America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it • Hacker News Board

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#61

Post by ramblenode » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 1:58 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #12

Note the absence of tax policy changes that favor manufacturing. Here are a few: * A tax on financial transactions. This is sometimes called a "Tobin tax". The US financial services sector has doubled in size as a fraction of the economy. It's currently around 12%. That's an overhead cost, and a big one. Could be half that. * A tax on advertising. The tax deductiblity of advertising as a business expense should be li…

Capping tax deductions for advertising and progressively taxing it is a good one. Indeed, most advertising past a certain budget seems to be a zero-sum game and should be discouraged, not encouraged.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#62

Post by avs733 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:16 AM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #45

avs733 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe just treat blue collar workers better? And enshrine such treatment into law so this doesn’t happen again. That would seem to be simpler

While "treat blue collar workers better" sounds like a nice goal in itself...I fail to see how that would do anything at all to address the problem which the article is about. In other news - treating your oxen wonderfully will not transmute a wooden moldboard into an iron plow.

because what they are talking about is the workforce. Treat your workforce like cogs, like oxen, and guess what thats what you get even when you find out quite some time later that you actually need something else. The contrast of these two quotes in the article makes the point

> "Mass production technologies and the division of labor created a workforce consisting of relatively unskilled employees on the line combined with a smaller group of highly skilled workers and the engineering teams that designed it."

> "Japanese producers pursued precision production, just-in-time production, quality built into all production stages (not just at the end), continuous improvements by the entire workforce, and collaborative labor practices, all of which led to dramatically increased efficiencies and quality."

One (Ford) seeks to deskill its workforce in the name of efficiency because they see their opinions as irrelevant because they are not the capital class. One (Toyota) seeks their input as valuable specifically because they are the ones doing the work.

I've worked in both types of factories as an engineer. BOTH sought to apply the principles of lean manufacturing to build efficiency. It only worked in one of them, the one with a culture of treating factory staff with respect. In the one where management and engineering looked down on the employees they didn't listen for efficiency opportunities they only looked for them themselves, they presumed the unskilled workforce provided nothing. Funny enough - that plant couldn't attract better quality employees.

The articles has an entire section dedicated to workforce education...great! but as with all post secondary education in our modern society, the participants are (in large part) motivated by the economic potential of that pursuit. If I can make the same working at starbucks (with benefits because employer scale) as I can as an electrical tradesperson (yes, there are levels but not all are union) why would I pick the one that destroys my body? Why bother with workforce education if your leaders don't respect their work and will seek to Taylorize them instead of partner with them. Apprenticeship and training works in Germany and Japan because the jobs are not awful. It works because of the culture of work. I would argue this is actually the same reason we lag in another marker the article talks about - robots per worker.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#63

Post by avs733 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

20after4 wrote: post #33

avs733 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe just treat blue collar workers better? And enshrine such treatment into law so this doesn’t happen again. That would seem to be simpler

Laws are so easily changed. Nothing is enshrined in law that can be nullified by the next court case or a hidden rider clause on a 'must pass' spending bill.

Personally I see this as a better option than the one from the dead comment below. We can argue about rules begetting culture or culture begetting rules, I think there is some back and forth and one set of changes is concrete.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#64

Post by stouset » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:22 AM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #46

Animats wrote: post #12

Note the absence of tax policy changes that favor manufacturing. Here are a few: * A tax on financial transactions. This is sometimes called a "Tobin tax". The US financial services sector has doubled in size as a fraction of the economy. It's currently around 12%. That's an overhead cost, and a big one. Could be half that. * A tax on advertising. The tax deductiblity of advertising as a business expense should be li…

A financial transaction tax is a terrible idea. I own a 100 shares of Apple. Tim Cook goes on CNBC and says he’s all in on printers. So I want to sell my Apple shares and buy Microsoft, where Satya Nadella is pushing Cloud and AI. I’m being a smart investor, moving a small bit of capital allocation intelligently. Taxing this decision discourages making it—even if only marginally—and makes capital markets dumber and l…

> I own 100 shares of Apple… Tim Cook goes on CNBC and says he’s all in on printers. So I want to sell my Apple shares and buy Microsoft. I’m being a smart investor.

No, you’re being a schmuck.

The market moved on that information well before you saw it on the news, loaded up your web browser, and executed the transaction.

Time and time and time again it has been demonstrated that actively trading is negatively correlated with performance. The more frequent you trade, the statistically worse you do.

Besides being empirically true, it makes intuitive sense. Every time you trade you’re engaging with a counter party on the other side of the transaction. With overwhelming likelihood, that counterparty has disproportionately greater (and timelier) access to information and market analysis than you. So every time you trade, you do so at a steep disadvantage.

Invest in the market. Buy and hold. Sell to finance your retirement. Save the gambling for your Vegas fund, not your life savings.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#65

Post by throw__away7391 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:24 AM UTC

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #2

The key topics missing from this article are management and culture. Manufacturing companies by and large are stubborn with outdated practices that haven’t kept up with the times. The number of mechanical engineers who switched to web development, for instance, because of poor pay and improper management is insane. And during the pandemic, even more either fled or were pushed out from lack of opportunity. It’s easy t…

OK, but this was also true of many software companies in the past. What is keeping manufacturing companies from experiencing the same kind of disruption?

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#66

Post by stouset » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:24 AM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #56

polygamous_bat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxing this decision discourages making it—even if only marginally—and makes capital markets dumber and less efficient. Or it encourages making longer term investment decisions rather than trading like a jittery cocaine addict (which by no small amount of irony a nonnegligible number of traders are already.)

What you’re suggesting is that markets are more efficient when they’re less liquid. That’s both intuitively and empirically wrong.

They are likely suggesting that incremental, hypothetical increases in market efficiency appear to come at increasingly steep costs which primarily borne by the rest of society at large.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#67

Post by twoodfin » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

stouset wrote: post #66

twoodfin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re suggesting is that markets are more efficient when they’re less liquid. That’s both intuitively and empirically wrong.

They are likely suggesting that incremental, hypothetical increases in market efficiency appear to come at increasingly steep costs which primarily borne by the rest of society at large.

And the evidence for this is … ?

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#68

Post by twoodfin » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:38 AM UTC

stouset wrote: post #64

twoodfin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A financial transaction tax is a terrible idea. I own a 100 shares of Apple. Tim Cook goes on CNBC and says he’s all in on printers. So I want to sell my Apple shares and buy Microsoft, where Satya Nadella is pushing Cloud and AI. I’m being a smart investor, moving a small bit of capital allocation intelligently. Taxing this decision discourages making it—even if only marginally—and makes capital markets dumber and l…

> I own 100 shares of Apple… Tim Cook goes on CNBC and says he’s all in on printers. So I want to sell my Apple shares and buy Microsoft. I’m being a smart investor. No, you’re being a schmuck. The market moved on that information well before you saw it on the news, loaded up your web browser, and executed the transaction. Time and time and time again it has been demonstrated that actively trading is negatively corre…

Sorry a colorful example seems to have gone over your head: A financial transaction tax dulls the market response to new information. The primary purpose of markets is to translate information into prices.

Markets that are less efficient in that task hurt long-term retirement investors and day-traders alike.

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#69

Post by dgacmu » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:55 AM UTC

yurishimo wrote: post #50

twoodfin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A financial transaction tax is a terrible idea. I own a 100 shares of Apple. Tim Cook goes on CNBC and says he’s all in on printers. So I want to sell my Apple shares and buy Microsoft, where Satya Nadella is pushing Cloud and AI. I’m being a smart investor, moving a small bit of capital allocation intelligently. Taxing this decision discourages making it—even if only marginally—and makes capital markets dumber and l…

You can have transaction taxes without penalizing small/micro investors. It’s criminal how the people who trade stocks for a living get away with paying less taxes as a percentage than their janitors.

This could be solved in part by eliminating the carried interest loophole

Re: America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

#70

Post by roenxi » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:56 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #15

roenxi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did China ever rely on protectionism? I'm sure they have bouts of it here and there but the overt part of their strategy has been a willingness to work hard for low wages combined with refusing to let Chinese land or companies be sold to overseas buyers. But I claim no expertise. There should be a more serious effort to figure out what China's strategy was before there is a conversation about how best to copy it…

> Focusing on why China succeeded is more interesting and harder to get good information about. It isn't that hard, really. They had a massive population in relative destitute poverty that was willing to work very hard for a small, but significant, increase in their quality of life, starting with Deng Xiaoping's market reforms through fairly recently. The surplus of cheap labor is shrinking, and the current "made in…

It is that hard - you just handwaved all the hard parts. Most of the world is effectively destitute, making And these massive subsidies - what evidence do we really have? Massive subsidies have not worked well outside of China. What magic is happening in there that makes them effective? Pre-1970 we had a series of superpowers that were effective because they avoided massive subsidies and let failures fail. China can't even afford massive subsidies for most of the period that mattered. The US government's spending might have been bigger than the Chinese economy for a lot of that period, and the companies the US has been subsidising aren't showing any of the vigour that the Chinese ones are.

> ... theft of trade secrets...

People have been screaming from the rooftops for years that the IP edifice is going to reduce innovation in the West. The question is why we subject ourselves to that madness. The amount of cultural destruction in not allowing 1900s works to spread freely is a tragedy, let alone the impact on science and technology. So certainly in theory I agree that the Chinese are getting a leg up here, but it'd be nice to see some analysis. And the problem isn't the Chinese attitudes to IP; that is the solution.

But to emphasis "it isn't that hard" to gloss over decades of highly successful economic policy is just not true. It isn't a serious attitude. If people in leadership positions hold that attitude the situation will worsen.

[0] China's average wage is above the world average, by the way. It crossed the line recently to much rejoycing. I think that is PPP adjusted. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...