161–170 of 753 posts
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
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Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job. But for practical purposes the pay needs to be in line with still being able to price your products competitively in a global marketplace. Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have…
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing. The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics h…
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Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing. The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics h…
You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole family, all on the salary of a high school educated factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You’d have to pay factory workers well…
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> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid , they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Western lab…
Or you could have trade borders.
Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the j…
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
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> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
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Conservatives don’t want unionized labor - they want 1890’s style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory of any sort - dark factories end to end. There’s little room in the conservative morality for people not working, or for people who are working.
Can we not call those people "Conservatives". There is very little conservative about them.
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A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services . Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to g…
I hear people (media, politicians) talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, but I haven't heard too much well articulated reasons for why. There are issues with national security, reliance on less than friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs. Given the choice of increasing the numb…
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Or you could have trade borders.
Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking. I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car. When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American…
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.