locked out of the market on machine tools.

Do you have any sources for this, I found it quite fascinating that machine tools can play such a big impact.

If it is, is it a sort of chicken and egg problem where machine tools require factories themselves which again require machine tools. If so, why couldn't Soviet Union just import some from other countries to bootstrap the production of tools which could then bootstrap all factories?

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

#146

Post by potato3732842 »

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.

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

#147

Post by bluGill »

softwaredoug wrote: post #92
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only works if Trump is president for life. He only has three years left in office, and you can't build nuclear that fast.

I don’t think Democrats are virulently anti Nuclear the way Trump hates wind farms. Unlike Trump, I don’t think they’ll just stop a popular project meant to provide power for a region. And in any case 3 years might not finish projects but it might seed a lot of private investment and R&D

There is no such things as "democrats". There are individual politicians that usually group together. 30 years ago I would confidently say most democrats would be against nuclear, but the political winds have changed. I think the old ones would still be strongly against nuclear, but the younger ones don't care as much.

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

#148

Post by fooker »

fragmede wrote: post #58
moogly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 invest…

> 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.

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

#150

Post by 9rx »

wvenable wrote: post #119
lanthissa wrote: post #110

the us is 16% of global manufacturing by value with 4% of the population, i dont know how this fact isn't brought up more. on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value than china. A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the world was ash.

Also US unemployment has been low. The idea that Americans need more jobs just doesn't fit the numbers. There are plenty of good paying non-backbreaking jobs for Americans but they just don't seem to believe it.

Also, US manufacturing already struggles to find workers.

The problem, though, is that 70% of US manufacturing happens in small town/rural areas, which is not where the people looking for jobs are found, so you get this curious disconnect.

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