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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

#481
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expec…

What you’re overlooking is that productivity doesn’t increase uniformly. The low paying service sector jobs aren’t any more productive today than they were 50 years ago.

You're overlooking the main thrust of what I am saying from my top comment to the one you replied to, which is the relationship between Labor and Capital:

> Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless.

To your point, this is even more true for the jobs where productivity has increased the most. Agriculture is vastly more productive today, and the share of profit captured by Capital increases every year. The main point is that productivity gains do not really matter to Labor because the benefits of those gains rarely accrue to Labor.

Put another way: there was a value capture split operant in 1950s manufacturing that contributed to factory jobs being Good Jobs. That split hasn't been operative for decades. In all likelihood, re-shoring factory jobs today would just create crappy sweatshop jobs.

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

#482
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still work, so this is a very bizarre comment to make.

Not really sure how you come to the conclusion that I was under the notion that nobody is working. Union membership has been in decline for decades. Labor jobs have been leaving the country for decades. Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent and the union membership will go back up as well. The labor jobs that still remain are what's left of the union membership.

> Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent

Please research which are the largest unions in the US. I'm curious why union representation would work for labor jobs, but not for the millions of jobs* represented by unions now.

* These are all "labor jobs," because otherwise you're not talking about a job

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN sure does like beating up on folks in the Southern US by painting us all with the same brush, it's the worst kind of ugly.

I'm a liberal and I've lived in Texas (Austin) for 20 years. It is infuriating when I am on some liberal-oriented forum, someone says we should force Texas out of the union or whatever, and everyone cheers. ~40% of Texans didn't vote for Trump, and in absolute numbers are a greater number of liberals than most other states in their entirety ... yet my supposed fellows want to write us off. Ugly indeed.

Austin, the capital of Texas, is quite heavily Democratic and liberal. But most of Texas is decidedly Republican: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Texas

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think if the wealth class wants to avoid communism and heads on pikes in the longer run, they should absolutely start to be more concerned with community and move beyond the tunnel blinders of the next quarter over long term stability. This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.

As long as the ownership class can continue tricking half the population into directing their lust for violence towards scapegoats like illegal immigrants, there's very little reason for them to change course. The remaining half of the population then gets most of their energy used up defending against "culture war" bullshit, with many even going on the aggressive there because it's one of the few types of allowable wins in the very narrow Overton window.

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

#485
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can look around the world, janitors consistently earn more in countries with a stronger middle class.

What you are calling "boom periods" are not composed of lots of people upskilling and moving into a higher earning partition of the middle class (or leaving poverty). I have no idea why you expected then to behave like something they are not.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I don't like to blame corporations for outsourcing. The consumers outsource every time they select for cost.

That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.

And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit.

Its called "capitalism".

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

#487

Earlier 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.

That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic decisions, not decisions that should flow down to individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and their moral failing. Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced…

Who are those "very few people" who actively manage our economy?

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

#488

Earlier 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…

It used to be 'America, land of the free' and we hero worshiped homeless dudes who happened to chase after cattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy Now it's 'America, land of the greed' and fox news talking heads say homeless dudes should just be executed. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8

_DeadFred_ says: "Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections"

Yeah, that kind of thought crossed my mind when a homeless guy, unhappy that I wouldn't let him sponge my car's windshield, grabbed my lhs rear view mirror with both hands and broke it (the mirror no longer responds to its dashboard control). But the moment quickly passed, leaving me only with a new item for my to-fix list.

FWIW we still worship cowboys. They differ greatly from today's urban homeless.

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

#489
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?…

It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. Th…

pixelready says "A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus."

Empathetic humanism isn't likely to do much for a schizophrenic or alcoholic.

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

#490
This is self serving nonsense. “ai infrastructure” here isn’t manufacturing its enormous data centers that have so few humans the lights are off in every area other than where physical maintenance is happening. It’s about building enormous caverns that consume enormous amounts of power and warehouse the products his company manufactures offshore. The only thing he wants to onshore is spending on those offshore made products he sells. There’s no meaningful jobs in “AI infra” that outlive for the original data center build. He’s advocating for huge investment in energy production to ensure there’s capacity to run his products he’s selling that his company produces off shore.

How can anyone read this with a straight face?

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