Where do we go from here?

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4thgenheel said:
i feel bad for jaime and his wife and kids.

the FIL trumper is a fucking idiot, of course.
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The bad thing is that for the FIL trumper to see his folly Jaime and his family will have to foot the bill.

Unfortunately, that seems too often be the result of the fuck around and find out. Those who don't need the lesson have to suffer with those that brought it upon us all.

This is my worry with trump. Those of us that voted against him will still suffer if he does everything, he says that he will do.
 
UNCatTech said:
I agree with this in many ways. Though I have read that some corporations are very aware and active in ensuring work life balance.

I've seen this in my company. I do greatly appreciate my direct team and how family oriented they are. But, since we spun off and are a stand alone publicly traded company, it has changed a lot.

Some co-workers and I were discussing how our company used to have very nice elaborate Christmas parties, but we no longer have those. Each year, we see less and less of that type of thing. Years ago we would have two major activities a year. One for family, one for couples. They were really nice events.

We haven't had one of those since 2020.

This year our sad little "Holiday Meal" was more of a reminder of how these things are no longer important than it was an event. We didn't even have enough seating, half the people got their meals and went back to their offices to eat alone.

I'm sure if this were taken to sight leadership their response would boil down to: "You get a nice bonus when the company does better".
Which is true, but if they cut the bonus by $200-400 a person to cover a Christmas party, I believe they would get better overall response.

I do understand that there are a lot of variables that leadership has to consider. And the company does still put effort into other areas. So, I don't want to sound like it's a net negative, it isn't. But everyone I speak with misses those Christmas parties.
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Im in a small niche industry (real estate education) and have refused offers to sell to the largest national corporation in the business. One of the primary reasons for my refusal is that I'm acutely aware I treat my staff 100x too nicely in the eyes of would-be shareholders. There is no way they would have the same pay, same freedoms, or same experience if they all suddenly found themselves under a corporate umbrella. Interestingly, I nearly never lose anyone. I think my total staff turnover over the last 5 years has been 1 person in a group of about 20. He was an instructor who left to be the director of another school.
 
UNCatTech said:
The bad thing is that for the FIL trumper to see his folly Jaime and his family will have to foot the bill.

Unfortunately, that seems too often be the result of the fuck around and find out. Those who don't need the lesson have to suffer with those that brought it upon us all.

This is my worry with trump. Those of us that voted against him will still suffer if he does everything, he says that he will do.
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The majority of people that voted for him are going to suffer, too. But those folks can pretend they are still better than the blacks, browns, gays and trans folks.
 
finesse said:
What factories that come back are going to be automation heavy and people light.
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This reminds me of the old joke about the modern automated factory of the future. The factory is 100% robotic, with a single human employee and a guard dog. The human’s job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to keep the human from touching anything.
 
Paine said:
substack.com

Here’s How the Return of American Industry Will Actually Look

Feat. the one stupid party trick you need to amaze the economists in your life…
substack.com substack.com

Interesting post by Oren Cass (former Romney advisor) on the subject of U.S. manufacturing.
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1. i am inherently suspicious of anyone who claims to have some revolutionary or unique insight based on one piece of publicly available data. are we expected to believe that nobody in the last 20 years has considered the data he discusses? isn't it more likely that he's made an error of some sort? or, if not an error, a misleading analysis.

2. he makes much of the so-called decline in american manufacturing output over the past two decades. productivity growth is down, and has recently turned negative; industrial output over the past 15 years has been in decline. his conclusion is that americans have outsourced so much manufacturing that we have forgotten how to do it. thats a paraphrase but he makes that point distinctly.

lets dig in a little. suppose there's an auto factory that produces 1M cars a year. the cars sell for 100k each. there are 1000 workers who make the cars. that's a 100m a year in revenue, and the productivity is 100m a year / 40000 labor hours (assuming 40 hour weeks). now a company opens a non-union factory in the adjacent right-to-work state. the company attracts 500 of those workers and starts to sell cars at 80k each. the first company has no choice but to match the 80k price. now the two plants together produce the same number of autos and employ the same number of workers. except now they are splitting all those labor hours across 80m in revenue, not 100. productivity has dropped by 20%!!!!

in reality, what happened is that the price of cars dropped. and because productivity is measured in terms of output, a 20% decline in prices meant that the output declined. the same amount of cars were produced, at the same price. nobody forgot how to make cars. all that happened was that prices adjusted.

disclaimer: i am no econometrician, and its possible that there are more sophisticated techniques for measuring productivity -- but as far as i know, this is basically the gist of all productivity measures. anyway, it is possible i am missing something but at the moment i don't think so.

3. anyway, lets change the hypothetical slightly. it's not a new state; its a new country. maybe china, or somewhere else. whatever the case, businesses in this new country make goods more cheaply than american companies, and thus the prices are forced down. note that tariffs wont solve this problem for any american industries that export. so what we would expect to see in the data is a drop in productivity and output, even though the same amount of stuff is being produced by the same number of people. note that my example above required some of the workers to move from one plant to another. that was just stylistic to make the model as mathematically and intuitively simple as possible. the same story is true if labor is not portable.

if this is true, then offshoring isn't really the problem. the expansion of manufacturing in other countries will have this effect by its very existence. the exact thing that we want economies to do -- make stuff cheaply, so there is more of it -- is causing some of those economies to look as though they are moving backward.

which is to say, cass is focusing on something that is a pure artefact of data. it isn't a sound basis for economic policy. again, i could be wrong about the productivity measure, but i haven't found anything on the internet to contradict my previous understanding so i am going for now with what i know.

4. i honestly have no idea what point he thought he was making in the worker augmentation module piece. that might be an anticipatory response to an argument i don't see. otherwise, i think its pretty silly.
 
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