3 ms·

Sadly it has been from the beginning. Companies in the US only care about profits, not about what is good for the Country they are in. And in reality that is

by jmclnx 2y ago

Sadly it has been from the beginning. Companies in the US only care about profits, not about what is good for the Country they are in. And in reality that is how capitalism works. Pouring money into these companies will do nothing. What is needed is laws with real punishment for the Company and maybe the CEOs. IIRC, there was a time were all defense contractors had to be 100% sourced in the US, not now. So I would say a law like this: "70% of all products you sell and all the components must be 100% built in the US. If not, you are fine of 30% of your pretax worldwide revenue, including international subsidiaries". If you leave the US, you will be nationalized.

Workaccount2 2y ago
Advanced economies simply don't work like this. You cannot have an entire generation raised with the mantra "You must go to college. Take loans. Go to college" and then expect to have a strong blue collar work force. I went to college to sit at a desk at home and get a salary, not commute to a job site and make an hourly. And even without the mantra, who the hell wants to be the skilled technician working 60 hours a week in a clean lab to push out top quality silicon, when they can be the skilled SWE fiddling with a login page for twice the pay, from their home office, for 30 hours a week? If you break it down, it becomes more and more of an irreconcilable problem.
- rahkiin 2y ago
  Why, in your example, is the technician working 60 hours or being paid hourly? Why cannot a technician work 40 hours on a salary?
- fragmede 2y ago
  because different people like to do different things? twice the pay is a benefit, sure, but then you have to sit in front of screen all day long staring at it. Some people wanna work with their hands, and really don't want to sit in front of a screen, no matter how much you pay them. some people even forgo a livable amount of pay, and choose the starving artist route. not everyone optimizes for pay, nor do they have the ability or aptitude or even desire to become a software engineer.
- catproc 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm not ready to blame it all on college kids just yet. They're not the ones firing employees to do stock buybacks.
quantum_state 2y ago
IMHO, it’s the government which should understand how capitalism works and to not try interfere with the market …
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  You notice how the right (or really any politician or think tank blabber) doesn't trump the "free market" anymore? It used to be every other minute on CNN in the 1990s and 2000s. Why is that? Well, pretty simple, the corporate powers have all largely settled into cartel, duopoly, or outright monopoly alignments within their markets. Market competition is pretty weak in the US, and it is hurting our competitiveness worldwide. The reality is that the nth-iterative stability of "free markets" in the real world with barriers to entry and even more important, regulatory capture, is cartel in best case. A lot of the centralization of wealth in the US is through the large cartel megacorporations. Using those, the "elite" can extract wealth and wage war on labor costs, which goddamn they LOVE to do, more than shirk taxes. Oh, and the megacorporations also enable massive tax avoidance (loans on existing unrealized stock value as a great example). So what the government SHOULD be doing is antitrust right and left, and breaking up all these monopolies and cartels. It would inject a huge amount of labor demand (at good job wages), a huge amount of anti-inflationary competition, and produce massive amounts of innovation, since you'd have a dozen companies trying different products and production methods in markets, as opposed to ... two.
  - gregw2 2y ago
    I am sympathetic to your argument. I just would like to point out the irony that you want to break up companies to improve our global competitiveness. I seem to recall hearing in the late 90s and early 2000s a theme that the US really needed to let these companies combine so we could have large national players who would have the scale to compete globally with other nations' mega-corps. (Not so much in terms of FAANG tech perhaps, but certainly in banking and many other sectors.) I'm not sure if there is some definitive research on what corporate size truly helps global competitiveness (but I'd expect that, as you say, smaller competitors in larger numbers tend to be more competitive.) But even in China car industry as transitioning today, the natural evolution of such a system is towards a fewer larger competitors. Kind of related to the iron law of oligarchy perhaps, this phenomena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

by jmclnx 2y ago

Workaccount2 2y ago

Advanced economies simply don't work like this. You cannot have an entire generation raised with the mantra "You must go to college. Take loans. Go to college" and then expect to have a strong blue collar work force. I went to college to sit at a desk at home and get a salary, not commute to a job site and make an hourly. And even without the mantra, who the hell wants to be the skilled technician working 60 hours a week in a clean lab to push out top quality silicon, when they can be the skilled SWE fiddling with a login page for twice the pay, from their home office, for 30 hours a week? If you break it down, it becomes more and more of an irreconcilable problem.

rahkiin 2y ago
Why, in your example, is the technician working 60 hours or being paid hourly? Why cannot a technician work 40 hours on a salary?
fragmede 2y ago
because different people like to do different things? twice the pay is a benefit, sure, but then you have to sit in front of screen all day long staring at it. Some people wanna work with their hands, and really don't want to sit in front of a screen, no matter how much you pay them. some people even forgo a livable amount of pay, and choose the starving artist route. not everyone optimizes for pay, nor do they have the ability or aptitude or even desire to become a software engineer.
catproc 2y ago
Yeah, I'm not ready to blame it all on college kids just yet. They're not the ones firing employees to do stock buybacks.

quantum_state 2y ago

IMHO, it’s the government which should understand how capitalism works and to not try interfere with the market …

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
You notice how the right (or really any politician or think tank blabber) doesn't trump the "free market" anymore? It used to be every other minute on CNN in the 1990s and 2000s. Why is that? Well, pretty simple, the corporate powers have all largely settled into cartel, duopoly, or outright monopoly alignments within their markets. Market competition is pretty weak in the US, and it is hurting our competitiveness worldwide. The reality is that the nth-iterative stability of "free markets" in the real world with barriers to entry and even more important, regulatory capture, is cartel in best case. A lot of the centralization of wealth in the US is through the large cartel megacorporations. Using those, the "elite" can extract wealth and wage war on labor costs, which goddamn they LOVE to do, more than shirk taxes. Oh, and the megacorporations also enable massive tax avoidance (loans on existing unrealized stock value as a great example). So what the government SHOULD be doing is antitrust right and left, and breaking up all these monopolies and cartels. It would inject a huge amount of labor demand (at good job wages), a huge amount of anti-inflationary competition, and produce massive amounts of innovation, since you'd have a dozen companies trying different products and production methods in markets, as opposed to ... two.
- gregw2 2y ago
  I am sympathetic to your argument. I just would like to point out the irony that you want to break up companies to improve our global competitiveness. I seem to recall hearing in the late 90s and early 2000s a theme that the US really needed to let these companies combine so we could have large national players who would have the scale to compete globally with other nations' mega-corps. (Not so much in terms of FAANG tech perhaps, but certainly in banking and many other sectors.) I'm not sure if there is some definitive research on what corporate size truly helps global competitiveness (but I'd expect that, as you say, smaller competitors in larger numbers tend to be more competitive.) But even in China car industry as transitioning today, the natural evolution of such a system is towards a fewer larger competitors. Kind of related to the iron law of oligarchy perhaps, this phenomena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy