America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it • Hacker News Board

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#261

Post by coliveira » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 6:49 PM UTC

ianburrell wrote: post #255

coliveira wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should remember that the US military is a two-tier system: there are the officers who rarely see real battle, and the rank and file who effectively die. In the case of war, if the rich ever serve they will be officers, they will only command other less fortunate to battle.

Junior officers had a higher death rate than enlisted in Vietnam. Junior officers lead their men and suffer the same risks. It is the senior officers that command behind the lines. That might be changing with smart weapons. 15 Russian generals have died in Ukraine, enough to have Wikipedia page.

15 was the claim from Ukraine, but only 6 deaths have been verified.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#262

Post by jdk354 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #47

liquidpele wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s only half right… the financialization is driven via a priority of short term profits that are incentivized by the market to executives. They play the BS game to just get rich and then dip, company be damned in the long run.

This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.

Private equity really makes life miserable for regular investors and the general economy. I think stronger provisions against buyouts of public companies preventing a single investor from buying more than say 10% of a company and preventing public companies from therefore being gobbled up by private companies would go a long way to solving these problems. Its also vitally important that rules for fiduciary responsibility to a companies shareholders have teeth and also the INDEX act to prevent companies from being subverted .

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#263

Post by jdk354 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #72

CPLX wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.

Is the looting behavior just a response to US industrial policy? US policy has made US manufacturing tenuous for decades. Meanwhile US policy has also provided the means and mechanisms to ship manufacturing abroad. Given the above, isn’t the optimal strategy to maximize profit extraction in order to invest in new industries?

Its likely that if many things were made in the US, they would be too expensive for most people to afford, a smartphone might cost $5000. The US could re-industrialize but it takes a lot of robotics due to high labor costs in the US.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#264

Post by yterdy » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #258

yterdy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite an arbitrary metric.

I find GP's metric useful. It helps address the question: wouldn't the company perform better if we did other things with that excess money?

>wouldn't the company perform better if we did other things with that excess money?

Of course. That's not what CEO pay/employee does, though; it trivializes the massive (over)compensation by putting it in seemingly-small terms. What we need to be analyzing CEO pay in terms of is 1) How much a person needs in order to live decently and with dignity in one's particular area, and 2) How much better than the "average" CEO any give one performs (to determine incentive pay). Certain entities, institutions, and groups have cartel-ized executive positions as a class and bid up their compensation, decoupled from real value.

Another view: $60/employee doesn't seem like a lot, but if you remove the employees making over the median, or $100k, or some other resaonable cut-off, something tells me that the lowest-paid employees would see a meaningful increase in their take-home. GGP is purposely being reductive in a way that makes rethinking the issue more silly than it actually is.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#265

Post by jdk354 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 7:06 PM UTC

peyton wrote: post #84

chii wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. If those people don't own the company, what is the owner doing by allowing this to happen? If those people _are_ the owners, then there shouldn't be a problem, since it's their own company, and they ought to be allowed to do anything they wish. Including short term reward for long term loss (if it is worth it in their eyes). So i dont think it's "looting" (imp…

I think fiduciary duties get way more nuanced. You can’t always do anything you wish to a company, even if you own it outright.

The big issue on that comes down to minority vs majority rights. If the majority puts in a board that destroys the value of the company because the majority also owns another company that wants to buy it at a bargain price, it destroys the investment of the minority. Some people suspect that could be happening with Disney.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#266

Post by OfSanguineFire » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

rorroe53 wrote: post #207

SyzygistSix wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine the magnitude of the humanitarian and environmental crisis China would be if they had not industrialized and joined the global market? A country that size full of uneducated farmers and first generation coal power plants would be a nightmare for everyone, not just China.

Well, the planet would be better off without Chinese middle class and elite flying around and buying stuff. Countries that are full of poor "uneducated farmers" tend to have much lower carbon footprint than richer ones, even with the higher birth rates. Despite its admirable investments in reneweable tech, China still keeps building new coal plants as well.

Carbon isn’t the only pressing environmental damage though. For example, Madagascar is an island full of poor “uneducated farmers”, and it is precisely their farming that has been deforesting the island through slash-and-burn agriculture, a practice that has accelerated over the centuries due to the high birthrates.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#267

Post by layer8 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 7:26 PM UTC

jdk354 wrote: post #259

layer8 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investments come with risks. The trade-off of cash losing its value over time is that it’s relatively less risky. You split your assets into cash and investments to achieve an overall combined risk profile. In that sense, cash is just another investment with a certain risk-return ratio (even when the return is negative).

Your cash over time is guaranteed to lose almost all its value. While, if you invest in something, it could be even gold or silver, could be a house, could be a global market cap index fund, it holds more of its value than a fiat currency does. So no, fiat currencies lose everything and even with risks involved with other investments, the risks are still less than cash. Cash over time is one of the worst investments.

It depends on your time horizon. Over a period of say ten years, cash is unlikely to lose almost all of its value, whereas for stocks the likelihood can be higher. The stock market may crash (like it has in the past) at an inconvenient moment where you’ll then be happy to have some cash on hand.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#268

Post by _8j50 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

In my very opinionated view, the concept of new company towns is missing. All the current efforts are around bringing jobs to people. Jobs are a side effect, things shouldn't be done for the sake of jobs.

The plains of nebraska for example are an excellent place (again, opinionated) for an assembly plant like foxconn but american. Mainly because a crapton of freight via railways passes through there and plenty of undeveloped cheap land. Such factories have high shipping/receiving volume and new towns with new cheap housing for potential workers is feasible.

Yuma is another great location because of it's stable (sunniest in US) climate, proximity to mexico boarder and like with TSMC and Tuscon it is very disaster safe, right on I10 and close to CA (the US might starve if Yuma was destroyed! A lot of food processing there for these reasons).

Manufacturing at old towns and factories will have minimal competitive advantage.

Lastly, the US does not have a "success at any cost" mindset towards manufacturing as the fuel for economic success. It is very much an afterthought. A lot of this and many other issues are a result of political divisions.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#269

Post by lumost » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

jdk354 wrote: post #263

lumost wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the looting behavior just a response to US industrial policy? US policy has made US manufacturing tenuous for decades. Meanwhile US policy has also provided the means and mechanisms to ship manufacturing abroad. Given the above, isn’t the optimal strategy to maximize profit extraction in order to invest in new industries?

Its likely that if many things were made in the US, they would be too expensive for most people to afford, a smartphone might cost $5000. The US could re-industrialize but it takes a lot of robotics due to high labor costs in the US.

My understanding is that robotics were being heavily developed in the US in the 80s/90s to improve costs. Then outsourcing took the wind out of the sails for robotics.

Maybe the tech was to far out, or maybe we would have had vastly more advanced industrial robots.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#270

Post by klooney » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

cced wrote: post #216

sudosysgen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are employed by the board, the board is made of major stockholders, those are pensions funds and other investors mainly interested in stock prices. No need for conspiracy theories or pitchfork waving, it's just all working exactly how it's openly designed to.

You guys keep saying pension funds. Where are the sources that financialisation sucking us dry is because pension funds need to get seeded? We’re living in a time of record profits and ceo to worker pay ratio through the roof and you guys are implying pension funds, the little to last thing workers have, as the issue? Gee I’m wondering what we should all be thinking and doing about those pension funds and who that wo…

Pension funds is shorthand for pension funds and other bulk investments for other people vehicles like BlackRock and Vanguard. A common complaint from people is that there's under ten entities that owns almost all of the major public firms. Matt Levine has very funny and informed takes on this sort of thing, ZeroHedge et al have conspiratorial ones, but it's a real thing.