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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

#321

Post by leptons »

almosthere wrote: post #279
Teever wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is that due to genuine innovation in manufacturing and automation vs cheaper labour and a lack of environmental and human rights regulations?

For clothing, for the most part is an Indian woman that is moving the cloth on a sewing machine still. We have not LLM'd making clothes yet. Nike and a few other companies are working on 3d printing shoes, but it's not comparable to hand made yet. For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't fa…

If we cut costs and automate the way China has automated - some factories run without any lighting at all because it's all robots running in the dark - then there aren't going to be a lot of jobs created by on-shoring. And the only way to create a product on-shore that approaches the pricing of the Chinese equivalent is to heavily automate.

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

#322

Post by marcosdumay »

phkahler wrote: post #125
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?…

>> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person, IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth more…

If you upskill enough people, companies will need to start paying more for those services. And once they need it, they will find the money.

There is a reason unemployment numbers are always within the same small band. There's always money to employ around the same ratio of the population. And when people get richer, that ratio gets slightly smaller, not larger.

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

#323

Post by cduzz »

nickff wrote: post #265
naasking wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctor and nurses are not bureaucrats. Single payer would significantly reduce the bureaucracy in healthcare, and simplify everything for citizens and businesses.

The main cost driver in medical care is provider (nurse, doctor, etc.) wages, not bureaucracy or drug prices (though they're frequently cited). I have tired of posting sources for the statistics, but they are very easy to find.

So, let's look at UnitedHealth Group; do they deliver health care?

If there were single payer, what would their role be in the healthcare delivery process?

Apparently they made 2.3 billion in profits on 113 billion in revenue in Q3 of 2025. How much of that friction would evaporate if they weren't in the healthcare delivery infrastructure.

Someone once said "the best part is no part" ?

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

#324

Post by rootusrootus »

zdragnar wrote: post #314
rootusrootus wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a virtuous cycle, though, right? If we had the right incentives for keeping manufacturing here, then sure, prices would be somewhat higher [0], but so would income for the very people who would be buying. [0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line, what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to produce?

That's not a virtuous cycle, that's inflation. Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect substitute, that means that the value has not changed. Paying more for the local good means your money is worth less, as it buys less value. Your question on the production line doesn't account for all of the precursors also being local, plus the local energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on. Everything tends…

> That's not a virtuous cycle, that's inflation.

From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.

Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.

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

#325

Post by nickff »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #306

What’s missing from these conversations are the cost of living. We’ve financialized the housing market, meaning the very basic needs of shelter now rises in price in accordance to the market. If tech workers make 2x or 3x the median annual salary, it makes housing prices rise for everybody else in the city. In order to pay a “living wage” employers have to pay enough for their workers to make rent and groceries. In a…

The financialized housing market is only a symptom of the over-regulation (through zoning and permitting) of housing, construction, and real estate in general. This over-regulation is itself a microcosm of the petrification of the majority of the economy.

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

#327

Post by burnt-resistor »

tokai wrote: post #29
hackthemack wrote: post #12

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…

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.

That's like rich people threatening to leave if taxes are raised. It's always a bluff.

And, the cheapest labor is slave labor like Dubai and the US (via prison labor in current use by multiple major corporations) use already. If there's no floor of standards, that creates perverse incentives and ridiculous instability.

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

#328

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

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?…

Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by flerchin »

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?…

Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this, and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.
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