Not to mention that we are already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries, which endanger humans. The ever-growing demand for natural resources and energy, which is directly coupled to GDP growth, is not likely to end well.
Distribution of wealth is the biggest issue and In my opinion, the most tangible way to solve things but then again, this is the core of the issue
Either you need a really anti corrupt body which can do their work and fight against such issues
But with causes like lobbying etc., those get washed up
Or we can have new people (like Zohran etc.) who try not to take lobbying money and then America can have new people who genuinely want to help and not be corrupt
But I am not sure what would happen, perhaps more people follow the example of zohran perhaps not. People are keeping an keen eye of the progress and what can happen. But one of the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?
it's wild because zohran's message was so well put out and received and this is the state then, I doubt that the voters might replicate it or not
It really depends ultimately on the voters. The truest form of responsibility but its also the lack of options and the two party system which is really bad in America ultimately causing the problems to exist even further.
If changing the system is off the table, then this is what any solution would inevitably look like. I do not think the problem is a flaw in the system though. Calling it a systemic issue is misleading, because the system is largely functioning as designed. The logical response, therefore, is to change the system itself.
That idea sounds frightening, largely because most political parties treat the system as untouchable, presenting it as if there are no viable alternatives (thus convincing people that there are none, making them feel helpless). This creates a dead end: people experience the full force of the system's pressures while being told that nothing fundamental can be changed.
In that vacuum, scapegoating becomes an easy outlet. When the system itself cannot be questioned, frustration is redirected towards marginalised groups, under the implicit belief that punishing or excluding them will somehow relieve the pressure on everyone else, and that's how we ended up at this point (imho).
A system centered on people's needs would judge success by outcomes like health, stability, and quality of life rather than by growth metrics. If a policy reduces stress, improves wellbeing, and lowers long-term costs, it should be pursued even if it shrinks parts of the economy or even the economy overall. The fact that we currently treat any reduction in economic activity as a failure, regardless of human benefit, reveals how misaligned our priorities are.
I hope Zohran succeeds in improving people's lives, but I'm not holding my breath. I've been burned too many times before...
> But one of the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?
I think this primarily relates to how people are socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society', i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place.
> I think this primarily relates to how people are socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society', i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place.
I so so agree with this statement, this is probably what I thought as well but one of the most terrifying things about this is that its sort of like a chicken and egg problem because the media,education and so much more are so influenced by policies/directly by the govt and the elites that I would doubt that making such change or giving people the idea that "change is possible" is itself possible
But there have been instances in the past where we pulled out of things but I am not sure how we can do it right now.
A large-scale cultural shift.
> the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place
So the thing which worries is me that I don't see a reason why these institutions would change? Do you see something in this perhaps?
I think that the best way is probably via at a small scale level and then having that grow up. Adopting it ourselves and discussing about it like we are doing right now is the only thing possible that we can do
My issue with this is that the incentives just aren't there for something like this. Let's say I want to create a social company and I just want "enough" and afterwards I'd just do it for helping etc. and getting miniscule gains because I think that the goal of money and only money itself is very dim
Even if we do something like this, the incentives really change because companies wont invest, you wont get funding etc.
So in a way, I think that the best way is probably getting attention of like minded people and having them invest with such knowledge but we really haven't seen such platforms. I think Kickstarters are a good idea for small scale projects but even they feel like you still have to get yourself a promotion or attention itself to fund it and it just becomes really 10x harder imo
I feel like microgrants are genuinely the best way moving forward. If people can provide 1-10k$/perhaps 50k? for an idea with intentions of good once it scales. To me it feels like the best way and I found ways to look at microgrants and they exist but I dont see many of them in much action either.
We really need to change incentives where doing good is favoured more than doing bad, We can even start small because sometimes even small good incentives are all one needs for real change.
I wish there was more interest in microgrants, I must admit that I had thought about working in this space or similar and perhaps I will jump back to it someday but what are your thoughts on it? Do you know of some mechanisms where good incentives can be generated at a societal rate?
The issue is that when that 150 billion is concentrated into one person's hands, it tends to be inefficiently allocated. This is the argument against central planning; it's inefficient, it does not actually go where it would maximally benefit society.
We have, with the amount of wealth inequality, essentially re-invented central planning. It's arguably worse today, because rather than giving central control to a worker's council which is nominally accountable to regular people, we've given it to Larry Ellison who is going to build yet another datacenter for AI, instead of spending it on energy or manufacturing capacity.
My home electricity bill has doubled since AI came out. That is my evidence that this concentration of wealth is egregiously misallocating capital. It is a civilization-scale self-own. Countries that allocate capital properly will wipe the floor and we are beginning to see that play out.
To who? There are ~300 million people in the United States. He could give each one a $500 check (assuming he didn't want to keep any of his $150bn). Or should he give it to the U.S. treasury? It's $38 trillion in debt, so he could give up all of his money to pay off 0.004% of it.
All the talk of energy and no mention of solar, wind, batteries
And in any case 3 years might not finish projects but it might seed a lot of private investment and R&D
This is a summary FTA, not a direct quote from Jensen, but it's a pretty good one IMHO:
> In a recent speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined his plan for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America: force companies to build AI infrastructure in America.
Of course if labor is cheap you can use a non-automated factory and then you will have 2000-10000 people needed. However those are not coming back to the US (or Europe).
I doubt it. Job density for land usage and other externalities generated is going to be one, maybe two, orders of magnitude greater for manufacturing.
In any new, expanding, or relocating factory, nobody is getting replaced by these things, because they are already priced in.
> factories are not near as labor dense these days as you would guess.
That's a bit presumptuous of you.
The factory I'm thinking of had 2000 people in 1950, and around 250 today - while producing the same amount of product. Automation is continuing to come to that factory - there are number of things that could be automated but their volumes are not quite high enough today to justify the upfront costs.
- Build up manufacturing (more jobs!)
Problem solved.
same reason why america has been protecting their oil with wars.
energy is the basis for everything. cheap energy is what you want. cheaper than the next guy. it doesnt matter if its for AI, transport, refining goods, etc. its the same problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4
We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.
We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money.
There will be a giant sucking sound going south.
Was he crazy or was he made to look that way as an excuse to dismiss his views? Sitting here in the 2020s knowing what we know now about "how it all works" it sure does cast a lot of doubt upon the past.
He was a super-rich guy, who had had too many people telling him he was a genius for way too long (reminds you of anybody?), and so was way too sure of himself. A bunch of his ideas were crazy, which doesn't mean others weren't trying to dismiss his views.
Which ones?
btw young idealistic me voted for Perot in 1992
His book “United We Stand” with modern context is quite amazing considering it came out in the early 90s.
I remember the debates around the time, though, and what most people said was that shipping manufacturing jobs out of the united stated would actually create prosperity here so that the manufacturing types could "move up" into less menial work. They're saying the same thing now, and although it _does_ seem that that did happen in the 90's when all the manufacturing jobs went offshore, it doesn't seem to be happening now.
American leaders lost hope in Americas ability to build the future. They decided this was as good as it's going to get and squoze the people at every level with unproductive IT, bureaucracy, consumerism. This country doesn't have a workforce capable of building the future anymore, it's dropouts and druggies the lot of them.
Exec compensation above a reasonable salary needs to to tied somehow to longer term outcomes.
I guess we could think of that as just "part of the reality," but I think its a little silly not to at least mention it.
Even good conditions and everything in country like India paying them around 10-30k$ is seriously really really good (source: I live there) and its english speaking and well integrated etc.
I saw another comment which mentioned that just merely healthcare in america can cost around 10k$/year
So Labour should be empowered in a good way but this idea still won't help america simply because of power purchasing parity.
Not to forget that America is going through some really tough economic crisis right now which it needs to figure out on. The deficit is still high and everything and companies are favoured completely capitalistic and so combined with all of these factors, we really come to the situation where it is.
I appreciate your optimism but I have my doubts. Especially when one reads the tense atmosphere of America right now
Think of it as two huge reservoirs of water, one of which is at a higher altitude. If you connect them with a pipe, they will inevitably tend to equalize - this is what is happening with globalization. It's good for the developing world but bad for the developed. The labor class not only needs to demand better working conditions, but also standards of living, environment regulations, housing, etc. etc. until equilibrium is reached. The owner class will be exploiting the difference until that happens.
The biggest issue is that even if one provides better working conditions, but also standards of living, environment regulations, housing, etc. etc
Even then, there would still be an imbalance and equilibrium would still not be reached simply because of power purchasing parity and other factors.
Plus another issue is corruption. There are rules and laws already in place but corruption takes their way
Also another thing but corruption can actually also take regulations and hijack them and actually penalize things simply for reducing competition etc.
Corruptions also the reason why we have enough food to feed the world but corruptions in the way and I am not sure if there is a way to solve it
y'know I have this pet theory that corruption is everywhere but the incentives of corruption/ways changes.
In the UK, the prices of rent are so damn high, this is a developed country.
In America, corruption takes place in the form of lobbying and the coupling of politics and finance and also the immense parity of money between the average person and the CEO salary's ratio being one of the highest and the shrewd incentives being one causing these issues in the first places being written almost in law, CEO's of major companies will fire 10_000's of people or more in a blink of an eye.
China, although secret, In my opinion has corruption inside the country as well from a more political standpoint as well
In India, there are some regulations and systems meant for good but people skirt through them via corruption.
So I don't know but to me corruption feels natural in the sense that altruism can't be the only gene and biology would dictate maliciousness to be present
This does make me sad thinking about it but I think that the nash equilibrium is unfair. This is how the system works, this is a cycle and Countries Like India/China once were super rich then became poor then are getting on their path again
At the end of the day, the person speaking about this Jensuan huang is corrupt as well selling AI hype in the first place, spiking actual prices of actual goods people buy thus contributing in inflation but also that some people accuse them of even writing this statement as a way to people please
When I had thought about it previously, I think um the best things we can do is probably reduce the incentives of corruption and then the nature of good ideas would take prevalance.
It's also just not a developing vs developed countries thing anymore as I said. We see in the news cycle how much blatantly corrupt America's current administration is becoming.
At the end of the day, facing reality is hard but that's the only way we can really put real change in the world.
if you have some thoughts about how to counter corruption in your idea/ actually creating incentives to be good and not corrupt or even malicious compliance in your idea and I am listening and I'd love to discuss more about it.
I wish there was less corruption but I am starting to think that incentives are set this way to help corruption and those themselves might've been/were brought by corruption themselves as one wrote on HN once that corruption brings more corruption , so how can one stop this vicious cycle? Because if that happens, I am telling you that America has enough money but the corrupt forces distribute them in a concentrated manner, even solving that problem to me feels like something which can help empower the labour globally
perhaps the rich can be taxed for what they deserve and that money can then be spent in developing countries labour class in your idea? This to me feels the most okay way to help but the problem is, nobody's taxing the rich/its hard because of all the loopholes/malicious legal compliance in many places.
The Weathertech CEO (or maybe I'm misremembering, in any case it was a big private company CEO) has a good talk about this IIRC.
This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to being locked out of the market on machine tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Basically, A company is bound by legal precendence to focus on capitalistic gains. It would be better if we argue the existence of other structures/their prevalence but I don't think that we can blame the entire companies but the darn structures that they are in
A CEO makes 100x (yes its not becoming hyperbole, sad reality) than workers. He is given power and he is given incentives to cut money wherever he can. He sees off sourcing and does this.
But I am not seeing America go towards a path like this, on the contrary, we are seeing America try to actively talk about workers in here and then talk about businesses without doing anything about all the issues in the first place.
There is a fundamental conflict of interests and America's promising both sides. It honestly feels political to me now because the news cycle for America is moving so damn fast (which is really really bad) that nobody comes to question these things in the first place or most aren't because they aren't literally having the time to do such with all the news cycle imo
I don't really know what America can do at this point.
> This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to being locked out of the market on machine tools.
Do you have any sources for this, I found it quite fascinating that machine tools can play such a big impact.
If it is, is it a sort of chicken and egg problem where machine tools require factories themselves which again require machine tools. If so, why couldn't Soviet Union just import some from other countries to bootstrap the production of tools which could then bootstrap all factories?
Or it's a great way to spur innovation in automation, which has other beneficial downstream effects. This is what people always seem to forget to consider, and I don't know why.
I've been hearing this since the early 90's, and I'm still not seeing any evidence that it's true.
And, the cheapest labor is slave labor like Dubai and the US (via prison labor in current use by multiple major corporations) use already. If there's no floor of standards, that creates perverse incentives and ridiculous instability.
With all of the medical group consolidation, all of the wait time woes our Canadian friends always complained about are the reality here now as well. So I’m paying more than anywhere else on the world and have to wait 6 months for a PCP appointment. We have the worst of both worlds.
An example of a country with "good healthcare" and such a system would be Germany. Extra insurance does exist there as well nowadays from what I understand but health insurance isn't tied entirely to employment and the extras are things like a 20 EUR per month to cover the co-pay on large and expensive procedures. While private insurance exists there too, I want to compare to the often touted "free healthcare" i.e. public system. There are still different providers even under the one public system.
So from a quick search, Germany has insurance rates from ~14-16% of gross salary, half of which the employee pays from their gross salary. But most insurances have an extra percentage they charge on top. I found one as an example that charges 17.29% total, which if you're self-employed, you have to cover yourself (to be comparable to your marketplace bronze plan being entirely self-paid).
Now the question becomes: Are you paying more or less as a percentage of your salary and by how much?
(and side question for your parent I guess: how does that compare to the $10k the employer pays, which would be 8.645% in this example)
Now the downside … because health care is free, everyone uses it and the wait times are longer. My grandfather recently required an MRI (non life threatening). The wait time in Ontario was 3 months. He drove to the USA, paid out of pocket, and had it done within in week …
Imo, singapore solves this well, by ensuring that some cost is borne by the patient at point of use, but it's never anything excessive. No one goes bankrupt from emergency hospital visits.
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/key-facts-about-hospitals/?...
I am not sure where your question about a percentage of your salary is valid on the face of it. Do you count the employer portion of your medical coverage as part of your salary? Do you count the tax exemption? How do you figure the taxes taken out to support Medicare/Medicaid/Veterans Health (all of which are required to support the system as it exists)? And how do you figure that for single payer systems?
So a much more direct way of comparing is to look at total costs per person, and then figure out how outcomes compare. When you do that the U.S. comes to about double the cost, and generally worse outcomes. Conservative politicians will scream about how long it takes to get procedures, but the research shows that elective procedures take about the same time (and no-one waits for emergency procedures in comparable systems).
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
I asked from an employee and cost perspective. So whether or not to count the employer portion depends on whether we're comparing one or the other. If you buy on the marketplace in the US, compare with the full cost in the example I gave for Germany. If you get insurance through your work the US/CA, compare with the employee only portion (as the employer pays part of the insurance there as well).
Theoretically it's even more complicated as at least in Germany private insurance also exists and is cheaper if you're a healthy single youth and more expensive if you're an older family ;)
But again, like you say, it is totally valid to also compare outcomes / wait times per dollar spent of course.
False. From what I know, only prescription drugs, dental, and vision are not covered. And since Americans frequently drive to Canada to buy prescription drugs, we can assume that's not as big a burden as in the US. But hospital stays, surgeries, lab testing, imaging, doctor visits, vaccines are all fully covered.
Private insurance also can cover a higher percentage, i.e. provincial plans do not always cover 100% of everything. Also, Health Care Spending accounts are in many cases part of private insurances and can be used to cover things that provincial plans do not cover at all (unapproved drugs et. al.)
Like what?
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 diabetic supplies are not covered by the ODB program.
A single person aged 65 years or older with a yearly income above $25,000 after deductions pays:
the first $100 of total prescription costs each program year (August 1 to July 31 the following year)
this is called the deductible and is paid down when you fill your prescriptions
after paying the deductible, up to $6.11 for each prescription, filled or refilled
this amount is called the co-payment
I'll stop here but I'm sure this is both similar in other provinces and/or other limits may apply in specific cases.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying the OHIP / other Canadian insurance programs aren't great overall in comparison to the US. But neither they nor I suppose Germany's "full coverage" actually are in all real world cases.
The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.
My employees are about $500 per month in a major metropolitan area, and a family of 4 can run up to $2000 a month for the most expensive plans (I cover individuals and their spouses in full for standard plans, and could cover one dependent for basic plans).
I looked at marketplace plans in WA because I was curious, and it looks like it's about the same as where I am but nowhere near what you were quoted 5 years ago.
Individuals do not cost $10k per year under any normal circumstances, and if you're paying almost $2k a month for a family bronze plan, you either have a lot of kids, you have some unusual needs, or you are getting ripped off. Even more so if you're waiting for a PCP appointment, because that is unusual as well.
In Europe (here: Germany example), which is frequently seen here as the ideal example of healthcare spending:
Employees and employers typically split around 14.6% of gross salary for public health insurance. [1]
[1] https://feather-insurance.com/blog/germany-healthcare-statis...
Depends on if you make 35k or 200k/year
And that 10k$/year can be considered middle class / heck I can even argue just slightly above middle class in India
And you can actually enjoy food and a lot of things really cheap as well
Usually the only problem becomes if something is inherently expensive (think college or land) which is where PPP does hurt but in everyday life, I think India's decent to live in.
Now I want to ask you but even if someone spends around ~$10k+ a year, even then I have heard people describe american healthcare subpar. Like why? Is it just corruption at healthcare level and lobbying efforts?
Is there truly nothing that the average american can't do about to make things better for the healthcare situation. To me its feeling like america's moving even backwards right now from cutting medicaid putting even more strain on the amount and still even on the average person themselves as well.
The costs need to be fixed, first. Moving to the government/taxes paying for it doesn't fix that.
It kinda does, bigger players have more bargaining power. There is no bigger player than the government in a universal healthcare system.
Furthermore, a significant cost in healthcare is all of the bureaucracy around billing. Much of that goes away with single payer.
If there were single payer, what would their role be in the healthcare delivery process?
Apparently they made 2.3 billion in profits on 113 billion in revenue in Q3 of 2025. How much of that friction would evaporate if they weren't in the healthcare delivery infrastructure.
Someone once said "the best part is no part" ?
This turns out to be a decent analogy to healthcare: insurance companies do not provide the coverage, universality and simplicity that a single payer system would; instead, you'll get something like insurance coverage networks providing spotty and inconsistent care.
Either approach has upsides and downsides, but single payer, universal coverage for basic and emergency healthcare seems like a no-brainer.
The USPS is obligated to deliver letters at the same cost to everyone in the country, and they do a pretty okay job at it -- I've certainly had horrid events from UPS and FedEx, and those guys get to just pass the crap delivery tasks off to USPS if they don't like it.
Lots of old people in the USofA seem to like their government run medical insurance, same with people in the VA system.
The Doge crew spent months looking for fraud waste and abuse and I don't see any big law enforcement results from all the fraud they found, and I don't see anyone crowing over all the waste they curtailed.
It's possible that the world's more complex than you imagine, and that sometimes people just do their jobs (IE the bureaucrats) and hard problems get solved.
Now, tell me again, what part of the health care system is UnitedHealth? What critical problem do they solve?
That's 2.3 billion in ONE QUARTER of 2025, on a revenue of 115 billion. In a quarter. There are four quarters in a year.
$5 trillion is how much is spent in all of healthcare in the USA for the whole year.
UnitedHealth's revenue was $500 billion (and net profits is 10 billion) for the year. For one insurance company. There are 6 that each have more than $80 billion per year in revenue. This isn't to mention the billing departments for each hospital, the claims processing providers smaller doctors need to enlist, the endless hours interacting with insurance companies, etc.
And tell me, please, what specific healthcare outcomes are driven by insurance companies?
Basically all healthcare spending in the US goes through insurance companies, Im not sure why you have a problem with that. Under m4a medicare would spend trillions a year, would you be complaining about that too? Large profits would be a problem, but that doesnt exist. Our healthcare system is rotten top to bottom, insurance is part of that but imo it gets way too much blame for existing in the system the government has created.
Obviously, paying someone 300K a year to sit on a 1 hour peer to peer explaining why they think they should do a surgery is just bad business. But, we do it, and I think a lot.
https://www.qunomedical.com/en/research/healthcare-salary-in...
But even absent any movement there you have a lot of savings to be had away from that: 1. The U.S. medical administration costs have ballooned, in large part because of the highly adversarial billing system between insurers and practitioners. Medicare/Medicaid is much less (but not completely) unpredictable. Doctors complain bitterly about the prices at times, but the system is much more efficient. 2. U.S. insurance companies are woefully inefficient. To the point that companies complained bitterly when the ACA required them to pay out 80% of premiums as medical payments. Before that there were companies making more than 20% profits. The most efficient insurance companies today use about 12% of their revenues for non-medical care. In comparison Medicaid uses about 3.9%.
There are lots of other parts you could address as well: 1. Fraud drawn to the huge payouts for medical bills. If people's accidents were just covered as a normal part of life those payouts, and most of that fraud just goes away. 2. Malpractice insurance. This is like the first, but would mostly be solved by a combination of single payer and a working medical review system (seriously, what we have now is the definition of regulatory capture).
Which the industry views as a historical accident, and now that they basically own all the hospitals and other companies, you can expect them to fix it.
I would expect neutering Doctor labor power will happen soon. This admin will get a small donation or two, and the republicans will insist that letting doctors have high wages is the sole cause of our expensive healthcare. They've never really cared about the truth, seeing as they have often claimed "Medical tort" is the cause of healthcare costs, even though places like Texas, which have limits of Medical tort payout don't have cheaper healthcare.
The US spends something like $4.9 trillion dollars on medical care, and employs around 1 million physicians, 4.5 million nurses, or 9.8 million health care workers in total [1].
If this was paid out in wages the average health care worker would be make almost $500k/year. Compare that to the wage of the average doctor at $335k/year [2] or average nurse at under $100k/year. There is a lot of money in medical care that is not going to wages.
[1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/who-are-our-h...
So why aren't they pushing for abolishing employer-based health insurance? They had no problems getting rid of pensions but for some reason nobody really lobbies for employers to get out of the health care business. The same for 401k. Why do companies have to manage those instead of just contributing some money and let the employees find the right package on the open market?
It's really weird.
This part is true.
>Then, because our society has become fundamentally incapable of saying "You are an adult. You have nobody to blame but yourself, and now you will face the consequences," this will become someone else's problem to pay for it.
Except that's an incredibly stupid short-term way of thinking. Because regardless, we end up paying for people's mistakes. As we should, because that's the whole point of society - we need to take care of the failures, the degenerates, the pieces of shit, etc because they play an important role in society - they too are humans and some of them weren't gambling away their savings out of a sense of fun, they did so to be able to continue to live in a day and age where costs continue to skyrocket, job growth is negative, and the economy is being hollowed out. We have many tools and mechanisms to help the winners in society. We need that for the opposite party, too. In winner-take-all capitalistm, the losers will always outnumber the winners. And you need to make life palatable for the losers, in hopes that their luck may one day change. Because if you don't take care of people who continue to lose and have nothing going for them, they will grow in numbers and eventually eat you.
And besides, we've bailed out enough bad actors in important sectors of the economy that main street deserves to be taken care of too.
Radical individuality is an illusion. Yes, it would be nice if everyone could be solely responsible for paying for their healthcare or retirement. But is it possible? If you can't answer if it's possible or not before you do something, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
Because "Deal with our illegal, immoral, or stupid work requests or literally lose your healthcare" is such a massive bargaining chip for them.
They would rather spend more money and have more docile and controllable workers, but not spend that money on paying workers more to be docile and controllable.
It's not about the money.
Honorable mention to Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio for introducing legislation to tax outsource payment flows.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
(US centric perspective)
I think its because I suppose we can either talk about small businesses who can be very cost cutting because their overall profits are very thin (you really can't blame them that much I think)
And the medium to large corporations either take Venture funding and want to cost cut to show more growth or maximizing share holder profit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
(taking an short summary from ddg AI)
The case you're referring to is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., decided in 1919, where the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that a corporation must operate primarily for the profit of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of employees or customers. This case is often cited as a foundational example of "shareholder primacy" in corporate law.
This is the root cause of the issue.
Do you know that there is a solution to it
They are called social enterprises and there are legal frameworks to do that. You might've seen some labels given by independent parties to show that as well
So they exist, but nobody creates them, why?
Because, its insanely hard to raise funding in them compared to the average structure. I looked up into it and the system of funding is just created such way where it rewards any and every cost cutting
I think that just like non profits get good value from doing good. A middle way where a company's purpose becomes some aspect of social good and not entirely profits. This might help but we need govts supporting them (similar to perhaps even non profits)
I have a hypothesis that if you provide easy access to lower interest loans with less collateral overall (perhaps even none?, provide micro-grants perhaps) at a federal level/banking level might be the best way to really start up some new innovation whose idea is social mission
Most people have an idea of enough, I think that academically inclined people who create companies would really appreciate this and this could even include the creation of things like google etc. which really just turned evil from dont be evil because of the wiki link/case that happened imo
Taxation as you say in the 25% tax won't really work that well imo as we saw recently in the tax scandal recently in America where billions were lost.
Although so much of US especially its politics is so much lobbied etc. that I find the idea of this change just stopping because it could prove a real threat to the completely capitalist corporations which will fire 1000's of people in an instant
Also whenever you position something as tax, the capitalist forces would find ways to evade it anyway, here let me give some ideas on top of my head
What would happen if people paid outsourcing companies via stablecoin crypto, how would you tax that?
What if things like this can count as gig work and laws related to that?
What if an outsourcer creates their own mini company and such creates an invoice, I am not sure but this would be considered a service so how would that work, is there a service tax if so how much %?
Suppose somebody got a consultancy company to work on a project and then just created the project end to end and deployed it and just tweaked it enough where its a mini saas designed just for that company, the company/consultancy can argue its a saas, so how would the taxation work for saas. Are we gonna reach a point where even things like saas could be highly taxed?
The easiest way seems to me crypto for (bootstrappable outsourcing?) but depending upon the size of the outsourcing, they can employ multiple methods as I gave.
How would the govt approach the multiple loopholes as such?
The whole issue stems from a pure capitalist system where it sometimes rewards to do malicious things so long term, countries need to find ways of supporting social entreprises/funding them.
Also, last I saw, he wasn’t prevented from speaking at any point in those past 2 decades and I don’t remember any mention from him about these issues despite the fact that there’s been bipartisan concerns about manufacturing in China for at least a decade.
It’s almost like he’s trying to position his company’s profit growing enterprises as a part of helping the poorest Americans to justify the U.S. taxpayer paying for a lot of it, or at least assuming all downside risk…
20yr ago you could at least plausibly lie to yourself and say that things were ok. The seeds were sown back in the late 60s early 70s at least. Fair amount of gas was put on the fire in the 80s.
But, I don’t think anyone is naive enough to propose such a thing seriously. It is impossible to believe that some administration wouldn’t use it for political favors.
Why? It's selfish, but since the US and EU sent jobs out to India and China. India and China, have created protections that make getting those jobs back nearly impossible short of stopping payments. At the same time, these countries have huge trading imbalances (see FR complaining that their CN trade imbalance is untenable) and have become the defacto for cheap labor.
I’m hoping that free markets tend to produce winners more often than protectionist ones. I don’t really want stagnant US companies to just stick around because they cozied up to the government.
Why does it seem like it is getting pushed down relative to other posts that have less upvotes and with longer times?
Here are some posts that are currently higher ranked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445412 currently 8 hours and 82 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465493 currently 4 hours and 29 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497589 currently 5 hours and 82 points
It does not make sense unless some force is pushing the Jensen post down, or the other posts up?
What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems? It's weapons isn't it[1].
That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization, because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from before.
Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get it.
Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's "entirely there".
[1]: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/se...
Motorola tried that not too long ago. Didn't go well. If you want to decimate American wages, you could do it, but if you at the same time deport people who were the most ready to work for a pittance, it's going to be hard to do this without riots. Then again, Stephen Miller wants those riots, so maybe you're right.
The crux of the matter is that those workers won't be able to afford the iPhones they're assembling, however.
This is wishful thinking, and similar to how how video game producers think if they stop N people from pirating a game, there will be N more copies of the game sold.
No, instead of that the game will be played less. And analogously, less iPhones would be produced.
You could argue that less iPhones would be good for the world, but that’s orthogonal to the topic.
iPhones have nothing to do with videogames. They are material objects, not zero marginal cost copies.
edit: and the point is that, across the economy, it is very good for labor. While the iPhone's cost would rise a little bit nominally, it wouldn't rise as a portion of income, which is the only important number. The retail price would probably rise a bit more than that, but that's because it is a luxury good and its price would rise as incomes rose.
Oh, that was not my point at all.
It's that we simply do not have the scale and manpower to do it. Maybe in ten years with more automation sure, but definitely not in the Steve Jobs era.
It's an interesting tradeoff, make the outliers the best in the world at what they do, or make the average person slightly more competent.
I think it's difficult to design a system that makes both outcomes true at the same time. The countries that have succeeded in doing it so far have a tiny population compared to the hundred millions of students US/China/India has now.
China seems to be slowly moving to a system comparable to the US one where outliers are prioritized. India has avoided it so far, which is why we see so many generic software engineers from India. I wonder if that stance will change with that category of jobs rapidly shrinking.
Of course they will, Americans banks and “tech” companies are always coming up with creative ways to extend shady lines of credit to the poorest Americans.
This isn't a fair characterization. The people on reddit who complain that the coffee place is only scheduling them for 10 hours a week and that people are being stingy with the tips might actually prefer the factory job with a regular 40 hours, occasionally mandatory overtime, and $5/hr more than what Starbucks offers. If you disagree, then I suspect that there's no universe possible where you're satisfied without the population of the United States being cut by three quarters.
1. Low paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops
2. Low paid Chinese workers glue iphones together in sweatshops
3. Well paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops, and to make this possible we have a massive tariffs regime that makes consumer goods massively more expensive and massively increases the price of all manufactured goods.
Pick your poison. They call economics the "dismal science" for a reason.
What America really needs is massive deflation in the cost of everything, curbing income inequality (which is driving inflation) and moving to renewables (cost of oil/gas also drives inflation).
I'm pretty sure this is what Apple wants you to believe, while Chinese company offers minimal wage for workers who assemble phones. One could never afford a decent lifestyle on a minimal wage.
I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive.
Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices and regulations. (there’s likely some modern process improvements they could add too but those won’t increase productively as greatly).
To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but it’s very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50 years). It could with a little push from the Government catch up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.
It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really low energy prices, after all.
We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, transparent, and understandable costs for consumers.
There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent seekers.
Snark aside, let me remind you of the term "enchitification": it came about because companies in theoretically competitive markets make good products shittier.
In theory, this ISO setup has saved untold millions of dollars (probably billions), by operating the grid regionally in a much more efficient manner than in the days of old. It is hard to tell though as you can't do a direct comparison very easily. The economists certainly like the price signals though, but there are numerous issues.
I'm worried that if we were to double energy production, all of the new surplus would be soaked up by data centers.
If the point of producing more energy is to produce more products, and instead it gets gobbled up by idiots giving us the next crappy phone app that runs in the cloud, then it's not me that's missing the point si it?
Sure, and if they were cranked out of American factories, that'd be awesome. But since they're shipped across the Pacific on a boat, they're not really the kind of products that help.
>If you don't like the apps, by all means don't buy them.
If apps are all we get out of doubling power production, then I'll do one better and we'll just not double power production.
For things that strengthen our country's economy, and provides a future for Americans, sure.
For some internationally-owned corporate conglomerates to churn out more brainwashing software garbage, no, I don't think me or other voters should give any support for that.
Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm.
Dude it’s all good. Just snort another line and fall in the techno-delusion.
It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain moral purity, of course).
Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and towards spending more money for less goods.
Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to land lines.
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? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?
There’s no reason American cars need to exist either, they basically all perform worse dollar-for-dollar, feature-for-feature, than foreign cars.
In fact, let’s offshore everything. There’s no reason not to use Filipinos for McDonald’s and In-n-Out drive-thru speakers.
Let’s all adopt Chinese tang ping. Lay down and die. Treat every effort of labor as replaceable and void of respect.
If China and India wanted to wage effortless war with the US all it would have to do is stop exporting goods and labor to us.
It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense.
It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket".
And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?
Services sell time and skills directly, instead of in the form of a tangible good. That's it.
In the late 90's when we talked about the transition to the Service Economy, jobs such as call center were touted as the way forward for the recently unemployed textile workers. Until we found we could move those to the Caribbean, Philippines and India.
I remember a number of people talking about how they could make decent money bar-tending and waiting tables. Until the economy slowed down and people stopped eating out.
Service is job that you pay someone else to do because you don't want to do it, which is great until you have less income. Then it becomes a budget line item that can be cut.
Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always a good job. I’m not sure if you realize what kind of skilled labor went into manufacturing:
1. Machining 2. Tool and Die 3. Welding 4. Etc
Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars an hour at 18. That’s good money, and at the time if I would’ve stuck to it I would’ve been able to afford a decent life. My stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good highly rewarding job.
Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a living wage. Unfortunately even with such “wage suppression” America is still one of the most expensive countries to live in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You cannot have both.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid...
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...
Do they? Who advocates near limitless spending? Last I checked foreign aid was less than 1% of the federal budget.
I would have believed Ukraine to have been the largest.
Would that not come with the end of the dollar as a reserve currency trough which the world essentially subsidizes american imports?
- $20/hr for hazardous work is "good money"
- your suggestion that we become an export economy, here on a forum where many people are working on products that will be purchased by the world but not counted as exports (examples of non-exporters who collect money from around the globe: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, AWS)
- the idea that the way to prosperity is for Americans to move back into lower-productivity jobs. (Here I ask you to look up the revenue per employee of Costco and JP Morgan and on the other hand good manufacturers like Steelcase and Lockheed Martin and Eaton. What do you think happens if we move the workforce from higher-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs?)
- your confusion of an economic point with a political point
Its called "capitalism".
Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
If that industry was still in the area, they'd be automating the shit outta it. It's just not worth it right now considering there are always literal wage slaves in some place they can ship in for their sweatshops
Also, even locally produced premium clothing uses materials sourced from literal slave labour. There is no consumer decision anywhere, because the immorally sourced materials are just too cheap... And if you're willing to pay a premium for your morals, someone in the middle will just take it and fulfill the order with the cheap stuff.
... and the jobs that were provided go poof again.
How's that much different than the parent's claim of "The consumers outsource every time they select for cost."?
People select for cost when resources are finite. This is going to be the case until we reach a post-scarcity economy, rich people or not. It's not like under communism everyone was driving around in lambos on gold paved streets.
Are you haggling with your mechanic, landlord/mortgage lender, or grocery store to pay them more money than they're asking for, or do you purposely seek out suppliers that do not provide the offering with the best value?
Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and picking things off the rack.
However that is likely exactly what happened when it was finally pretty much killed of in the 90s. At some point clothes were made largely domestically. Some manufacturers started offshoring while others didn't. At that point consumers had a choice, the choice they made was to drive the onshore industries out of business or offshore.
There might be some argument people have more surplus wealth now though, and they'd rather en masse buy those domestic products than healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing, and the other stuff that absorbs all the income we can muster. Of course I think there is always a market for people with money for luxury goods, some of them buy USA because it is USA.
~75% of cars are bought used and according to Experian only 33.5% of those are financed. When adding 80% new cars financed you're already under 50%. Then consider already paid off vehicles.
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 by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.
The US company outsources the manufacturing to China because "they have to" (I don't necessarily agree with that), Chinese company keeps the assembly line running a few extra hours and resells the units back in the US under a slightly different name.
This equation is so comical to me:
The greed-driven US company screams that it's "fake", yet they didn't do anything illegal by outsourcing, just put Americans out of jobs. But if they don't build in China, a competitor will.
The Chinese company is driven by the same "profit over everything" motive and doesn't infringe on the US companys trade mark, but competes with the US company with essentially an identical product minus the R&D costs.
US company cries foul, "they're stealing our trade secrets!" Creates FUD about China but has no legal standing to do anything about it. Reeks of the same "immoral but completely legal" argument the former/would-be employees make
Most people don't drive around in a base Honda Civic.
[0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line, what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to produce?
Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect substitute, that means that the value has not changed.
Paying more for the local good means your money is worth less, as it buys less value.
Your question on the production line doesn't account for all of the precursors also being local, plus the local energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on. Everything tends to be more expensive, otherwise the cost of managing offshore production wouldn't be worth the effort.
Total isolation only works when there's still room to grow by way of some underutilized resource- cheap labor, land, or something extractable from the environment like wood or minerals.
From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.
Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.
Companies are also constrained to do labor arbitrage once the rules allow it, but they were the ones who lobbied the rules into place and they were the ones to profit from the rules, so they have far more culpability here.
I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like general labor building houses or working on fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that stuff wasn't nearly as rote.
You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you think that sounds easy but wait until you're up all night taking care of a screaming infant and then have to come in so your family doesn't starve, then you make a simple mistake and now part of your body is gone. Often a overnight shift. I would find myself waking up at 2,3 am moving my arms but completely unconscious. Sometimes I would catch myself before I stick my hand into something that would break it apart. One place I was working, about half the people were missing fingers.
I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets and instead do the awful work making them is beyond me unless you are so desperate it's your only option.
I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).
Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".
This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
(only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
>Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown)
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19... >1910.212(a)(1) >Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc.
> a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.
I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old working in a poultry processing plant:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children...
These companies know what they're doing.
It looks like that plant in particular has serious issues. Someone else died after the 16 year old, bringing the number of deaths in recent years to 3.
This one in particular seems to know what it is doing: Googling "Mar-Jac Poultry" does not bring up any of the issues, nor are they listed in the Wiki page.
we really do call those stamping machines 'finger eaters'
My first job with a stamping machine was in a company with about 30 production workers. This was early 2000s in the southern US, all the workers were from Latin America and I think that most of them were not here legally(I say this because the company used temp agencies to employ the workers and at one point later they wanted to bring one of them on in a management role so they had me(also a temp) ask if the person wanted too switch the the higher paying but also requiring them to submit legal documents role).
Even under those circumstances, I never saw the company do something that skirted OSHA regs. Their stamping machine was a POS that was annoying as hell to use, mostly because the light curtain and other safetys kept tripping but it was never bypassed.
People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing.
Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.
You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave.
> I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior.
It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.
So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous, monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a shit about. Wonderful.
I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can openly be.
My statement is in reply to those who are unconcerned about exploiting desperate societies.
We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide.
Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.
In practice, not sure. But it's not like the prices dropped drastically when mfg. was outsourced, the companies pocketed a most of the savings as profit.
For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't fact check me, it's just a guess here). She can probably make 5 shirts an hour.
A woman in the United States will make $16 per hour and still make just 5 shirts (or less - more rules in the US about breaks, and probably streaming Netflix too)
Now the company that sells the shirt at Walmart for $10 will have a profit margin of probably $5 per shirt from the Indian labor, and $1 from the US labor.
Technically after the industry is built out more we may be able to squeeze more shirts per hour if we start doing technical innovations (for example we make a machine that pre-sews 5 of the seams because of innovation. This is something that won't happen if the center of gravity is in India, but may happen in the US. (Actually today that may happen in India as tech is taking on its own thing there now).
For instance, actual MiUSA jeans from companies like 3sixteen and Raleigh Denim retail for ~$200+, which is a far cry from the $30 to $50 that most people think jeans "should cost" (and that companies like American Eagle, who have long since outsourced their manufacturing, are happy to provide). Sure, it's not as if MiUSA jeans HAVE to be a few hundred dollars (I believe there are some Gustin's jeans you can pick up for $120 or so), and there are offshored jeans like Levi's which are already overpriced. But you'd have to be very naive to think that there would not be a massive and quite frankly unbearable sticker shock for the vast majority of people if you were to somehow force all domestic clothing demand to be met through domestic production. You could maybe sell it with some very effective austerity propaganda, but good luck with that.
There's also brands made in China for cheap with Euro brand labels attached that sell for several hundred. Cost is not the same as price.
The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored.
BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity here.
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. The shirt is shipped to Colombia for final assembly. And finally it's shipped to the USA for purchase. Move any one of those steps to the USA, and the other steps may still be located elsewhere.
Same is true of other items, like cars. Ford may "manufacture" in the US, but the parts and tooling are sourced from elsewhere. It can't manufacture the chips here, because the tooling and process are exclusive to Taiwan. Even if you bought the plant and moved it here, the making of the tools and the processes are still specific to Taiwan. And some steps may be impossible to "bring home", either because some other country has all the raw materials, or all the expertise, or local laws prohibit some part of the process being done here.
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 when the truck is made in Mexico entirely (which I think they still are). I know that's not "the entire supply chain" but it certainly becomes a center of gravity.
Last year many people were talking about dev shops changing their "center of gravity" from the US to other places like Poland. In other words, CEO here, EVERYTHING else is in Poland. Wherever that center of gravity is, that's the country that will benefit the most. They may even hire a remote worker in the US that is up all night - but it will be the exception, not the rule to hire US people.
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 country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.
It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.
Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.
There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.
This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.
There are limits on migration for a reason... that doesn't even consider the impacts on the larger society by weakening social cohesion.
Even then, there's plenty of indication of movement from those who want a Communist society... you only need to look at the NYC election, and the Venezuela protests to see that. Without a longer term consideration for society as part of where business/corporations operate, you will only see more drift in that direction.
If this tiny movement towards "communism" amounts to anything of note in 20 years, I will be surprised. The pattern I've seen is that even if the current push is headed by idealistic leaders who don't give in to self-interested expedience (ie corruption), the next crop won't be. And the corporatist structure has been very good at neutralizing any real reforms, especially in the US.
[0] given equity with things like people who have been here for quite some time - those are undocumented Americans. For comparison, adverse possession, by which you can gain exclusive title to a piece of real estate by breaking the law usually only requires a few decades
Ecological factors from logistics are missed technological development opportunity from not having local production are not factored in here as well.
You're both right but you appear to differ on particularities, like if it's good to bring all manufacturing onshore.
I'd rather address Jensen's could-be-apology which pretty much mimics Grok's "Oops, I made some pedo images, sorry... but move on, nothing to see here."
Yes, Nvidia, Apple and AMD are the companies that drove the US chip manufacturing overseas. The problem is, thanks to that, they are now forcing us to pay for their enormous margins and for bringing chip production back here, all the while they swim in money.
On top of that, we are now supposed to appreciate their newly acquired wisdom and be thankful when they lecture us about what's good for America.
How do you explain that? Why do the locals vote against the countries that provide them the jobs? Are you also pro-Trump because you live in that town?
Don't commit the mistake of thinking Trump politics is a rupture from what came before when it comes to how the US treats Europe.
It's been economic aggression after economic aggression from both parties since Obama. Different styles, same core ideas.
Not only the direct jobs, but also the other support ones - automation, suppliers, maintenance, facilities work, etc.
That's a significant shift moving from final assembly to forcing most of the supply chain to be relocated.
Plenty of countries have negotiated more favorable tariff positions.
There have been several favorable trade deals as well as several announcements for new production facilities in the US... this may cost more than imports, but there's something to be said for domestic security in terms of access, especially in the likes of a global pandemic or war.
I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, or situation, only in that it isn't exactly an idea completely without merit and just blindly applied at random.
If the economy is doing so well because of these tariffs why are they hiding numbers?
Its not even the first time US tried tariffs like these, it didn't go well then but Trump talks about like it was a golden age.
Strategically, it does not make sense for democratic countries to have higher trade barriers with each other than with autocrat states. But over time the hybrid warfare by autocrat states leveraged social media to convice people to vote against their own interest e.g. brexit.
Biden, really? If you’re attempting to stop disinformation, please start with yourself.
Michelin opened their US headquarters in Greenville in 1984. BMW opened their plant in South Carolina in 1994.
How was (at the time) Senator Joe Biden of Delaware responsible for that in any way? Why would he care so much about South Carolina?
The real reason is shipping tires and vehicles across oceans is expensive.
Michelin invested significantly in the site recently and BMW added a ton of EV manufacturing capacities, we are talking of a 1.7 billions dollars investment.
All of this is linked to subsidies they got through the IRA on top of local South Carolina subsidies. They had to do these investments to remain competitive in the US market as the subsidies are tied to local manufacturing and the conditions significantly limit what parts they can import. It was a direct attack on European manufacturing masquerading as green investments.
Guess which president passed the IRA.
[1] Eager for Credits, BMW Breaks Ground on SC Battery Plant https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a44361301/bmw-ba...
[2] Inflation Reduction Act 'super aggressive,' Macron tells his US hosts (https://www.euractiv.com/news/inflation-reduction-act-super-...)
[3] Michelin's US investments won't affect Europe, CFO says https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/michel...
The past years have shown that many have no problem to change affiliation with the zeitgeist. I feel many Americans are secretly pro-Trump as long as they make money. If there would be more liberals in US tech we would see much more leaks coming from companies such as Apple, Facebook, Reddit, Google, about how the senior leadership is supporting the government policies.
For example with Facebook it needed a woman to get sexually harrassed out of her job and write a book called "careless people" so that it is reported that Facebook engineers were actively embedded with the Trump campaign while at the same time democrat voters (black people) were shown literal fake news ads to keep them away from voting.
I have not seen one Facebook senior engineer being ostracized on HN for working on the trump campaign. Everbody made their millions and joined the next big thing, with us worshipping their amazing FAANG credentials.
If the people who worked on DOGE do a "SHOW HN:" nobody would call it out.
I just look at the patterns of things that are downvoted to death. Comments that would come out of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk's mouth any day of the week are regularly downvoted to hell here.
It's not a matter of 'liberal' vs whatever anymore, it's a matter of expertise and basic ethics versus corruption riding upon anti-intellectualism, cloaked in naked bigotry. Say what you will about the prevailing value system among HN commenters, this place isn't that bad.
Am I saying they should be disenfranchised from the country? Have I said they I have no empathy for their concerns and hope the worst for them? No.
What I said was it was infuriating when they are doing those things to the ~40% of Texans who are liberal. I didn't say it happens on all liberal forums, I'm complaining about the cases where it does happen. And please don't shift things because I said "everyone cheers" because it should be obvious it is a common phrase and doesn't literally mean I checked and every person on the forum commented.
What makes you think the problem that caused the industry to go won't also cause it to fail if somebody forces them to stay or tries to bring them back? Also, why one industry leaving made people there destitute?
Those things are always more complicated than they seem.
There was a strong dollar making imports cheaper and exports more expensive. At the same time there were reductions in tariffs (Tokyo Round of GATT) as well as increased quota allowances from other countries, particularly China, than were previously allowed (the Multi-Fiber Arrangement).
At the time, this particular area of the country had turned into a global textile hub and it was devastated as a byproduct (over-saturation of a single industry). Now if you come to the area, you will see all of the old mills converted into apartment complexes, coworking spaces, wedding venues, etc just to preserve the architecture.
The whole area is beautiful now and has been one of the fastest growing parts of the country for almost a decade. I moved here 25 years ago when the changes were just starting but the natives will tell you the whole story. I think a PBS documentary was being made about it too.
If we have an infinite supply of labor with no better place to allocate them then sure, any additional job is good. But that's not the case. We have a constrained labor supply, so is it better overall to focus on high value, high pay jobs, even in manufacturing instead of aiming for the entire supply chain for everything?
In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan, a democracy, and one of our geopolitically closest allies. This business went to TSMC because they did a better job producing these chips than either Intel or AMD (or AMD's successor, Global Foundries). The Twinscan machines that fab the chips are from ASML in the Netherlands, another democracy and geopolitical ally. The parts for those machines come from a truly global supply chain. Modern chip manufacturing is an absolute marvel of global integration.
American consumers and businesses benefited from this arrangement in the form of very competitively priced hardware. Most of the manufacturing was in Asia, but most of the profits were to American companies. This is why America is today the richest country on Earth. It simply would not have happened like it did without free trade.
China's low wages and integrated supply chain can beat American manufacturing. China cannot beat the combined talent of the free world. Along with immigration, from the likes of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, free trade and an open economy was what once made America great.
In the context of Jensen's would-be-apology, it doesn't matter where the offshoring went. Nvidia, Apple and AMD drove the US chip manufacturing overseas, and thanks to that, they are now a virtual cartel which commands enormous margins, so they can "mercifully" argue about bringing chip production back here... at our expense of course.
While paying through the nose, we're also supposed to appreciate their crocodile tears and listen to their drivel about what's good for America.
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 and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve himself and get a better job the school would presumably find someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line is that they expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some point it's not about him needing to upskill it's about expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages.
I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers can't pay more because it's become structural and they don't actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to agree with parent poster:
>> 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I get that from another perspective your answer is also correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45 software people that want to make their own amazing game does not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather than collectively start a game company now.
What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc... because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having a say".
There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long periods of time. So over time, the policies that are continually ratified do reflect our collective choices.
And for at least the last several decades, yes we have collectively decided through our policy directions that there are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of material prosperity.
I’m not convinced it is, or that it lasts.
They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us since automated systems require engineers to design them and technicians to maintain them.
(OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)
The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine.
The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.
Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
I’d like to see this worked out for real.
On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.
On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in the last 50 years.
So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid compared to lower-productivity workers.
It sounds more fair to pay people according to how much and how hard they work, but economically it tends not to work out.
Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100 people in the population, and a bunch of them are ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing. If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and the employers would reduce wages. (I’ve occasionally contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive: they can afford it, so they might as well, because it makes it more expensive to compete with them.)
Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so that owning more than one house were highly discouraged (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different jobs with very different salaries would could still result in having enough income to afford to live in approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and some might afford one that is much fancier than someone else’s, but if the pressure that makes someone like a hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech worker to pay for a similar house went away, the situation could be much improved.
(California, like many places, has strictly too few residential units in the places that people want to live, so just adjusting prices won’t help much.)
And if everyone else's time has become more valuable then too has the time that is being saved by buying services.
If my time as a programmer is worth significantly more now than it was 25 years ago, then the time I save by buying services is worth more.
There's a reason that someone making $1mil/year is going to be willing to pay more for the exact same haircut that someone making $70k/year also gets. The time being saved is worth more to them.
So while the $99/hr haircut might technically save me money/time, suppliers of haircuts are generally willing to give the same haircut for $30/hr. If one supplier tried to pin their prices to the growth of their customers' income, they would go out of business. That is because the value of the suppliers time isn't increasing at the same rate.
Note, I usually use clippers on myself about once a week. Sometimes I'll use a shaver to get a closer shave, but generally doesn't matter as I don't care if there's a little growth, which is noticeable unless I literally shave daily anyway... which I'm too lazy to do, and definitely not able to pay someone else to do.
There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.
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
Might be an interesting exercise to consider why you consider those jobs as not being "labor jobs."
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 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 7.5M or something (maybe something like 1.5% from 7.5M-15M, 2.0% from 15M-50M, and then 3% from 50M+, this could be done more smoothly if desired). We'd need to penalize capital flight with something (something like a 40% exit tax or something). The IRS would have to be greatly empowered to support this, net worth declarations would all be declared by the tax filer, and if audited and found to be incorrect, the IRS will purchase the asset at 70% of its declared value (or some other better mechanism can be thought of to ensure that NW is declared accurately). We'd also simplify the tax code in all other cases, removing all forms of credit/deductions/etc on income. This will free up IRS audit resources to focus on declared net worth fraud. Remove all forms of non-sin tariffs entirely.
Get rid of entitlements taxes and spend and replace it with a negative income tax that is calculated to provide a very base level of existence that never disincentives work.
Then remove government backed student loans, but make them treated the same as other loans (ie. students can declare bankruptcy). Kids should also get a 5k per annum payment that's held in trust by the government that's invested into the US total market that gets linearly released to them from the age of 18-30.
I also propose that we remove all consumption taxes that aren't a sin tax. Ie. keep taxes on alcohol, gas, etc. Implement a very high luxury goods tax.
Then completely change the medical system to be more similar to Singapore with mandatory copays of something like $20-50 (to prevent abuse), but also provide universal coverage with the government setting prices with pharma/providers.
Dissolve the ability of states to collect taxes and provide federal funding per head. Standardize/centralize all stuff like the DMV. Ie. have a single federal agency to de-duplicate work.
I don't think this stuff is viable at all (would require dramatic tweaks), but it'd be a very interesting thought experiment to see how something that tries to encourage business friendliness, the strength of the income earning population, and incentives capital effiency (over tax effiency) and investment does.
I really think that the fundamental market forces of capitalism are very powerful, we just need to change the incentives structure so that the benefits aren't captured strictly by the ultra 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.
Every jobs post: "this doesn't fix X" 'this isn't the biggest issue'.
And the republicans keep dog walking straight to their goals while we talk about the best arrangement for deck chairs.
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).
If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.
For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever.
And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer.
Something something privatize profits something something socialize cost centers.
This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.
There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it.
If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.
It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.
Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up.
Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether.
Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well.
I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.
There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch.
Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work.
Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there.
People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be.
What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
> 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 expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for.
(There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of the country.)
> 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.
Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in.
So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible.
We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. 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.
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!":
In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
Reading this, one would make certain incorrect assumptions about pay in service jobs based on imperfect knowledge of skills required. One might assume service jobs in general do not require any skills at all beyond the capability to slightly warm a room.
The famous counterpoint is obviously "teacher" with its starting salary in the $20 range, but that's too easy so I will start with phlebotomist (starting under $15/hr). And I'll toss in chef (~$22/hr-$25/hr in my city) as an alternate to suggest that even in service industries skill matters (because there is a range here).
"AI" is going to coincidentally collapse the same time this tyrannical presidency ends
what drugs are you doing where you truly believe eliminating millions of jobs is going to bring "prosperity"
it's going to "silo" wealth even further and make everything more unaffordable
next generation won't even be able to own a car forget a home
Not self-serving at all.
> Since founding Nvidia in 1993, he has overseen its transformation into a central supplier of computing platforms for AI, data centers, and high-performance systems. That position provides direct exposure to the industrial requirements behind digital innovation, including power generation, fabrication capacity, and workforce availability. From this vantage point, energy is the basis of the economy from which everything is built.
This reads just like AI slop: I am applying for a government advisor position. Can you please write me a short paragraph linking the work experience listed in my resume with the position?
Don’t worry, soon they’ll earn as much as those without PhDs and college degrees thanks to LLM overlords. What an absolute clown.
A fair number of the executives who shipped the jobs overseas 10-40yr ago lamented that the numbers simply didn't make sense any other way.
Racing to the bottom, essentially.
Corporations control congress, if they really lamented offshoring they would have done something about it.
The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.
Fundamentally Americans want to consume more services and especially goods than the people living in America produce. The only ways to square that circle are
1. To get more people. But by 2024 prime age labor force participation was at essentially record numbers[0] so there aren't more people available domestically, and we saw in the election that swing voters are not fans of mass unskilled immigration.
2. To produce more with the same people (i.e. increase productivity). But in most cases this is up to technological advancement and not in the hands of policymakers. There are probably some sectors that could benefit from deregulation (e.g. construction) but those regulations have their own constituencies that don't want to see them go.
3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters hate this.
4. To import more from abroad.
In the end "offshoring" is the only politically viable option.
Inflation from immigration/offshoring restrictions is not evenly distributed. It's essentially a purchasing power transfer from everyone else to low-skilled workers (who no longer face competition from cheaper overseas labor, so have more bargaining power and hence can demand higher wages from society).
No doubt this short-sightedness was the result of our debt-based monetary system. The disconnection of money from long term value-creation created a cycle of speculative booms and busts which made short term bets the most viable strategy to ensure that execs would get their bonuses.
Also, the perverse legal concepts of 'corporate personhood' and 'limited liability' sealed our fate, ensuring that companies could pollute our land and water with chemicals... China was all too happy to send children's toys full of phthalates and other endocrine disruptors our way, ensuring that the next generation would be pacified and struggling with hormone-related issues (I leave you to infer cultural implications...)
Seems like China got their revenge for the Opium wars!
Today We have lights out manufacturing.
One thing I would highlight, is that the issue with offshoring wasn’t the loss of jobs as much as it was underemployment.
Going from factory foreman to burger flipper is what hollowed out that class of workers.
The Root cause failure for the offshoring model for the offshoring nation is retraining difficulty.
If people could be magically retrained into new roles, then offshoring would always work.
Don’t bother retraining, just make people financially whole at the cost of those who offshored/outsourced.
IMO, I’d rather china be the economic super power and the US leeching off that technological progress and manufacturing the same way say Scandinavia or most of Europe currently does.
Those Europeans get 2 months off while china and the US duke it out and they get all the technological benefits with no downsides. It’s genius.
Everyone talks about the US being number one, but no one wants to put in the effort. You all want to sacrifice work life balance and give up those remote jobs to push the US back to the top? Thats what it takes.
Take an example of tesla vs byd. Heck, The electric MI car I saw looked so good and nice, its wild
Most of the money I feel like America's still has lots of influence is probably from well established tech corporations or similar but even those get challenged by leaner companies but also that all of them have bought into the hype of AI
America's economy is on such a weak line in my opinion because the only thing which stops all hell from breaking loose is that stocks are doing good just because of the AI bubble.
When the AI bubble bursts, I have a predication that all hell might loose free (I sincerely hope that I am not right though)
Ironic that the thing which would in the end hurt america is the company selling hype who is trying to doublespeak itself into showing something but being completely different when you realize the downstream effects of the AI bubble crashing
Europe is unconcerned. And they benefit from that. I mean real benefits like work life balance not benefits like talking points about which country has the bigger dick.
Do you really want America to be number 1 while you’re slaving away at your job 996 in pollution infested cities?
I wouldn't say Europe is unconcerned either. Europe has less issues than America because its collective debt feels very low compared to America
France recently went into all out stalemate of sorts and in countries like UK as well there are some really systemetic issues and not vice versa
Namely the most heard is the lack of innovation. People (here on HN) have compared Europe to a colloseum, saying its stuck in time and that there is a lack of innovation.
The startup culture is disfragmented etc.
There are some real concerns about Europe as well being impacted because a huge chunk of jobs were in the manufacturing business (think cars) and with things like BYD etc., Europeans themselves are worried about being able to compete with their price.
the point being that Europe has some concerns as well and they stem from their decision. The regulations make businesses genuinely hard to start.
(Note that I still believe that Europe is really good compared to America in a lot of genuine metrics in my opinion as well but then again, its not really a fair discussion if we don't discuss both sides of the coin)
It’s hard to measure this directly but there quantitative metrics that correlate. Suicide rates for example, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/heart-medicine-for-a...
[1] https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-...
on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value than china.
A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the world was ash.
Where at?
so thats the floor for anyone willing to put in a few years of work.
The problem, though, is that 70% of US manufacturing happens in small town/rural areas, which is not where the people looking for jobs are found, so you get this curious disconnect.
There is a reason why for instance ships and raw materials output is measured in tonnage, since that is the actual thing produced, the value is secondary to that. That is you would want to measure the actual amount of goods produced rather than what they sold for, obviously only amongst comparable categories.
Not because off shoring was a mistake 40-50 years ago; but because technology now enables automating a lot of the type of jobs that we off shored. I'm referring to robotics and and other innovations in manufacturing and assembly that reduces the amount of cheap labor needed and calls for higher skilled labor that the west can still provide.
The higher cost of skilled labor can be offset against the also substantial cost of shipping. A typical car from China costs between 1-2K $ to transport. And that's of course before tariffs. Also shipping is slow and building locally means faster delivery of custom orders, which is another thing enabled by modern manufacturing technology. There are many valid reasons to re-shore and re-thinking supply chains.
The Chinese are moving ahead applying the same kind of technologies in e.g. automotive than many other manufacturers with the exception of maybe relatively new companies like Tesla and Rivian that have embraced a software intensive approach to cars already. And that includes spinning up BYD plants on different continents. Compared to a BYD factory, GM and Ford look like they have a bit of catching up to do. Their lack of competitiveness on the international market has a lot to do with the fact that they failed to modernize their businesses. Also, they seem to be repeating their mistake of the nineteen eighties when the Japanese kicked their behinds with better cars and more modern manufacturing. Their reflex to blame the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese (or whomever) for their own failings is not a great one. It's going to yield the same result unless they change.
A bunch of assholes in offices (edit: and a handful of C-suite above them of course) got rich on RSUs at the expense of the entire rest of the economy. The factory shut down and all those workers are getting screwed driving for some gig service or order picking for ecommerce or whatever.
Number go up only matters if the number going up is strongly associated with things getting better.
And it didn't even necessarily get better for the asshole in the office. A few of them won but most of them can't afford to live within an hour of where he works, have a family, etc, etc.
Whole lot of good it did us.
You can get $15/h jobs and cheap, giant spyware TV’s now. Are you not impressed with your bread and circuses?
Real change feels out of the way so of course people forget that that they are capable of change in the first place.
The difference is that people work less than ever and obesity is now a sign of poverty rather than wealth. Depression era US had people actually starving. The relative wealth of the middle class in the sixties and seventies is something you might rightfully mourn a little. But even then, there was a lot of poverty.
Calories and consumer goods are cheaper than ever. Housing, education and healthcare are more expensive than they've ever been. There has been a marked decrease in the amount of personal and economic autonomy available to the middle class and below over the past 40yr. Look at how medium skill level workers lived in the 1980s. It's basically a foreign country compared to today.
Having a robot vacuum to smear your dog's shit all around doesn't actually make you wealthier if you can't afford a house for the dog to shit in and apartments don't allow dogs.
What people want is a comfortable and fulfilling life, both of which are assessed on a relative basis. The modern economy has given them a rat race and shitty highs and they know it. Happy pills don't make depressed people happy. They just make them not depressed.
What you describe are first world problems.
Then make it litigative open season for any affected or displaced person to court mandate a near-blank check to make up for the generational contempt of US citizens.
Regardless of whether you bring or do not bring manufacturing back you also have to fix these socioeconomic issues before all can prosper.
Let's see what the United States Secretary of Commerce has to say regarding onshore manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUXedYX7aE&t=17s
In my mind, the reason (or the original intent) for off-shoring was to reduce costs to be able to sell more X (because cheaper is easier to sell) and selling more X means more profit and better market capitalisation (if the company selling X was public)
If re-shoring is adopted, my assumption/understanding is that X will retail at a higher price. Oversimplification maybe, but higher retail price means lower sales means lower profit (means lower stock price if the company selling X was public)
The solution to that would be higher/more automation i.e. less (or minimal) manufacturing related jobs I think ?
And now the situation would be that while there was capital-return-to-shore happening but went into automation and the jobs recovery was not what someone would have expected (both in terms of scale and skill)
But because the jobs were virtually re-shored the off shore labour market now suffers ?
Thoughts... ?
People and news articles always talk about goods trade deficits for rich countries, but never their almost universal services trade surpluses, and the profit margins are vastly different.
For manufacturing, a large part of the revenue goes to materials costs, but for services, almost all of it are net incomes.
Yes you can bring back manufacturing jobs, but your services surpluses would also shrink, because when you don't open your market, countries were not obligated to let you reap profits there too.
But that said, there is a balance to be had. Ultimately, quality of goods and services, and the competitiveness of the country as a whole must take priority. Not jobs. The whole idea of creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is perverse. It doesn't help anyone and harms the public in the long term. If we want a way to give people income, UBI or similar welfare-like approaches make sense. They might even be more profitable in the long-run.
With offshoring, has the quality of software gone up or down? If it has gone down, then these companies are harming the country. If they can improve quality by offshoring, then so be it. That only means whatever we're doing isn't working in terms of generating quality software, and we need to fix that. But I think it is a bit more nuanced, offshoring to certain countries tends to have higher quality than others, so that should be taken into account.
My wish is that we all (not just the US) go back to the 50's and 60's space-race era mindset of competitive innovation. I think (and I hope it isn't too controversial to say) that culturally we've been abandoning nationalism and nationalistic-pride, these were the drivers back then. Whether it was Nazi germans, USSR scientists, NASA scientists, bell labs,etc.. there was a strong sense of country/nation and that our work was contributing to that, that something we're building as a collective that will be our legacy to be passed on to the next generation.
The offshoring and general enshittification culture today is not that. It's Reaganism turned pandemic. The only thing that matters it the thickness of the shareholder's wallet. What I expect from governments is to take a bi-partisan approach to this, we need some sort of nationalistic pride to get us back on track. With EU for example, I can see a sense of European identity and choesion being formed now that the US is turning more and more hostile towards the EU. In the cold-war era, we had russia to unite us. Now, we're more concerned about other americans in the US than we are about China or Russia, our sense of partisan/sub-culture identity is much stronger than the national identity, there is no expectation or pressure from the government or the public for companies to work in the best interests of the country. At best we expect them to be proxies for welfare programs.
In other words, whether it is LLMs or offshoring, we should expect them to not do that because the alternative is better. The educated workforce in the US is not looking good,it's pretty dismal. Even the population attending college has gone down dramatically. Companies like TSMC struggle big time when trying to open plants in the US because there is no talent here. From what I hear from teachers all over, the post-covid situation is very scary, it is perhaps more concerning than anything else for the future sustainability of the US as a country.
I agree that we've done a great disservice to the country by offshoring, but only in part, only in cases where the quality of the work was poor. For example,I reckon (and i could be wrong) there are more developers and with better talent per-capita (not by volume) in certain western-european countries than the US. Even in India, for a long time there was this bias that outsourced talent there is of lesser quality, but over the decades I thing things have improved - but you do get what you pay for. My point is, coupled with this sentiment should be how we've also done a great disservice to the country by screwing up education, government and a several other things. It isn't just offshoring, there is a more fundamental mindset that is corrosive and must be addressed.
Put your money where your mouth is!
I’ve noticed again and again what’s missing from the often repeated by media blame game of “they’re taking our jobs” is the fact that it was US corporations purposefully offshoring in the name of maximising profits at the expense of paying US wages locally, rather than countries “stealing” the jobs ffs! It’s. Pure. Xenophobic. Deflection. FFS!
“They’re stealing our jobs!”. No… corporate America applied the Ferengi Rules of Aquisition #6 to whole industries for a quick buck.
It turns out you can't cherry pick the intellectual work and fob the rest off on foreign supply and still maintain global leadership and domestic prosperity. The whole stack must be at least competitive domestically. Only trade policy can achieve this.
Other countries develop and need less of the basic products that they can begin to make for themselves, they create trade blocs where they can begin to achieve scale greater than the US or they simply are bigger anyhow. If the US can substitute imports then so can they.
IMO the US has ridden the wave because that was the only sensible thing to do and it has stayed rich as a result. Adjustments may be needed - it's not safe to not be able to make fairly modern chips - but the whole world will get poorer if one splits it up and prevents scaling.
What to do now...well....
The periphery got the jobs and the US Elite got the $$$'s. What should've happened though was the Elites should've invested their cash into in technologies. Sure they did to some extent (NVIDIA is an example) but mostly what they did was pile their money into fixed assets, hence the inflation (e.g. housing) we have today.
The Blame lies with the Investment class elites, the Bankers, and the Donor Controlled politicians. Washington D.C. (Donor Controlled).
We’ve financialized the housing market, meaning the very basic needs of shelter now rises in price in accordance to the market. If tech workers make 2x or 3x the median annual salary, it makes housing prices rise for everybody else in the city.
In order to pay a “living wage” employers have to pay enough for their workers to make rent and groceries. In america, one of the highest GDP per capita in the world, the “living wage” is somewhere between 3x to 10x the offshore salary.
If you could house millions of people at the bare minimum cost, if you could provide them food and healthcare at prices that aren’t inflated, then the living wage doesn’t need to be so high.
We talk a lot about raising the minimum wage. What about lowering the minimum costs? That would mean a less stressful life for workers and cheaper labor for employers.
The reason why highly developed economies have become so service driven is because they have become sort of bimodal: The cost of labor is such that only jobs that are productive enough (profitability per hour) are done in these countries, and jobs that absolutely have to be done there to sustain the population. Jobs in the middle, everything that is not highly profitable or location-dependent, is offshored to lower-cost countries due to the cost of labor. This results in these developed countries having issues: Cost of living is high due to labor cost and there's high economic inequality due to wildly differing productivity.
The solution would be to bring these "mid-productivity" jobs back to developed countries. However, the main roadblocks still remain: The cost of labor is too expensive for most of these jobs to be competitive globally. However, I think there might be a way to do this in the near future: Advancements in robotics would mean a higher level of automation for industrial work, meaning more industrial jobs would become viable in high-cost countries. Each worker would be productive enough that the cost of labor is not critical anymore.
To make this happen, I believe it's important to ensure that the country is viable for this kind of manufacturing: Energy supply needs to be abundant and cheap, workforce needs to be educated, outside the "elite" students, and there needs to be low trade barriers. Low trade barriers are needed, because virtually all manufacturing is part of a global supply chain where parts cross many borders before the product is sold (and (high-value) products are sold globally). Additionally, the viability of automation will vary between different parts of the supply chain, and so you likely cannot automate everything.
Lie. The largest sector is Services at 70%. Besides, if it were the largest how can you also say it is offshored and needs to be brought back?
Let the private sector battle it out in their race to the bottom on everything, but ensure there is an ethical and trustworthy alternative to create the necessary competition in the marketplace to secure progress, both technological and social, over stagnation and eventual necrosis.
This is part of that "national security" we hear so many go on about when defending their policies of hate.
1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.
Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it well when he said, "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,"
1. A lot of industries offshored simply because the owners of the facilities just sold and shipped off rare/expensive/important equipment to other countries without a second thought. Especially tool and die equipment. So a lot of industries in countries like Korea and China or India literally use the exact same equipment we used 80+ years ago. Even if we wanted these jobs back, the countries & businesses in question are too smart to ever sell the equipment back at nearly any price (why we can't manufacture them again is a whole other problem).
2. As Jensen alludes here, the cost of energy in the US dropped through the 60s but then flatlined. We became too dependent on fossil fuel and "comfortable enough" consumer prices. But the energy intensive heavy industry all moved to places with nuclear power or heavily subsidized power sectors.
3. The lack of any sort of public welfare solution is a distinctly American industrial policy failure. Manufacturing depends on labor force flexibility - both in finding the right people for jobs, as well as just dealing with stop-and-go or seasonal work. But Americans having their healthcare and retirement tied to their jobs and full employment is a huge boat anchor on both the workforce and industry.
China is living its 1990's this decade: the boom is starting to wear off. Next comes India which is living its 50's. Next will come Nigeria which is in it's 20's. Offshoring jobs will continue until the end of modern civilisation.
How can anyone read this with a straight face?
Just another billionaire.
plastic-enjoyer•1d ago