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

In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan, a democracy, and one of our geopolitically closest allies. This business went to TSMC because they did a better job producing these chips than either Intel or AMD (or AMD's successor, Global Foundries). The Twinscan machines that fab the chips are from ASML in the Netherlands, another democracy and geopolitical ally. The parts for those machines come from a truly global supply chain. Modern chip manufacturing is an absolute marvel of global integration.

American consumers and businesses benefited from this arrangement in the form of very competitively priced hardware. Most of the manufacturing was in Asia, but most of the profits were to American companies. This is why America is today the richest country on Earth. It simply would not have happened like it did without free trade.

China's low wages and integrated supply chain can beat American manufacturing. China cannot beat the combined talent of the free world. Along with immigration, from the likes of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, free trade and an open economy was what once made America great.

Obviously, paying someone 300K a year to sit on a 1 hour peer to peer explaining why they think they should do a surgery is just bad business. But, we do it, and I think a lot.

Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up.

Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether.

Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well.

I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take 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. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.

> 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 other people being subject to the same conditions.

There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch.

Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work.

Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.