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Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

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Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#361

Post by shimman »

pear01 wrote: post #331
adamweld wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole. I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.

And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it. Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he stu…

These people are just trying to find an alternative narrative because the vast majority of the population have been rejecting neoliberalism for a good 30 years now. So they spin up the foreign enemy is better than us, so we need to deregulate more and not hold monopolies accountable.

If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#362

Post by eli_gottlieb »

lkbm wrote: post #289
mlsu wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.

Possibly, but it's just as much a predictive trait of being libertarian, which for all its faults, is extremely anti-authoritarian.

Libertarianism is just privatized authoritarianism.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#363

Post by pear01 »

anon7725 wrote: post #350
pear01 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

> America used to build things too Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc. The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed. Europe can act collectively but lacks dyn…

What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.

The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#364

Post by jmknoll »

Avicebron wrote: post #272
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a great freakonomics podcast that talked about China being run by engineers and America being run by lawyers. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...

Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.

I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#365

Post by shimman »

montagg wrote: post #344
827a wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your learned helplessness is defeatist and boring. We need not be Moloch's subjects; Apple's business priorities are not the result of some natural and unstoppable force, and their leadership is not exempt from responsibility because of your belief that it is. Someone, sometime, in a surprisingly boring room, wearing a surprisingly boring suit, made decisions like those which opened a factory in China instead of Texa…

Texas would need to train its people. And the people would need to be as hungry as the Chinese were, and are to a certain extent. You should read the book the OT is talking about, it shows how the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in manufacturing, even going back to the 80s. Literally just not getting back to potential clients for two weeks and saying X or Y can’t be done, while Southeast Asian companies were jumping at th…

All these things sound like great reasons to force Apple, along with the rest of big tech, to pay to better our society in the form of taxes.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#366

Post by thrdbndndn »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #352
thrdbndndn wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized. Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway. Most industrial clusters in China formed organicall…

Is the labor cheap in China or are you comparing it US salaries? Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?

I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global.

The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.

China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#367

Post by typ »

mikestorrent wrote: post #294
Avicebron wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.

You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rap…

If that were the true secret sauce of the economic success in China, why had it not taken off before the 2000s? Like, they have been that "aligned" and "want the same thing" and "run by engineers" since the 50s, no?

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#368

Post by chrsw »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #84

Apple is very tied to Chinese manufacturing in a way that is hard to replicate in US. They will agree to make some high margin simple to assemble thing in the US to appease government, but if it goes as well as last time, they will stop as soon as they can. In china they were often able to iterate on designs and have custom screws and other parts made and ramped up in very short times. Something about having the whol…

Well put. I tried to explain this to someone years ago after they asked a question like "why don't they just build a factory here?". I was like "you need more than _a_ factory, you need a whole ecosystem of manufacturing". I guess I didn't make my argument clear enough based on their response.

I think the USA has been very clear based on our actions over the past 4 or so decades: we don't want this kind of labor in this country. I don't see any material changes despite the recent puff pieces and political grandstanding.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#369

Post by Braxton1980 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #333
whynotmaybe wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect. It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them. We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.

Who's we? The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse? Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation. Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin a…

What government policies are you referring to? Businesses moved manufacturing to China because their goal is to make as much money as possible. The only potential barrier is if US citizens would care that it wasn't made in America. Products are labeled and most people don't care.

This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.

Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.

Re: Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

#370

Post by [deleted] »

donw wrote: post #245
whynotmaybe wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect. It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them. We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.

We collectively decided nothing. Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.

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