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Singapore Got Its Manufacturing Mojo Back
- armishra 4y agoTLDR: Singapore embraced automation.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoThis is also the direction in which the US is going. There is little appetite politically to let more legal immigrants in.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThere will be when we need 10x more nurses in 20 years. The population inversion crisis begins…
- grapeskin 4y agoAnd in 20 years current immigrant supplying countries will be aging and suffering from low birth rates and in desperate need of their own nurses.
- toss1 4y agoYup Stay healthy - healthspan is key. Makes Japan's push for automated elderly assist technology seem prescient. I wonder how far they are getting and will get in the next 20 years. anybody have any good info?
- fyrn- 4y agoNot really that "pre" in their case, it's in a reaction to an existing crisis
- mlyle 4y agoBut will they be able to compensate them as well?
- grapeskin 4y agoWhen you factor in cost of living, they'll probably be better off than places like the US. 20 years from now America might have $8000/month starting wages (pretax) with $5800/month rent for a broom closet and thousands of miles away from family and friends. "Poor" countries may only be paying $2000/month, but with $400 rents, $5 dining, public medical services, plus family nearby to help with any troubles you have. People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination. The luster is fading pretty quickly as the world is catching up to western standards and online work helps balance the employment scales globally, plus crime rates and conflict generally leveling out.
- mlyle 4y ago> 20 years from now America might have $8000/month starting wages (pretax) with $5800/month rent for a broom closet Hyperbole. You think, for a US average, that nursing comp is going to go up by 20-30%, but rents will go up by 300%? > People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination. When the waiting list is huge, trending upwards rapidly, and many don't even bother to try because of the difficulty in clearing the list... there's pretty clearly significant demand. That doesn't mean these trends stay true forever, but it's a fair bit of near to intermediate-term momentum.
- grapeskin 4y agoWages for jobs with an influx of cheap immigrant labor don't rise (they drop) and rents have been rising exponentially and inflation is accelerating. My figures were likely a bit too optimistic so I do apologize for that. Places I rented for $600/month 6 years ago are now reaching $2000/month now, so assuming the trends hold for 20 years and factoring in the drop in the value of the dollar, rents may very well more than quadruple. Immigration has been trending downwards for a very long time in the US[1]. There are far more desirable countries these days (such as Canada), and even then, those will likely lose their appeal as well. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/12/15/just-before-covid-19-american-migration-hit-a-73-year-low/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/12/15/just-be...
- polishdude20 4y agoBetter start paying your nurses well now!
- Hellbanevil 4y ago
- mlyle 4y agoEveryone really overstates this for the US. 75+ population is 6.8% now In 2040, it's forecast to be 12%. It'll be an economic burden for sure. Yes, we'll need some more nurses-- about 25-30% more, during which time the working population grows by several percent.
- thehappypm 4y agoCounterpoint—immigration and generally population growth will not exacerbate things like the housing crisis
- baybal2 4y ago
- nikanj 4y agoUnions fight automation tooth and nail, and the people skilled enough to automate things are either retired or in Asia.
- gautamdivgi 4y agoI think Singapore makes it easy to immigrate legally if you have a job offer (like Canada, Australia, HK, etc.). I don't think they allow for "family based" immigration.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThat's basically correct, although the top tiers of the employment pass hierarchy are permitted to bring in dependents and parents. Only on long-term passes, though; becoming permanent residents, much less citizens, is off the agenda unless you're willing to sign up your offspring for at least two years of military service.
- SenHeng 4y agoThat’s only if your offspring wants their PR too. If they’re willing to leave Singapore after their childhood, they don’t have to serve.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThey have to leave Singapore before a fuzzily defined boundary between 10 and 12yo, meaning it's the parent who has to make the call. Stay beyond that, and they're a deserter who'll be arrested on sight if they ever return.
- fabfabfab 4y agoFab guy here. Lots of references in the article about semiconductors. I posted about automation here a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29331417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29331417 It is already extremely automated in the US for semiconductors. If you have any questions about semiconductor manf, ask away.
- quanto 4y agoI appreciate your expertise and openness to discussion. How much of the business/industry cost is HR/wages, would you say? If the industry is already automated, further attempts to automate would not lead to great cost reduction. It seems like a higher ROI approach would be increasing the efficiency of the existing automated processes.
- fabfabfab 4y agoSemiconductor Fabs would be less than 10% labor costs. But there are also indirect labor costs: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/reducing-indirect-labor-costs-at-semiconductor-companies https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insig... There are areas in the fab that are not fully automated. Lot of backend wafer fabrication (Laser scribing, Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate or CoWoS, a bunch of other wild card assembly steps at wafer level, Wafer-to-Tape & Reel processes, etc.) is not entirely automated in terms of material flow in the Fab. There are usually bigger fish to fry when it comes to Fab cost-reduction w.r.t labor. For example, if there is a trade off between having space for laborers to move about vs. using OHTs, the favor is almost always for OHTs. Why? Because every square foot of the Fab is big bucks. Floor space is king. You'd rather jam more equipment than to put humans that need 4 ft clearance and a whole bunch of OSHA needs.
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat happened to the Wisconsin tmsc deal?
- 0xy 4y agoOne just has to look at wages in Sweden and Germany to decide that its not in your best interests as a tech worker to allow immigration floodgates to open. Wages for a senior developer can be 250-300% higher in the US, with lower taxes. And no, "free" healthcare doesn't come close to making this huge pay cut worth it. European developers get shafted badly, with the narrow exceptions of Switzerland and London (they get shafted less).
- jotm 4y agoThe "immigration floodgates" is by far not the biggest cause of it. Forget developers, engineer salaries are pretty bad across the board compared to the US. Managers, on the other hand, are doing much better.
- BlueTankEngine 4y agoWould you mind explaining the managers part of your comment?
- jotm 4y agoI meant the engineer to manager salary ratio is worse than it is in the US - managers make nearly twice the money for a given level of experience. Afaik the gap is not as bad in the US, but I may be wrong? Engineers turned managers would actually be fine, but we're talking traditionally educated managers who are often hired separately/brought in from outside. Needless to say, they're not all that good, especially with modern startups/software businesses. Which plays a part in making Europe suck at them.
- 0xy 4y agoIt's not different for managers. An L6 manager at Amazon for example will make around USD$170k total comp in Munich while new Seattle offers sit at $380k or more. You will take at least a 55% pay cut -- and that's just pre-tax. Now consider Germany's 44% effective tax rate versus Seattle's 32% effective tax rate. The chasm gets even wider. You get the double hit of massively reduced salaries and massive increased taxes. How about purchasing power? Even more bad news. Local purchasing power in Munich is 40% lower than Seattle. Yet another hit. Don't forget Germany recently also hiked their sales tax to 19%(!!!), which is almost double Seattle. The higher you get on the seniority ladder, the worse the comparisons get. You can't get the equivalent of US$500k without being an executive, or for extreme outliers. US$500k is garden variety staff level in most top tier US companies. Work just as hard as your US counterparts for a MASSIVELY reduced rate. Over 10 years, you've lost literally millions of dollars.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- someonewhocar3s 4y ago
- keeganjw 4y agohttps://archive.ph/wT67J https://archive.ph/wT67J
- checkurprivlege 4y agoTLDR: low taxation and a government with a credibility to be business friendly attract large investments
- checkurprivlege 4y ago
- checkurprivlege 4y ago
- monkeycantype 4y ago@checkyrprv, as likely someone took a political dislike to your username, rather than being about your comments
- shoo 4y agoyeah, perhaps someone dislikes the username. or it could be an automated flagging decision of some heuristic decision rule. @checkurprivlege: your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31864002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31864002 seems reasonable. i vouched for it and the others. the others comments don't add much value in my opinion, but they don't seem actively toxic, but are maybe closer to noise than signal. consider posting fewer comments that are each more thoughtful and more likely to contribute something novel to the discussion that others can get something out of. unexpected yet interesting conversation tangents are often appreciated here. fabfabfab is a good role model in this thread: niche expertise, actually somewhat relating to the topic, offering to go into detail if people have specific questions.
- quanto 4y agoSummary: 1. Singapore's manufacturing relies on automation. The GDP share of manufacturing has gone up in recent years, reversing the earlier decline; on the other hand, employment in manufacturing actually dropped as a fraction of total employment in the nation. 2. Singapore offers favorable conditions for automated manufacturing: A. tech talent pool B. favorable government support (talent growth subsidy, political stability, IP protection) C. network effect of other high quality firms in the vicinity. > It is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of high-tech goods, according to the World Bank. The top three are China, Germany and South Korea. The U.S. is fifth. This surprised me: Singapore beats the US and Japan in this metric.
- swyx 4y agoFor those wondering what kind of manufacturing, article specifically points to GlobalFoundries Fab 7, GE jet engine 3d printing, Siltronic and UMC semi manufacturing, and REC solar panels. BioNTech wants to produce "several hundred million" vaccines with a staff size of 80. Paper bag makers, HP print heads, Hyundai electric cars. As a Singaporean I had no idea all this was going on. pretty cool. as a more cynical news reader this article is so glowy to the point of propaganda. I imagine very few people have a problem with employment in manufacturing dropping as a side effect of this. Keep right on.
- raverbashing 4y agoAnd this is all in a (big) city sized country.
- SenHeng 4y agoIs the tech talent pool really that good? I was there a decade ago and many foreign run startups were adamant about not hiring Singaporeans for creative or software engineering positions. Something something lack of initiative and free/critical thinking skills. The admin and finance side were mostly Singaporeans though. To be fair, I am an ex-Singaporean and no longer keep up with matters concerning the island. Left because of the stifling (physical/cultural/political) environment. I visit every few years and find little has changed in those regards.
- Animats 4y agoIt's about time for the US to get back into manufacturing. Wages in China have gone up enough that the cost advantage isn't as great as it was a decade ago. The average manufacturing wage in Shenzhen is now about US $36,000/year. US average manufacturing wage is $70,446/year. That's a little under 2:1. A decade ago it was about 30:1.
- 88840-8855 4y ago
- saiya-jin 4y agoYou are supporting wrong type of Ukraine migrants - we talk about country where average monthly wage was around 300-400$ last time I checked. Given its for completely different cost situation, but there were literally millions of Ukraine economical migrants all over Europe before the war, mostly the eastern part, working for much less than the amount you mention.
- anovikov 4y agoSimply because in Ukraine, no one lives on their salary. People hustle. Look at the famous photos of bombed-out Ukrainian places where people were tortured. Pay attention to the architecture, cars, everything. These are anything but poor, dilapidated places with people willing to work for food as the official stats may picture things. And people who worked abroad are just the unfortunate ones, the underclass, just as it is in Mexico: those who illegally cross to the U.S. are those who couldn't make it at home (often because of discrimination/racism yes). One looking at the desperate Mexicans doing hard work for almost nothing in the U.S. may assume that Mexico is a very poor place - which it isn't. Now, as the war started, it's the common - much more well-to-do - Ukrainians who started leaving the country, and they already enjoyed much better living standards than people abroad imagined. Ukraine is much like the rest of Eastern Europe - uneven, fragile, but in general a wide middle class society. It's done with widespread poverty. It's just that vast majority of that wealth is undocumented, and Ukrainian financial infrastructure makes owning, investing and moving undocumented wealth easy. People there have no idea what taxes are. Most never paid anything and don't know how it's done. And sure, it results in corruption, for which Ukraine is famous.
- fareesh 4y agoSingapore is a remarkable place. Every time I visit, it feels like the rest of the world is 10+ years behind.
- sho 4y agoYeah.... live there for a while though and you might find yourself wishing you were somewhere a little behind, especially if you don't agree with the government on every single little rule and prohibition. I lived there for a year and while I appreciated the efficiency, when I needed it, the feeling of control of every little aspect of life and commerce eventually started to feel oppressive. I could give many examples but let me just choose one - I live in Thailand now and I can state for a fact that the single street I live on has more live music on any given night than the whole country of Singapore. (1) Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it sure matters to me. Singapore's one big, very well run, very efficient, very purposeful, corporate campus. Nice place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there. (1) OK, maybe not every single night of the year - there are concerts and events in SG sometimes. But 99% of the time, absolutely.
- devortel 4y agoTrading live music for GDP seems like a good deal. Although, I completely agree that SG does feel like an efficient well run corporate campus.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoA quiet city? That’d be like a dream come true for me.
- imtringued 4y agoIt is probably more than a decade ahead because it is one of the few countries on earth that's actually tried to solve the land problem. http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Land_Problem.html http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Land_Problem.html As it stands right now, most people are born into poverty. Why? Because they are born into this world, that is already owned by the past generation and they have no place on this planet. They aren't just humans with no possessions to their name, no, it is far worse, they are people who don't even have the right to exist on this planet, people who have been deprived of the very things that should belong to them. A person born into land poverty has no means to help themselves, it is illegal for them to help themselves until they have bribed a previous land owner with years of their time. Imagine being born into this planet with an obligation to work 15 years to acquire land. Being born is no longer a blessing. Everyone who was born must justify their existence in front of the land owners.
- wooque 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ogujl https://archive.ph/ogujl