Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#761

Post by coldtea »

myrmidon wrote: post #171
pjc50 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.

And then you try to eat figurines, and find out they're not as digestable

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#762

Post by beeflet »

const_cast wrote: post #452
raincom wrote: post #259

I worked in the retail; it is the shittiest job I ever had. I was given an abnormal schedule: two days closing, one day opening, one mid shift (and I should work either Saturday or Sunday). The churn is really high: people leave even if they find a better yet shitty job. Which jobs do you want to create in US? Retail jobs or manufacturing jobs?

Given the manufacturing is currently being done by people making much less than US minimum wage, I’d have to say retail! People forget why manufacturing was moved out of the US. Manufacturing jobs sucked major ass. Then they sucked less ass, when unions started gaining power. Then the companies saw their employees had prosperity, said “fuck you”, and left. We’ve crippled unions to such an absurd degree that the reali…

Because of tarrifs, demand for local manufacturing increases and manufacturing wages will be greater than they are currently abroad due to newly constrained supply.

Okay, then we'll have unions then. I don't see what the issue is here. I have heard this reasoning several times, even in person, it seems to misunderstand the action of protectionism in the first place.

You can't have an industrial economy if workers don't have any leverage to demand sufficient wages or if unions have so much power that they bring the balance of labor negotiations to unprofitability.

I don't think manufacturing jobs suck ass. They probably aren't great for your physical health, but it is better for society spiritually in the long term to have the majority of society focused on producing something real rather than just having an endless network of fake jobs as a means of wealth distribution.

The factory worker of today can't afford anything because they are competing with third world wageslaves to outsource manufacturing to our geopolitical rivals.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#763

Post by briandear »

consp wrote: post #740
kilolima wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they hire those software engineers along with their unions? Not quite. It's all about labor and getting rid of the class that used to (and could have) threatened the elites.

SE will one day realize they are as screwed as the average worker and unionize in some way. The endless money pits are not for every SE, even today the majority does not work for the creme-de-creme of well paying companies. While specialists and smooth talkers might profit from the current model, as always is the case, most won't.

Then when they unionize, all the software jobs will head to cheaper locales. Unless of course you’re suggesting that the U.S. use tariffs on labor to prevent that?

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#764

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…

[deleted]

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#766

Post by victorbjorklund »

rayiner wrote: post #42

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…

Indeed. The primary reason to go to China is not that it is lowest cost (but of course lower cost than US) but rather that they have the skills and infrastructure for it.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#767

Post by beeflet »

marenkay wrote: post #664

This makes a good argument against centralized production and knowledge. It would economically be much more reasonable if any good could be produced anywhere at any time. Smaller production facilities for localized sourcing. Would IMHO also be much more in line with a free market. Everyone would be free to source goods in any country or location of their choice. Coupled with open knowledge this could be a truly free…

It will never happen because of economies of scale.

What type of intervention of the free market do you approve of as an alternative that would incentivize local production over economies of scale? It essentially comes down to tarrifs and protectionism.

Free market means voluntarism. You say that consumers ought to have the freedom to source goods anywhere, but the only way to preserve this "freedom" is to either force producers to operate in unprofitable conditions (which is not stable-state) or force consumers to pay a premium for those goods.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#768

Post by pjmlp »

eyko wrote: post #258
myrmidon wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.

It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we n…

Which amid everything, maybe it is time to focus again on our own programming languages and OSes like in the cold war and export regulation days, it will suck for a while, but apparently it is how everything is going.

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#769

Post by throwaway2037 »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #731
lolinder wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than m…

India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has. China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone. And one thing I rarely see menti…

I am genuinely curious about what would happen if China allowed their currency (RMB/CNY) to float. The most obvious thing I can see that would put tremendous downward pressure on the currency would be capital flight from China to more politically predictable/safe places. Currently, normies are limited to 50K USD per year. (Of course, there is a large grey market to move more money.)

Re: How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

#770

Post by lifestyleguru »

slt2021 wrote: post #444
pjc50 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…

Agree, UK did not have a smart and capable leaders and elites for a very long time. The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones

Oh they are very smart an capable. They just don't work in your favour.
Post reply on HN