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I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business lo

I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic. Like, with locally made solar panels you have some high paying jobs and those people will spend that money locally. With foreign made solar panels you have low paying warehouse and distribution jobs moving around foreign goods and most money goes overseas. So yeah 10x cost is maybe still too much. But I suppose the actual figure depends on how value is calculated. I think it’s kinda wild the USA invested billions to build factories in China and now they can produce cheap goods and regular people in the USA can barely afford to live.

perl4ever 5y ago
>I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic. Because typical businesses are making decisions for themselves, and not their whole industry or economy? Colluding with other businesses to try to achieve a collective goal might well even be illegal.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Right, but there's no natural law that says we need to structure business or our economy this way. We can form collectives that make decisions based on what the whole group thinks is best. We can federate collectives or make all manner of different arrangements. You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter. People are dying because they can't afford medical bills. It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Either you have government action that forces all businesses to adhere to certain rules, or you get the rules that help each business to be as competitive as possible. If there is more profit to be made by shipping stuff from China and there are no global rules discouraging that, than any company which does not do it will eventually be outcompeted.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      This is a false binary. There is a third way - collectively owned firms or institutions which represent a federation of collectively owned firms. That is the arrangement that I am most interested in and the one where the price is less important than the overall impact to society. Take a look: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW7j-H8ah1 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW...
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter. I assume you understand the reasons there are people who live in an apartment on disability without working, but others are homeless. You may want to spell it out to make sure we are on the same page. I'm wondering if you are drawing on specific personal experience and think you understand the crux of the problem. Could you state it if so. >People are dying because they can't afford medical bills. Which implies that EMTALA, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, etc. are insufficient, so do you have a specific gap and/or thing to fill the gap in mind? >It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing. Saying that to a random person on the internet kind of implies you don't think most people ask themselves that all the time. I'm inclined to assume virtually everyone does.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I agree with you — and there must be a name for this kind of thinking. I was going to jokingly call you a "red" but, kidding aside, it's not even close to Communism. You're suggesting something more akin to forward-looking Capitalism.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Actually it's interesting. There have always been those who believed in voluntary communism and opposed capital "C" "Communism" where the state controls everything. These people have identified as "libertarian communists" or "anarchist communists" where "anarchist" does not mean "chaos" or anything of the sort, but describes a process of questioning and dismantling hierarchy, replacing it with collectively governed voluntary systems. I recently had a conversation with someone about this who is a libertarian capitalist, and they found a few videos I shared intriguing, so I've just put them into a playlist to share with you. It starts with a 2 minute video that describes things in high level terms and then subsequent videos provide more detail. I think you might like it! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW7j-H8ah1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy...
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Now that I think about it. The whole capitalism vs communism debate is stupid. The flaws in capitalism are obvious and simple. Everything derives from it, even communism. Instead of fixing the leaking pipe everyone tries to build something akin to a teleportation system to catch all the leaking drops of water to send them back into the water tower so that they can leak out again and be caught by the system. Kids, your money is broken. Money is the mirror image of debt and someone took that mirror image hostage. You still need the mirror image. The only thing you can do is shrug and create a new mirror image by creating new debt until the day the hostage is returned. What if you don't want to create new debt? Rescue the hostage. That will never happen because people will deny reality for as long as possible. It actually takes someone who will force reality upon you, either the US government or the Fed. The former is prone to denying reality as well. The latter is unable to force reality onto people. If denying reality is the fundamental problem then no ideology will ever fix it. Communism will suffer from other problems because it is just a different mechanism, it didn't change the humans that are part of it.
kragen 5y ago
You're talking about what promotes the welfare of society, fundamentally a normative question hinging on our conception of "welfare", while I was talking about what the patterns of world trade are and will be in the future, and what causes affect them, a factual question. I did not intend to deprecate the importance of skilled factory jobs to the welfare of society. In fact, my comment didn't touch on normative questions at all. I think that, in order to formulate a strategy to promote some set of objectives, as you are trying to do, you must first have a correct factual understanding of the causal relations of cause and effect that relate to those objectives. Whatever strategy you formulate will only have a tendency to promote your objectives, whatever they are, to the extent that your factual understanding of the causal structure of the system you are trying to affect is correct. Therefore, factual analysis of the relevant causal structure is epistemologically prior to any such normative analysis of strategies. If your factual understanding is sufficiently incorrect, as in Tales of the Black Freighter, the strategy you formulate can easily have the opposite effect of what you intend. This is especially likely if your factual beliefs are being manipulated by other players whose objectives do not align with your own; this article seems to be an attempt at such manipulation.
- momirlan 5y ago
  No, your epistemological understanding is factually incorrect and causally manipulated by the normative nature of your strategic objectives. Actually the higher goal of such structural alignments is a regressive conceptualization of the historically ascendant conjunction of the CCP. In other words, shit mammoth.
  - kragen 5y ago
    If you don't know what those words mean, you can look them up in a dictionary. If you're looking to make fun of people for knowing things you don't, whether words or anything else, maybe you're on the wrong website. Or in the wrong species.
- state_less 5y ago
  I am happy to see a friendly competition to reduce CO2. It’d be cool to see people questioning in the papers about why they can’t be more environmentally friendly.

perl4ever 5y ago

>I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic. Because typical businesses are making decisions for themselves, and not their whole industry or economy? Colluding with other businesses to try to achieve a collective goal might well even be illegal.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Right, but there's no natural law that says we need to structure business or our economy this way. We can form collectives that make decisions based on what the whole group thinks is best. We can federate collectives or make all manner of different arrangements. You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter. People are dying because they can't afford medical bills. It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianN 5y ago
  Either you have government action that forces all businesses to adhere to certain rules, or you get the rules that help each business to be as competitive as possible. If there is more profit to be made by shipping stuff from China and there are no global rules discouraging that, than any company which does not do it will eventually be outcompeted.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    This is a false binary. There is a third way - collectively owned firms or institutions which represent a federation of collectively owned firms. That is the arrangement that I am most interested in and the one where the price is less important than the overall impact to society. Take a look: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW7j-H8ah1 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW...
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter. I assume you understand the reasons there are people who live in an apartment on disability without working, but others are homeless. You may want to spell it out to make sure we are on the same page. I'm wondering if you are drawing on specific personal experience and think you understand the crux of the problem. Could you state it if so. >People are dying because they can't afford medical bills. Which implies that EMTALA, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, etc. are insufficient, so do you have a specific gap and/or thing to fill the gap in mind? >It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing. Saying that to a random person on the internet kind of implies you don't think most people ask themselves that all the time. I'm inclined to assume virtually everyone does.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I agree with you — and there must be a name for this kind of thinking. I was going to jokingly call you a "red" but, kidding aside, it's not even close to Communism. You're suggesting something more akin to forward-looking Capitalism.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Actually it's interesting. There have always been those who believed in voluntary communism and opposed capital "C" "Communism" where the state controls everything. These people have identified as "libertarian communists" or "anarchist communists" where "anarchist" does not mean "chaos" or anything of the sort, but describes a process of questioning and dismantling hierarchy, replacing it with collectively governed voluntary systems. I recently had a conversation with someone about this who is a libertarian capitalist, and they found a few videos I shared intriguing, so I've just put them into a playlist to share with you. It starts with a 2 minute video that describes things in high level terms and then subsequent videos provide more detail. I think you might like it! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW7j-H8ah1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy...
- imtringued 5y ago
  Now that I think about it. The whole capitalism vs communism debate is stupid. The flaws in capitalism are obvious and simple. Everything derives from it, even communism. Instead of fixing the leaking pipe everyone tries to build something akin to a teleportation system to catch all the leaking drops of water to send them back into the water tower so that they can leak out again and be caught by the system. Kids, your money is broken. Money is the mirror image of debt and someone took that mirror image hostage. You still need the mirror image. The only thing you can do is shrug and create a new mirror image by creating new debt until the day the hostage is returned. What if you don't want to create new debt? Rescue the hostage. That will never happen because people will deny reality for as long as possible. It actually takes someone who will force reality upon you, either the US government or the Fed. The former is prone to denying reality as well. The latter is unable to force reality onto people. If denying reality is the fundamental problem then no ideology will ever fix it. Communism will suffer from other problems because it is just a different mechanism, it didn't change the humans that are part of it.

kragen 5y ago

You're talking about what promotes the welfare of society, fundamentally a normative question hinging on our conception of "welfare", while I was talking about what the patterns of world trade are and will be in the future, and what causes affect them, a factual question. I did not intend to deprecate the importance of skilled factory jobs to the welfare of society. In fact, my comment didn't touch on normative questions at all. I think that, in order to formulate a strategy to promote some set of objectives, as you are trying to do, you must first have a correct factual understanding of the causal relations of cause and effect that relate to those objectives. Whatever strategy you formulate will only have a tendency to promote your objectives, whatever they are, to the extent that your factual understanding of the causal structure of the system you are trying to affect is correct. Therefore, factual analysis of the relevant causal structure is epistemologically prior to any such normative analysis of strategies. If your factual understanding is sufficiently incorrect, as in Tales of the Black Freighter, the strategy you formulate can easily have the opposite effect of what you intend. This is especially likely if your factual beliefs are being manipulated by other players whose objectives do not align with your own; this article seems to be an attempt at such manipulation.

momirlan 5y ago
No, your epistemological understanding is factually incorrect and causally manipulated by the normative nature of your strategic objectives. Actually the higher goal of such structural alignments is a regressive conceptualization of the historically ascendant conjunction of the CCP. In other words, shit mammoth.
- kragen 5y ago
  If you don't know what those words mean, you can look them up in a dictionary. If you're looking to make fun of people for knowing things you don't, whether words or anything else, maybe you're on the wrong website. Or in the wrong species.
state_less 5y ago
I am happy to see a friendly competition to reduce CO2. It’d be cool to see people questioning in the papers about why they can’t be more environmentally friendly.