631–640 of 814 posts
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> A sustained conflict with a nuclear power is a no go. The risk of nuclear escalation is too great. That was the rationale for letting the US military get into this state, but the conflict in Ukraine proved it to be unwise and founded on false assumptions.
Huh? Ukraine isn't a nuclear state.
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>Isn’t automation easier to face with population decline than with population increase? No? These things do not seem to be connected in any way.
I mean, of course they are. If you have a population increase you have plenty of young people who will complain that automation is taking their jobs. But with a population decrease you eventually end up with just old people and not enough working people to sweep the streets or wash cars or whatever - so automation is welcome because it doesn't "steal" jobs.
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> US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. Only on a dollar value basis. And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated. When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?
The IP is important. Not only did you use $50 in parts, but the design, software, and marketing were done in the states. One critical flaw in MAGA thinking is that these inputs are worthless: the full value of an iPhone comes from China because that’s where it was assembled even if most of the value was actually added in the USA. China wants to be on the other side of the value chain as well and really don’t mind swa…
A few years ago, Huawei was in a clear path of becoming the biggest producer of smartphones in the world, with smartphones that by now were based on their own IP, including CPUs and modems, even if Huawei had started 20 years ago by buying smartphone IP from companies like Siemens (which had been reckless enough to sell it). At that time, the latest Huawei designs were superior in performance to those of Qualcomm and superior in performance per dollar to those of Apple.
The result was that the US government has started a campaign of sabotage against Huawei, because they did not like the result of a "free market".
A couple of years later everything has repeated when there was the danger that Chinese manufacturers of flash memories will overcome Micron.
So the percentage that American "IP" takes in the products of other countries is only maintained by quasi-military actions of the US government, which treats any commercial rivals as enemies against which any sanctions are justified.
Using a national currency as the de facto global reserve guarantees a trade deficit for that country. No one else can manufacture USD's, so other countries have to acquire them by shaping their economies to supply goods and services demanded by the US. They can then use these earned dollars to transact with other countries, as the US itself insists they do. For the US, this is a simple trade off - gain massive politi…
US doesn't just get political influence. It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means. China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers. US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop wor…
Yes. The mass of US consumers do benefit from penny subsidies of certain foreign product.
However, for every penny of foreign subsidy benefitting US consumers buying finished iron or steel goods, a US metallurgist is losing a job somewhere.
On strictly numbers, we are better off with foreing-paid subsidies yes, but there are losers, and they take the brunt of the downside.
So id update your analogy by adding a twist: your childhood sitter living on anytown, USA was the virtual receptionist of the business. She had no RSUs in the business. She stayed in anytown and declined a career in a larger, growing city because she found virtual work and it made her happy. Now she's stuck with a mortgage, in a dying town, and with no career prospects locally. And all because you offered her a job that incentivized her to move, and then changed the relationship to her job 180 degrees .
Separately, ive only discussed the trade impact on consumers. We arent going into trade impacting producers, for example matters like producers having their inventions stolen, or their investment nationalized, to name a few examples.. -
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Thank you for elucidating the fact that US “borrows” in its own currency and so as long as we have monetary sovereignty (which we do to a great degree due to USD being the global reserve currency) we have no deficit problems (as long as we keep inflation in check). I implore everyone reading this thread to read up on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” is a good place to start. Until m…
I don't think domestic manufacturing works anymore. The pressure to automate will just skyrock. I'm more for a global currency which will be given to everyone who does certain jobs we can't automate away or don't want to like nursing, teaching. Everyone around the globe can get worldfiat when they do these jobs. We need to start thinking beyond known capitalism in a modern highly automated world.
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Thank you for elucidating the fact that US “borrows” in its own currency and so as long as we have monetary sovereignty (which we do to a great degree due to USD being the global reserve currency) we have no deficit problems (as long as we keep inflation in check). I implore everyone reading this thread to read up on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” is a good place to start. Until m…
as long as we keep inflation in check That's the trick though isn't it? MMT discourse tends to gloss over or ignore the dangers of runaway inflation and act as if you can borrow all you want with no consequence. But that part that you put in parentheses above is precisely why you can't do that. What you borrow for your budget has to be payed back later. If you just print money to do it because you borrowed more than…
That it can be depleted and take well over an average lifetime to regain.
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> US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. Only on a dollar value basis. And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated. When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?
What other system of value are you using here? Bottle caps? Nostalgia? While the dollar remains the global reserve currency, this is just a wild theory of trade. If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie? (they clearly already do this everywhere they can)
Why? It's an aliexpress model. Create as many legal entities as you can and let an economic Darwinism kill the ones you do poorly at and cherry pick your successful businesses.
The actual labor is outsourced to the market itself with products produced in southeast Asia by a wholesaler, sent to the market by said contracted wholesaler, and sales handled by the market's fairly much only retailer. It's so automated you really only have to be lucky that consumers pick your product and luck can be bent to will at times.
It's a very botnet approach to business.
This does expand the approach from flooding the market with cheap goods, to making cheap goods and competing with prices from the middlemen, making less efforted profits using the same approach, but exports the profits out of the US economy. I know this is a unusual framing but that's exactly what is happening.
Before a middleman within the economy would extract the wealth from that labor in this way. Why not cut out the middleman if the formula can be followed by anyone? And in the current belligerent state of trade it would politically expedient to do so or at the very least encourage this model if you are adversarial to the US because it works well. Our businesses already proved that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for elucidating the fact that US “borrows” in its own currency and so as long as we have monetary sovereignty (which we do to a great degree due to USD being the global reserve currency) we have no deficit problems (as long as we keep inflation in check). I implore everyone reading this thread to read up on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” is a good place to start. Until m…
as long as we keep inflation in check That's the trick though isn't it? MMT discourse tends to gloss over or ignore the dangers of runaway inflation and act as if you can borrow all you want with no consequence. But that part that you put in parentheses above is precisely why you can't do that. What you borrow for your budget has to be payed back later. If you just print money to do it because you borrowed more than…
I see people say this a lot, which is odd since as far as I have seen it's one of the main points MMT people make. I'm not sure how one of the core insights of MMT has become the main criticism of it, it's kind of funny.
I suppose this is because some people have taken MMT to mean that debt doesn't matter, however that is really not at all what it says. I think a more reasonable conclusion of the system MMT describes is that how money is spent matters greatly (productive vs unproductive spending), the primary purpose of taxes is keeping inflation in-check, and real resources are critical to the health of a currency.
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This is the obvious end-state of unregulated capitalism. Fewer and fewer people owning and benefiting from the means of production, and more and more people with nothing and nothing to do besides revolt and (eventually) chop heads off. All the ownership class needs to stop the "head chopping" part is a robust and powerful police/surveillance state, which we all know they are diligently working on right now.
The wealthiest 10% of America have increased the ownership of wealth from about 40% in the 1970s to 70% today, with no sign of slowing. A typical HN techbro may not care because they're likely in the wealthiest 35 million, but the only way for the top 3 million / 1% to continue growing at the same rate once the bottom 90% have nothing more to lose is to take the wealth from the 32 million between 1% and 10%. It took…
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Yes, it'll buy you an oz of gold. https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... What does equal value?
Whatever people buy. If you are looking at the dollar value of gold you have to look at what a dollar would buy that year. That is the value. You will find that a similar amount of gold buys the same amount of things throughout time regardless of the dollar price. Another way to say that is that the dollar price of gold is correlated with the cumulative inflation of the dollar0 over time.