"If only we could find the people responsible for this" - American CEOs
Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
431–440 of 527 posts
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#432There 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?…
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. 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 fi…
I thought about addressing this in the original post, but I want to address part of your response:
> one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't
Indeed, this is a core component of Capital vs Labor issue I mentioned. Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless. The change in this relationship is why I would expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for.
(There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of the country.)
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored. BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse ec…
For manufacturing in the US to be economically competitive on the global stage (or even on the domestic stage), the actual work will mostly be performed by robots, not by humans. This will bring back profits, but not a lot of jobs. 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 produ…
> In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan
In the context of Jensen's would-be-apology, it doesn't matter where the offshoring went. Nvidia, Apple and AMD drove the US chip manufacturing overseas, and thanks to that, they are now a virtual cartel which commands enormous margins, so they can "mercifully" argue about bringing chip production back here... at our expense of course.
While paying through the nose, we're also supposed to appreciate their crocodile tears and listen to their drivel about what's good for America.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI isn't going to collapse. It's the real deal.
Sure, like the dot com bubble it will burst. But like the internet, AI is here to stay. The real bottleneck is electricity supply. CEO of Microsoft has even said, we have the chips but not the electricity to power them. The chips are sitting idle.
The capabilities of AI are on an exponential curve.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
> Unions are a potential solution to this issue
This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see several shirts that looked basically the same and not pick the expensive one without giving it any more thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
Even expensive brands are usually made overseas. I looked at a couple of random pieces of expensive Patagonia outerwear in my closet. One was made in Vietnam. The other in Bangladesh. Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and picking things off t…
IIRC the last company that manufactured men's dress shirts in the US closed not too long ago. They really were dedicated to making stuff here. The economics just simply did not support it. Which is another way of saying people would not pay the necessary price premium.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#437There 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?…
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it. If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economic…
Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the impact of regulation.
It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world. One example for a cotton shirt ( https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/ ): the cotton is grown in Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough cut and sewing…
For return to happen you need to have a creative economy, not an extractive economy. Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable. For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag. What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated c…
Offshoring happened because people dont want to buy goods that cost 3x as much just because they were made in the US. If a clothing company tries manufacturing domestically no one will buy their clothes unless theyre already an expensive brand.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world. One example for a cotton shirt ( https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/ ): the cotton is grown in Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough cut and sewing…
They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet people wore shirts. Those steps can come back. For cars I found it interesting that my water pump on my Dodge Ram is stamped with Made in Italy. Yet the part is fairly small that even if Italy continues to make it, they can ship 50k water pumps in one shipping container to Detroit, and the truck can still be assembled here. That's not an issue. The issue is wh…
Clothes are much cheaper than they were in 1960. You could bring the garment industry back to the US but you wouldnt be able to sell your products because they wouldnt be price competitive with sweatshop products.
Re: Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
This really doesn't work because there is not enough demand for people to upskill. Even during boom periods like 1999, there were still janitors. Janitors did not suddenly earn more money because white-collar hiring was exploding.