4 ms·

Like I said, because it will grow the real economy of the United States overall if menial labour is conducted elsewhere for cheap and the high-value high-margin

by aianus 11y ago

Like I said, because it will grow the real economy of the United States overall if menial labour is conducted elsewhere for cheap and the high-value high-margin labour is conducted in the U.S. Consider that as a result of 70 people at Toys 'R' Us losing their jobs, toys became marginally cheaper for hundreds of millions of Americans. Edit: not to mention the majority owners of Toys 'R' Us realizing the part of the savings that aren't passed on to consumers are undoubtedly American investors and pension plans.

67726e 11y ago
Yeah, it'll get a corporation and a few higher ups rich at the expense of the folks making a decent living on those jobs. I have an interest in seeing my fellow countrymen do well compared to those of another nation.
- Asbostos 11y ago
  "I have an interest in seeing my fellow white people do well compared to those of a darker skin tone." This is the same kind of feeling with the same kind of effect. The only difference is the choice of how to classify people.
  - tedks 11y ago
    Do you really, genuinely think that if Russia was the destination du jour for outsourcing, there would be no contention?
    - Asbostos 11y ago
      No. I'm making an analogy to racism. It's not actually racism but only because of the arbitrary choice of classification. We usually think racism is bad so we should logically also think prejudice against foreigners is bad for the same reasons. It harms people simply because of how they scored on the lottery of birth. Just as racism does.
      - tedks 11y ago
        So you believe that nation-states should not be self-interested? I think if you hold such a radical agenda, you should be up front about it, rather than arguing by analogy to topics people want to distance themselves from. You're advocating the dissolution of nation-states in the conventional sense. This is a fine thing to advocate for, but one certainly isn't a racist for not supporting this particular radical agenda that you happen to have. Are you also a communist, or at the very least, do you believe that inheritance should be abolished? After all, inheritance is a literal lottery of birth in the same way race is. And finally, as someone who is posting on the Internet, you have either won the lottery of birth in a direct way, or been blessed with enough intelligence to overcome suboptimal birth conditions and thus have won the lottery of birth in a more indirect way. What are you doing to address the harm your privileged position does to the world? Do you live a life of poverty and give all your money to Waatsi?
        aianus 11y ago
        > I think if you hold such a radical agenda Nationalism is stupid. What's so radical about feeling I have more in common with an Indian engineering student than a white American factory worker? I'm not a saint and I'm not simply going to give all of my money away, whether I deserve it or not. However, I'm not going to whine about foreigners stealing my jerbs either. If it's so easy for someone half the world away to steal my job I didn't deserve it in the first place.
        tedks 11y ago
        You won't give up your cushy tech lifestyle to feed starving african babies, but you expect a blue-collar worker to give up his job to feed a guy in Dehli?
  - 67726e 11y ago
    Except my tax dollars aren't exclusively spent on white people, they're spent on the folks in my country. I guess my supporting a path to citizenship for those dirty brown Mexicans that got brought over as kids would come as a surprise then, wouldn't it? Please, save your self-aggrandizing, half-baked rhetoric for your drum circle.
georgemcbay 11y ago
In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position. When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement.... That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering). By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.
- douche 11y ago
  That's a scary thought. Morlocks and Eloi... A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...
steego 11y ago
This is wishful nonsense. Destroying the middle class to improve margins does not grow the real economy. You grow the real economy by investing in technology and an educated workforce that can translate their skill set to providing real goods and services. Majority owners, investors and pension plan managers need to invest their money in companies that have real customers with real incomes that can afford to buy their goods and services.

by aianus 11y ago

67726e 11y ago

Yeah, it'll get a corporation and a few higher ups rich at the expense of the folks making a decent living on those jobs. I have an interest in seeing my fellow countrymen do well compared to those of another nation.

Asbostos 11y ago
"I have an interest in seeing my fellow white people do well compared to those of a darker skin tone." This is the same kind of feeling with the same kind of effect. The only difference is the choice of how to classify people.
- tedks 11y ago
  Do you really, genuinely think that if Russia was the destination du jour for outsourcing, there would be no contention?
  - Asbostos 11y ago
    No. I'm making an analogy to racism. It's not actually racism but only because of the arbitrary choice of classification. We usually think racism is bad so we should logically also think prejudice against foreigners is bad for the same reasons. It harms people simply because of how they scored on the lottery of birth. Just as racism does.
    - tedks 11y ago
      So you believe that nation-states should not be self-interested? I think if you hold such a radical agenda, you should be up front about it, rather than arguing by analogy to topics people want to distance themselves from. You're advocating the dissolution of nation-states in the conventional sense. This is a fine thing to advocate for, but one certainly isn't a racist for not supporting this particular radical agenda that you happen to have. Are you also a communist, or at the very least, do you believe that inheritance should be abolished? After all, inheritance is a literal lottery of birth in the same way race is. And finally, as someone who is posting on the Internet, you have either won the lottery of birth in a direct way, or been blessed with enough intelligence to overcome suboptimal birth conditions and thus have won the lottery of birth in a more indirect way. What are you doing to address the harm your privileged position does to the world? Do you live a life of poverty and give all your money to Waatsi?
      - aianus 11y ago
        > I think if you hold such a radical agenda Nationalism is stupid. What's so radical about feeling I have more in common with an Indian engineering student than a white American factory worker? I'm not a saint and I'm not simply going to give all of my money away, whether I deserve it or not. However, I'm not going to whine about foreigners stealing my jerbs either. If it's so easy for someone half the world away to steal my job I didn't deserve it in the first place.
        tedks 11y ago
        You won't give up your cushy tech lifestyle to feed starving african babies, but you expect a blue-collar worker to give up his job to feed a guy in Dehli?
- 67726e 11y ago
  Except my tax dollars aren't exclusively spent on white people, they're spent on the folks in my country. I guess my supporting a path to citizenship for those dirty brown Mexicans that got brought over as kids would come as a surprise then, wouldn't it? Please, save your self-aggrandizing, half-baked rhetoric for your drum circle.

georgemcbay 11y ago

In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position. When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement.... That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering). By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.

douche 11y ago
That's a scary thought. Morlocks and Eloi... A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...

steego 11y ago

This is wishful nonsense. Destroying the middle class to improve margins does not grow the real economy. You grow the real economy by investing in technology and an educated workforce that can translate their skill set to providing real goods and services. Majority owners, investors and pension plan managers need to invest their money in companies that have real customers with real incomes that can afford to buy their goods and services.