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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

#511
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a lot written on Labor vs Capital, so I will just suggest you research the topic because you are not on target here.

Do you have a link? What I've seen in most discussions is obscuring of the fact that the majority of "capital" is directly or indirectly retirees or people saving for retirement. Those in the top 5% wealthiest often need to survive on that wealth for decades so it's not as if they have per year spending power that is that high. You too will be at your top percentile wealthiest of your life when you are nearing retire…

Honestly? Your favorite LLM will be able to build you a syllabus better tailored to fit your current level of understanding. But in short, Capital is the people making decisions about how money is expressed through the economy.

But to make concrete what I am saying. Take a VC fund like Lightspeed that manages tens of billions of dollars. They do this on behalf of LPs, of which the largest are typically large pools of long-term capital like university endowments and pension funds.

Lightspeed, for example, has received ~$400m in investments from CalPERS (retirement program for some California public employees) alone. That represents tens of thousands of employees and former employees. Even if the notional value of one of their retirements is (say) $2m, that person is still Labor. Capital is represented by the people at CalPERS who decide where to allocate money, and by the Lightspeed GPs who decide which startups to fund. A former county attorney who has money in CalPERS has essentially no say over how her retirement funds are invested (if she's on a pension); that decision is down to a relative handful of people she will likely never meet.

A quick way to know the difference: top 5% wealthy people can buy the house next door and make it ugly, being a small nuisance. Capital can crash the entire economy with bad bets or get laws changed/ignored at their behest (we are watching this right now with X's CSAM generation on demand).

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. We've also decided that labor needs to be taxed more heavily than capital, which is fucking stupid. Taxing the lower end of society who actually works at a higher rate than wealthy people is just so shortsighted.

It'd be a very interesting thought experiment to completely redefine the economic and fiscal plan of the US. It'd be interesting if we greatly reduced personal income taxes in the majority of cases. Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy), and then implemented a progressive wealth tax that kicks in starting at…

>Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy),

I'd back this whole plan to a hilt but want to highlight this section.

I'm on board with eliminating corporate taxes under 1 condition: the company, its executives, and its board - are fully 100% banned from participating in politics in ANY way besides each individual citizen voting in normal elections.

Lobbying? Banned. PAC contributions? Banned. Campaign contributions? Banned. Hiring former government workers as "government liaisons" or "government relations" consultants? Banned.

If a corporation wishes to not pay taxes to the government, it has ZERO business involving itself with politics.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're description matches a well planned and communicated slow increase of tariffs targeting specific products or industries so companies have time to adjust (newsflash, US was already doing this). Trump used blanket tariffs as a hammer to extort other countries, but its not like we want to buy your shitty cars anyway. Most of these facilities already existed or were planned. hint: most foreign brands were building…

The US seemed to get through the industrial revolution mostly with tariffs over income tax revenue which was extremely limited early after enacted.

And you believe the world is similar to what it was back then? Are you mainlining fox news?

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> provincial plans do not always cover 100% of everything Like what?

Since we were using OHIP as an example: https://www.ontario.ca/page/get-coverage-prescription-drugs#... and following. The first info about what's not covered for example is concerning diabetes. There's a limit to the number of test strips for example. I'm no diabetic, so I don't know if these numbers are "enough" or not but there is an actual limit. It also then states: Syringes, lancets, glucometers and other diabe…

This is all prescription drugs.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we were using OHIP as an example: https://www.ontario.ca/page/get-coverage-prescription-drugs#... and following. The first info about what's not covered for example is concerning diabetes. There's a limit to the number of test strips for example. I'm no diabetic, so I don't know if these numbers are "enough" or not but there is an actual limit. It also then states: Syringes, lancets, glucometers and other diabe…

This is all prescription drugs.

Correct. Which doesn't invalidate either your or my previous points.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we were more invested in each other’s well being, especially if we had more capacity to put that care into action, wouldn’t that improve the support network surrounding those suffering from chronic mental health conditions?

Have you ever dealt with an alcoholic when he's drunk or a schizophrenic when he's acting out?

You use the word "suffering" as if they had no part in their own condition. I'm reminded of Duke, the skinhead in "Repo Man" who, as he dies, says "I blame society!":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo

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

#517
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.

Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."

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

#518
So fucking just go ahead and make your own foundry then, go ahead and make an EUV machine instead of buying one from ASML, get slave wage Americans to assemble chips and boards, better ban foreign developers abroad and domestically because they might send those pennies you give them back home.

Just another billionaire.

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

#519

Earlier 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…

> They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet people wore shirts. Those steps can come back.

That was an entirely different economic world. We also paid 25 cents for gasoline; that's not coming back, and neither are cheap t-shirts.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can just ban imports of the sweatshop products.

Protectionism has been proven time and again to fail. Over time inflation rises, trade gets worse, prices get higher, fewer choices, then the economy fails; it's a shitshow.

Even if we wanted to buy domestic-only, wealth inequality is so fucked that our people couldn't afford it. The way to solve that is higher wages, smaller corporate profits, cheaper healthcare and cost of living. But you know that ain't happening. Our economy is built around corporate profits. We're basically one large hedge fund with a lot of uber drivers.

So while you can get away with protectionism during the reign of an insane person for 4 years, you eventually need to move stuff back overseas, because nobody here can afford the stuff you make here. (You could export all your goods, but then what's the point of the protectionism?)

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