Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

barchart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 527 posts

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

#351

Post by yibg »

closeparen wrote: post #219
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?…

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…

But the relative value of those same labor (hairdresser, daycare worker) changes. If my labor as a tech worker was $50 / hour I'm willing to pay $30 / hour for a haircut. But now if I make $100 / hour I'm willing to pay $60 for the same haircut. And in both situations I still need a haircut and the hairdresser is still the place to go to get one.

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

#352

Post by triceratops »

terminalshort wrote: post #144
luma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious that there are two parties involved in lawbreaking but only one of them gets called an "illegal".

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

#353

Post by smallmancontrov »

leptons wrote: post #321
almosthere wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Lights out" has been the big automation meme since before China joined the WTO. Everyone has gotten better over time but it's still "high school sex bragging rules": a few people are doing it but not nearly as many as brag about doing it.

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

#354

Post by mc32 »

bpt3 wrote: post #346
mc32 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government. People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing. Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.

Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there! You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the glob…

It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)

I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.

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

#355

Post by potato3732842 »

largbae wrote: post #349
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?…

Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done. If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.

>e.g. by training and licensing

For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever.

And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer.

Something something privatize profits something something socialize cost centers.

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

#356

Post by yibg »

almosthere wrote: post #281
ryandrake wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society,…

Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.

that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.

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

#357

Post by yibg »

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.

Depends on the service. The US is a huge exporter of financial services.

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

#358

Post by closeparen »

yibg wrote: post #351
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…

But the relative value of those same labor (hairdresser, daycare worker) changes. If my labor as a tech worker was $50 / hour I'm willing to pay $30 / hour for a haircut. But now if I make $100 / hour I'm willing to pay $60 for the same haircut. And in both situations I still need a haircut and the hairdresser is still the place to go to get one.

Sure, but the gap between your hourly wages has doubled.

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

#359

Post by MisterTea »

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…

> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.

Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.

I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?

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

#360

Post by resumenext »

resumenext wrote: post #77
potato3732842 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently used to dismiss his views. Was he crazy or was he made to look that way as an excuse to dismiss his views? Sitting here in the 2020s knowing what we know now about "how it all works" it sure does cast a lot of doubt upon the past.

Powerful people like those who control both parties and our news media don’t tolerate outsiders. When you have the power any deviation from status quo is a threat. A side effect of this is that voters stop listening to the talking heads and politicos when they call some political outsider a dangerous loon even when that may be a valid point.

I’m not directing that last sentence at the president or RFK, but I’m guessing that’s the reason for the downvotes?
Post reply on HN