Just like nobody's fooled anymore about programmers in America with Bachelor's degrees really being any better than programmers in India who started googling PHP functions a few weeks ago, right?
The China argument is really strange. People talk about slave labor or something, and ignore that China's exports have allowed it to generate revenue to purchase new technology. That technology is expensive, and they wouldn't have been able to pay their workers well or buy it without exports to other countries: Europe and the United States have been funding China's rapid development, which has resulted in over a decade of growing wages and social insurances, while economic efficiency increases at a pace such that the fractional cost of wage per product manufactured has come down (e.g. with these new tools, the product costs the same if you pay the Chinaman $3.50 instead of $1.20, but they pay the Chinaman $3.20 and now it's cheaper!).
We got wealthier taking advantage of a wage gap; China got wealthier taking advantage of that wage gap, too. The wage gap is getting narrower as a result.
Fair trade tries to accelerate the growth of wages so as to raise standards-of-living in the developing country while slowing the loss of jobs in the importing nation, near as I can tell. It has its own disadvantages, for example by encouraging the mixing of low-quality product (which sells below fair-trade prices) into fair trade product. It also only slows the outflow of jobs; we need social insurances to carry those workers who lose their jobs until they can find a new opportunity--slowing it only means we don't have to care about those workers for our own comfort, since we don't collapse the economy at large.
Wait, what? The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in decades.
Use the median income. The minimum-wage is a red-herring: it's a policy set to ensure that the person at the bottom has a livable income--and, as a policy, it exists because certain classes of labor naturally balance out to have too little power to reflect the growth of wealth (or anything else). The median income tells you whether wage raises are actually happening--unless your country is so broken that everyone makes minimum wage because the employers are your slavemasters.
Food prices have jumped significantly in the last decade.
Not as a percentage of the median income.
clothing costs have gone up as well,
From 12% of the median income in the 80s to under 3% of the median income in the modern era.
Really, dollar values as an argument? You need to discuss prices as a pie chart of fixed total size.
If prices were allowed to drop in the 1st world, then we'd be okay. But we pay up to 50x for the same products because prices are set locally not globally. We pay $20 for a Tshirt that cost $1 to make which sells for $1.50 in china.
Actually, around half the price is domestic shipping. It's cheap to ship it (pants: 6.5 cents per pair) overseas, but trucking it from the dock to a warehouse, to a local warehouse, to a distribution center, then to a retailer? That's costly as hell.
The average cost of men and boys's cotton pants and trousers (not t-shirts; don't care to look up the trade data right now) coming from China in 2015 was $6.12, with 20,000 coming on a 40-foot shipping container imported for less than $1,300.
Be careful about what you hear about profits and prices. A lot of folks like to talk about the gross profits of things, such as hamburgers. A Wendy's franchise makes a gross profit of 50% on a hamburger, and it's really frigging high on fries and sodas. They've got like 80% gross profit margins overall. Their net operating profits are 8%, because gross profit margins don't count management overhead, lighting, building rent, property taxes, or anything that's not directly necessary in the process of making a thing. A lot of folks like to call out e.g. Comcast for having ludicrous profits on their Internet service, when they average about 11.7% net operating profits.
When you get to healthcare, the narrative changes: some healthcare suppliers have 48% net operating profits... in individual years. They average 12%-20% over 5-year spans (yes, those are high profits), with near-50%-profit years and with near-25%-loss years. The huge cash grab is, in part, because their industry is unstable as hell (the other part is because they can make a shitload of money in that industry, being that the barriers to entry are high).
That's creative. It's still just playing a shell game.
Let's take a step back for a second. You're looking at the end result: buses are self-driving, there's less human labor, the business is basically accounting and maintenance. You're trying to fix the end result.
The end result is fine.
There's nothing wrong with the complete revolution of an industry, as an endpoint. It's basically-optimal at that point in time, and not fundamentally-different from the business of today, such as bus drivers operating buses.
The problem is we have roughly 3.5 million people whose jobs depend on driving trucks, buses, and taxis. If they lose their jobs all at once (or over a year), we get a massive recession. If they lose their jobs slowly over a few short years, America and its economy is fine; the damned bus drivers are not fine.
The slower the transition, the easier. We need social safety nets to carry these people to the next opportunity, because getting laid off severely disrupts your life and it's not your fault we found a way to do it better without you. With a slower transition, you send some people to retirement instead of the unemployment line--they'd like to retire at 72, but they'll retire at 68 if they lose their job, rather than job hunting--and you have more people shifting their careers. Potential truckers look more into becoming mechanics; mechanics look into becoming engineers; and the inflow of new workers for that industry slows as people start to think that's a bad career to get into.
You can retrain a bus driver to be a freight driver. You can retrain a freight driver to be a mechanic because many of them know a thing or two about how the rig works. They can't all become mechanics if we throw them all off the buses today; but they can bleed over into these near-fit industries if the demand changes slowly.
In freight, there's a particular opportunity with the reduced cost of shipping. Domestic shipping is big: it accounts for half the cost of many products today. Chinese pants land at the dock for 6.5 cents per pair of shipping cost, and have $10 or $15 of shipping costs on them by the time they're trucked around the country. An independent trucker gets around $140k/year, while the average for someone who doesn't own his rig is $40k: it costs $100k to operate (maintain, fuel) that rig.
You're cutting more than a quarter of the cost off by eliminating the driver. If you can get electric trucks to work well enough--and they will for the local distribution trucks which drive less than 300 miles per day--you're cutting off a hell of a lot of maintenance (no, batteries don't destroy themselves constantly). The costs come down, WalMart starts doing the price rollback thing again, and the price competition brings us to higher consumer purchasing power as usual.
More buying means more trucking, which means fleet expansion: the trucking companies spend CapEx on a new self-driving truck, but they need two; so they keep a driver in his seat because they still need him... for now.
Technological maturity, prices of the trucks, cash flow to the shippers and thus their ability to make CapEx to expand or transition, ROI, risk appetite, and the like will control the rate of change. If it starts happening too fast, maybe we need to slow it down--either by trucker's unions (market solution--the Republicans seem to hate this part of the market) or by regulations (Government solution).
So you get to that endpoint without destroying peoples's lives. You carry them to the next job--a trucker, an Uber driver, a mechanic--as the market shifts around. If it's slow enough, people stop getting into trucking and bus driving because that's a dying career, and you have a mild labor shortage while you slowly demolish the whole industry.
The point was an economic one: when you get out of hunter-gathering, you're sustained by outside money. When you're hunter-gathering, you frequently leave the land on which you hunt to find greener pastures.
Apparently there's protectionism, free trade, and fair trade. I've been talking to the unions, so I've had to learn about fair trade.
Jobs are going overseas. That's unfortunate, but if they didn't they would only be automated away anyhow.
Actually, in many cases, "bringing jobs back" doesn't work. For example: if you brought manufacture of Chinese pants (at $3.20/hr labor) back from China (import cost: 6.5 cents per pair, $6.12 total cost at the receiving port), at American minimum wage of $8.25/hr plus 18% overhead (payroll overhead is 40%), you might create about 5,000 jobs net. When you bump up the wage, you start losing jobs.
Why?
A minimum-wage worker works 1.8 hours to buy a pair of pants at the average price (which was $14.97 at the time I did the math, by quick Google--this includes children's pants). To buy pants with the same labor hours in American total payroll costs, it's 3.0 hours. That also assumes Americans are skilled enough to make the pants at the same quality with the same labor and materials--we're not; most folks approach this argument by assuming Americans will overbuild (more material cost) and that the overbuilt thing will last longer, thus "it will be higher price because it's better quality". Basically, we can't do it to such precision, so we ham-fist it and claim it's magically better.
The middle-class will work fewer hours in either case to afford pants, and the ratio (3:1.8) will stay the same. Thus there's a decrease in affordability of goods: fewer pants or fewer other things. Folks like to argue here that "the money stays in the hands of Americans, so we're richer", but that doesn't hold true in any case, both for the reason stated here and because we'd need at peak 0.11% of our workforce making pants (insubstantial while everyone's getting slightly-poorer). We're also paying them out of the same income that everybody else already has--just redistributing the income from Chinese to American factory workers.
Retail cashiers can run about 980 scans per hour. Trucks ship a fixed number of a given set of goods. Shelf stocking, loss prevention, etc. Cut back the number of goods and you cut back the jobs. The short math for this is to divide the total dollar increase in cost of pants by the yearly minimum wage and call that the "maximum" number of jobs lost--which is a flat lie: many retail workers are part-time (so the number of "jobs" lost is higher, although the number of theoretical whole full-time jobs lost is not affected by this), while truckers make $40k/year or $140k/year for owner-operators ($100k/year to maintain the truck!). You'd have to project the number of mechanic and factory worker jobs invested in that truck to get an accurate number.
By the time you hit $20/hr+40% payroll cost at the factory floor, you're definitely losing more American jobs than you're gaining. Up to then, it's questionable. That's at $3.20/hr average Chinese total payroll cost.
If the Chinese labor cost is higher, then the break-even point for American wage and job loss is also higher. Likewise, if the jobs related to infrastructure, retail, and truck maintenance are higher-paying, then your lost job count is lower.
None of that actually matters because Americans are still working longer hours to afford the same goods anyway, so you've brought poverty back to America. As well, the labor force responds to job availability: if you make jobs more-available, your labor force expands to fill; less-available and it contracts. There are limits on this--especially on contraction--hence high unemployment in recessions. Population booms are the other side.
So, long-term, a slow transition of jobs to outsource just means we change what jobs and industries in which our workforce specializes. Short-term, you can really damage the economy with mass job exodus. You want controls to slow that (for the economy) and social safety nets to support the displaced worker (for t
If our education system ran off of immigrant dollars, that was never sustainable or good, and we should celebrate its departure.
Baltimore City isn't self-sustaining. It has to bring in food from outside farms, since it doesn't have the climate to farm everything. It has to bring in material from outside quarry, as it doesn't have rich mines for every type of mineral. It has to bring in product from outside manufacturing, as it doesn't have every type of skill and factory. Even if we tried, we'd end up expending far more labor and producing far less per person than the folks all over the country and the world, meaning we'd work long hours for little wealth.
It also has to bring in outside money to not be poor, as what we buy into the city goes out of the city and up the supply chain.
When the major industry and commerce left, Baltimore collapsed. If Amazon put a secondary HQ here, we'd have $2.5Bn-$5Bn more of yearly wage income flowing to the city, being spent, and producing more jobs and more tax revenue. We'd be running off foreign money--non-Baltimore money coming in from all over the US east coast.
It depends on how much importance you place on oversight. Amazon is a big business, and it seems to be using brick-and-mortar Whole Foods to push its Prime subscriptions. I'd say this is basically just a loyalty program, similar to Safeway and Wegmans giving you price discounts if you have their shopper's card; just the loyalty program happens to have a price tag (similar to Sam's Club memberships) and ties into their other services.
It's an interesting approach. This will get the brick-and-mortar shoppers who don't go straight for wholesaler memberships thinking about Prime, streaming media, and online shopping. It's like monopoly abuse in reverse: instead of using Monopoly A to get into Market B, they're using Market B to draw folks to Monopoly A as a substitute for Market B.
I liked how the movie turned out. It's kind of silly and comical, and it's baked into this darker and edgier atmosphere. The juxtaposition isn't awkward, and the acting really is excellent. They managed to work through the ham-fisted stuff better than a lot of modern crap that just doesn't fit together at all: a few scenes are jarring, but nothing screams "discontinuity" too badly.
These things are always happening in every industry. That's what technology is. There are hundreds of new processes everywhere, new tools, everything, coming out for every job you can think of.
Take manufacture. Artisan manufacture--one person making one thing--takes forever. The assembly line makes workers more-efficient by giving them one redundant job for which they become highly-skilled and, thus, efficient. Then: cellular manufacture brings the tools used to make similar parts together, such that a worker would go to a certain U-shaped tool cell and move through with a work piece, building it from start to finish. It's just like the assembly line, but you waste less time on complex part assemblies, and so can produce the same output with fewer workers.
We're always doing things like this. We're making nail guns, we're creating new kinds of machines, or we're coming up with new methods to approach a certain task. Nowadays we build machines--hard tools or software scripts--and call them "automation". It's the same thing we've been doing with every job at all times, continuously.
So no, the wooden shipping pallet didn't affect every single job; something like the wooden shipping pallet was being rolled out for every single job at the time, had been for all of human history up to that point, has continued to be up to today, and is coming in our future.
It won't always be the pin industry. Sometimes, you don't need that many pins, people become unemployed, and then jobs are created in the button industry. Things get shaken up and it's bad for the worker, but good for the economy. This is why we need policies to protect labor while not halting progress--a challenging problem.
Yeah, and look at what happens. Cars today contain the expensive, high-end, luxury features of 1990s cars. Computing technology has improved ridiculously, and new applications have come with it. Phones aren't tethered to the walls. We eat food out of home much more because food is cheaper and cooking takes too damned long (not really: it takes too long if you don't have a dishwasher and don't know how to cook). Clothing is cheaper, utilities are cheaper. Our paychecks are bigger, and the median income has grown faster than expenditure on the same necessities--even houses are bigger, although the housing market had some fun with mortgage rates and exciting get-rich-quick schemes that have messed that up a little over the past decade and a half.
People today have on average more communications, more entertainment, and less spending on necessities. Then: they complain they haven't gotten any richer in 40 years.
I want to move toward a 32-hour work week by taking some of that productivity and converting it to free time. As we grow our efficiency, we trim the work week down a bit.
The optimal political process is a bit more complex. I'm finding that a lot of things make economic sense, yet raise human issues: a strictly sub-optimal path to address the complexities of political issues is often required.
Take the economies of trade, for example. Because of things like wage differential or cost of resources (e.g. is the climate better for cotton in China?), importing pants is cheaper than making them here. Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American). When the differential is big enough, you actually lose jobs by moving manufacture to America. That "big enough" is only slightly above minimum-wage today.
Okay, so what about outsourcing then?
Well... when you outsource, somebody's job goes away. It's very bad for some.01% of the population, and very good for the other 99.99%.
Here's the thing: a rising tide lifts all boats, and yet it's obviously barbaric for the folks spread across a million boats to torpedo your boat so as to lift the tide a fraction of an inch. Maybe that's net-positive in a big way; maybe it all works out for you in the end (after you abandon ship and somehow manage to get yourself a new boat); but you just lost a boat, dammit, and that puts you at huge risk and places the burden of all our success on your shoulders.
In faster transitions, lots of people's boats get sunk. So maybe, even though it's not as great for everyone else, maybe we slow down that transition. Maybe we have a stronger safety net--we all pay into it, and we still keep a large part of the profit of this new trade deal--so you don't get torpedoed so bad. We crew you on our boats so you can sleep and eat, and you at least have a secure place in life until you can get back on your feet.
Trade, technology, things that create lay-offs. I look at the hard economic facts. When I talk to unions about these things, I push back on globalism rhetoric: I tell them we need to focus on protecting labor, and that global trade and new technologies are coming and we're not going to outright halt progress. Near as I can tell, they like that: it's uncomfortable, and yet it's facing a problem head-on and taking ownership of and responsibility for the impact on working Americans. We're looking for ways to not simply hurl people into the streets, but rather to carry them securely to their next place in life.
I'm frequently surprised by what people will accept when they think you're being honest, when you won't compromise your position, and when you start incorporating their needs into your position. Politicians who waffle based on with whom they're talking seem to take a hell of a lot of flack--as do politicians who have their mind set and don't care what you think.
This is more-complex than mere science. Well, it is if you actually care about doing your job right.
Around 1920, wooden shipping pallets cut down about 83% of the labor involved in shipping: what took a crew three 16-hour days to load and unload now took four hours. It became efficient to stack goods, wrap them, then transfer them on the truck to go to a port, then the ship, destination dock, back onto truck, warehouse, truck, distribution center, truck, retail center. They might unpalletize, rearrange, and palletize to go to retail so as to tailor from bulk stock to store-specific need.
A piece of wood.
Ikea has changed the shape of one of their mugs twice so as to nearly triple the number they can ship on a truck--cutting out 2/3 of the labor of shipping them.
This is what technology is. When someone says "automation", imagine a wooden shipping pallet. When they say, "It's coming for unskilled jobs!", imagine a dock worker. When they say, "It's coming for smart people's jobs this time!", imagine being a charge authorizor in American Express in 1988 (Authorizor's Assistant), or an accountant, or a market trader (look at all the automatic charting software). When they say, "It's coming for everyone's jobs this time!", look at pneumatic power tools and digital computers.
That's right: it's always coming for everyone's jobs.
I've found the language more-pleasant as I cease to end sentences in prepositions. Indeed, ending a sentence in a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Psh, that movie was awesome. The guy who played President Koopa did an amazing job, and pretty much all of the acting was dead on. It had enough comic relief and memorable moments to turn it into a timeless classic.
"Hey, can you do that again? The way your knuckles smashed into my face?" "............ dance with me."
A lot of unexplained stuff (how the heck did they know about the parallel dimension? I guess they had the whole meteor to begin with and could pass through) and it didn't hold true to source at all, but it was a great movie.
MBAs are mostly looking at "Agile" and reading "no planning!" Problem: Agile development is heavy on planning--it's still easily 60% of the process. Actual execution makes up less than half of your time.
We've hired plenty of programmers who make shit code. We also hired two programmers who flipped chairs over the horrendous mess their predecessors left and three who were actually useful but also not freaking out. The ones who were writing good code were also lobbying for things like coding standards, requirements gathering, and scope control. It took a little effort to get them to actually accept project management: they kept asking for PM, but didn't like the PM label--until they got an explanation of what PM is.
Here's a hint: if you sit down and just start writing code that spits out the expected result, you're probably a bad programmer. If you're plotting out risks like architectural changes, potential reuse of facilities for new features, and expansion of use case to require higher number of users and thus a new back-end architecture (cloud, sharded databases, etc.) before you start coding, you're probably a not-bad programmer. If you think there are any actually good programmers, you haven't quite grasped programming yet. This reasoning applies to many fields--it wasn't until 2013 that the entire field of project management finally accepted that maybe they should consider the particulars of managing people who are impacted in some way by the projects they're managing, because most of us are bureaucratic paper pushers and we need to be people persons.
Generally, we're seeing a trend of individual data centers getting hacked. For IAAS and SAAS, we're finding that guy in data center A who had to deal with a security issue is also guy in data center B who hasn't yet, because they're the same guy: the service provider runs stuff for multiple clients.
It's more-efficient. That doesn't mean the service platform itself doesn't sometimes have flaws, or that the new provider won't get hacked to hell; it just means anything that's been running for reasonably-long (even a small player with a dozen or so clients) is probably more-secure, more-stable, and better managed than whatever you're going to build in-house.
How appropriate, as you're pretending to know what you're talking about.
Agile project management is about reducing risks by scheduling things in smaller, more-manageable pieces so you can verify, define, learn from, and build upon them. Turns out people will break down a project into a bunch of definable work packages that have to all be implemented completely before anything "whole" is delivered; so instead, you build whole building blocks, whole features, whole APIs, whole subsystems, etc. to solve particular problems. That could be a whole authentication API that goes with a whole data management API, and then you can swap out the authentication back-end if needed--as opposed to building the "core library" that's not really done or working or alterable without breaking other things because it's one giant unit with vertically-integrated design.
Incremental and iterative delivery also let the customer test and validate whatever you deliver, so they can come back and tell you that part isn't right before you build the other 90% to rely on exactly how the broken thing operates. It lets your QA testers have at it, too.
Actually, they took the source code, modified it, then said you can have the source code and they're keeping control over the binaries which they built. You're allowed to build, modify, and distribute their work; you're not allowed to download the ready-to-go package, flash it, and sell phones.
They're not downloading Google's Android image, flashing it, and selling phones, either. They built their own--with modified code, even.
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Just like nobody's fooled anymore about programmers in America with Bachelor's degrees really being any better than programmers in India who started googling PHP functions a few weeks ago, right?
The China argument is really strange. People talk about slave labor or something, and ignore that China's exports have allowed it to generate revenue to purchase new technology. That technology is expensive, and they wouldn't have been able to pay their workers well or buy it without exports to other countries: Europe and the United States have been funding China's rapid development, which has resulted in over a decade of growing wages and social insurances, while economic efficiency increases at a pace such that the fractional cost of wage per product manufactured has come down (e.g. with these new tools, the product costs the same if you pay the Chinaman $3.50 instead of $1.20, but they pay the Chinaman $3.20 and now it's cheaper!).
We got wealthier taking advantage of a wage gap; China got wealthier taking advantage of that wage gap, too. The wage gap is getting narrower as a result.
Fair trade tries to accelerate the growth of wages so as to raise standards-of-living in the developing country while slowing the loss of jobs in the importing nation, near as I can tell. It has its own disadvantages, for example by encouraging the mixing of low-quality product (which sells below fair-trade prices) into fair trade product. It also only slows the outflow of jobs; we need social insurances to carry those workers who lose their jobs until they can find a new opportunity--slowing it only means we don't have to care about those workers for our own comfort, since we don't collapse the economy at large.
Hard problems.
Wait, what? The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in decades.
Use the median income. The minimum-wage is a red-herring: it's a policy set to ensure that the person at the bottom has a livable income--and, as a policy, it exists because certain classes of labor naturally balance out to have too little power to reflect the growth of wealth (or anything else). The median income tells you whether wage raises are actually happening--unless your country is so broken that everyone makes minimum wage because the employers are your slavemasters.
Food prices have jumped significantly in the last decade.
Not as a percentage of the median income.
clothing costs have gone up as well,
From 12% of the median income in the 80s to under 3% of the median income in the modern era.
Really, dollar values as an argument? You need to discuss prices as a pie chart of fixed total size.
If prices were allowed to drop in the 1st world, then we'd be okay. But we pay up to 50x for the same products because prices are set locally not globally. We pay $20 for a Tshirt that cost $1 to make which sells for $1.50 in china.
Actually, around half the price is domestic shipping. It's cheap to ship it (pants: 6.5 cents per pair) overseas, but trucking it from the dock to a warehouse, to a local warehouse, to a distribution center, then to a retailer? That's costly as hell.
The average cost of men and boys's cotton pants and trousers (not t-shirts; don't care to look up the trade data right now) coming from China in 2015 was $6.12, with 20,000 coming on a 40-foot shipping container imported for less than $1,300.
Be careful about what you hear about profits and prices. A lot of folks like to talk about the gross profits of things, such as hamburgers. A Wendy's franchise makes a gross profit of 50% on a hamburger, and it's really frigging high on fries and sodas. They've got like 80% gross profit margins overall. Their net operating profits are 8%, because gross profit margins don't count management overhead, lighting, building rent, property taxes, or anything that's not directly necessary in the process of making a thing. A lot of folks like to call out e.g. Comcast for having ludicrous profits on their Internet service, when they average about 11.7% net operating profits.
When you get to healthcare, the narrative changes: some healthcare suppliers have 48% net operating profits... in individual years. They average 12%-20% over 5-year spans (yes, those are high profits), with near-50%-profit years and with near-25%-loss years. The huge cash grab is, in part, because their industry is unstable as hell (the other part is because they can make a shitload of money in that industry, being that the barriers to entry are high).
That's creative. It's still just playing a shell game.
Let's take a step back for a second. You're looking at the end result: buses are self-driving, there's less human labor, the business is basically accounting and maintenance. You're trying to fix the end result.
The end result is fine.
There's nothing wrong with the complete revolution of an industry, as an endpoint. It's basically-optimal at that point in time, and not fundamentally-different from the business of today, such as bus drivers operating buses.
The problem is we have roughly 3.5 million people whose jobs depend on driving trucks, buses, and taxis. If they lose their jobs all at once (or over a year), we get a massive recession. If they lose their jobs slowly over a few short years, America and its economy is fine; the damned bus drivers are not fine.
The slower the transition, the easier. We need social safety nets to carry these people to the next opportunity, because getting laid off severely disrupts your life and it's not your fault we found a way to do it better without you. With a slower transition, you send some people to retirement instead of the unemployment line--they'd like to retire at 72, but they'll retire at 68 if they lose their job, rather than job hunting--and you have more people shifting their careers. Potential truckers look more into becoming mechanics; mechanics look into becoming engineers; and the inflow of new workers for that industry slows as people start to think that's a bad career to get into.
You can retrain a bus driver to be a freight driver. You can retrain a freight driver to be a mechanic because many of them know a thing or two about how the rig works. They can't all become mechanics if we throw them all off the buses today; but they can bleed over into these near-fit industries if the demand changes slowly.
In freight, there's a particular opportunity with the reduced cost of shipping. Domestic shipping is big: it accounts for half the cost of many products today. Chinese pants land at the dock for 6.5 cents per pair of shipping cost, and have $10 or $15 of shipping costs on them by the time they're trucked around the country. An independent trucker gets around $140k/year, while the average for someone who doesn't own his rig is $40k: it costs $100k to operate (maintain, fuel) that rig.
You're cutting more than a quarter of the cost off by eliminating the driver. If you can get electric trucks to work well enough--and they will for the local distribution trucks which drive less than 300 miles per day--you're cutting off a hell of a lot of maintenance (no, batteries don't destroy themselves constantly). The costs come down, WalMart starts doing the price rollback thing again, and the price competition brings us to higher consumer purchasing power as usual.
More buying means more trucking, which means fleet expansion: the trucking companies spend CapEx on a new self-driving truck, but they need two; so they keep a driver in his seat because they still need him... for now.
Technological maturity, prices of the trucks, cash flow to the shippers and thus their ability to make CapEx to expand or transition, ROI, risk appetite, and the like will control the rate of change. If it starts happening too fast, maybe we need to slow it down--either by trucker's unions (market solution--the Republicans seem to hate this part of the market) or by regulations (Government solution).
So you get to that endpoint without destroying peoples's lives. You carry them to the next job--a trucker, an Uber driver, a mechanic--as the market shifts around. If it's slow enough, people stop getting into trucking and bus driving because that's a dying career, and you have a mild labor shortage while you slowly demolish the whole industry.
That's how you protect the laborer.
The point was an economic one: when you get out of hunter-gathering, you're sustained by outside money. When you're hunter-gathering, you frequently leave the land on which you hunt to find greener pastures.
Apparently there's protectionism, free trade, and fair trade. I've been talking to the unions, so I've had to learn about fair trade.
Jobs are going overseas. That's unfortunate, but if they didn't they would only be automated away anyhow.
Actually, in many cases, "bringing jobs back" doesn't work. For example: if you brought manufacture of Chinese pants (at $3.20/hr labor) back from China (import cost: 6.5 cents per pair, $6.12 total cost at the receiving port), at American minimum wage of $8.25/hr plus 18% overhead (payroll overhead is 40%), you might create about 5,000 jobs net. When you bump up the wage, you start losing jobs.
Why?
A minimum-wage worker works 1.8 hours to buy a pair of pants at the average price (which was $14.97 at the time I did the math, by quick Google--this includes children's pants). To buy pants with the same labor hours in American total payroll costs, it's 3.0 hours. That also assumes Americans are skilled enough to make the pants at the same quality with the same labor and materials--we're not; most folks approach this argument by assuming Americans will overbuild (more material cost) and that the overbuilt thing will last longer, thus "it will be higher price because it's better quality". Basically, we can't do it to such precision, so we ham-fist it and claim it's magically better.
The middle-class will work fewer hours in either case to afford pants, and the ratio (3:1.8) will stay the same. Thus there's a decrease in affordability of goods: fewer pants or fewer other things. Folks like to argue here that "the money stays in the hands of Americans, so we're richer", but that doesn't hold true in any case, both for the reason stated here and because we'd need at peak 0.11% of our workforce making pants (insubstantial while everyone's getting slightly-poorer). We're also paying them out of the same income that everybody else already has--just redistributing the income from Chinese to American factory workers.
Retail cashiers can run about 980 scans per hour. Trucks ship a fixed number of a given set of goods. Shelf stocking, loss prevention, etc. Cut back the number of goods and you cut back the jobs. The short math for this is to divide the total dollar increase in cost of pants by the yearly minimum wage and call that the "maximum" number of jobs lost--which is a flat lie: many retail workers are part-time (so the number of "jobs" lost is higher, although the number of theoretical whole full-time jobs lost is not affected by this), while truckers make $40k/year or $140k/year for owner-operators ($100k/year to maintain the truck!). You'd have to project the number of mechanic and factory worker jobs invested in that truck to get an accurate number.
By the time you hit $20/hr+40% payroll cost at the factory floor, you're definitely losing more American jobs than you're gaining. Up to then, it's questionable. That's at $3.20/hr average Chinese total payroll cost.
If the Chinese labor cost is higher, then the break-even point for American wage and job loss is also higher. Likewise, if the jobs related to infrastructure, retail, and truck maintenance are higher-paying, then your lost job count is lower.
None of that actually matters because Americans are still working longer hours to afford the same goods anyway, so you've brought poverty back to America. As well, the labor force responds to job availability: if you make jobs more-available, your labor force expands to fill; less-available and it contracts. There are limits on this--especially on contraction--hence high unemployment in recessions. Population booms are the other side.
So, long-term, a slow transition of jobs to outsource just means we change what jobs and industries in which our workforce specializes. Short-term, you can really damage the economy with mass job exodus. You want controls to slow that (for the economy) and social safety nets to support the displaced worker (for t
If our education system ran off of immigrant dollars, that was never sustainable or good, and we should celebrate its departure.
Baltimore City isn't self-sustaining. It has to bring in food from outside farms, since it doesn't have the climate to farm everything. It has to bring in material from outside quarry, as it doesn't have rich mines for every type of mineral. It has to bring in product from outside manufacturing, as it doesn't have every type of skill and factory. Even if we tried, we'd end up expending far more labor and producing far less per person than the folks all over the country and the world, meaning we'd work long hours for little wealth.
It also has to bring in outside money to not be poor, as what we buy into the city goes out of the city and up the supply chain.
When the major industry and commerce left, Baltimore collapsed. If Amazon put a secondary HQ here, we'd have $2.5Bn-$5Bn more of yearly wage income flowing to the city, being spent, and producing more jobs and more tax revenue. We'd be running off foreign money--non-Baltimore money coming in from all over the US east coast.
That's called trade.
It depends on how much importance you place on oversight. Amazon is a big business, and it seems to be using brick-and-mortar Whole Foods to push its Prime subscriptions. I'd say this is basically just a loyalty program, similar to Safeway and Wegmans giving you price discounts if you have their shopper's card; just the loyalty program happens to have a price tag (similar to Sam's Club memberships) and ties into their other services.
It's an interesting approach. This will get the brick-and-mortar shoppers who don't go straight for wholesaler memberships thinking about Prime, streaming media, and online shopping. It's like monopoly abuse in reverse: instead of using Monopoly A to get into Market B, they're using Market B to draw folks to Monopoly A as a substitute for Market B.
I liked how the movie turned out. It's kind of silly and comical, and it's baked into this darker and edgier atmosphere. The juxtaposition isn't awkward, and the acting really is excellent. They managed to work through the ham-fisted stuff better than a lot of modern crap that just doesn't fit together at all: a few scenes are jarring, but nothing screams "discontinuity" too badly.
These things are always happening in every industry. That's what technology is. There are hundreds of new processes everywhere, new tools, everything, coming out for every job you can think of.
Take manufacture. Artisan manufacture--one person making one thing--takes forever. The assembly line makes workers more-efficient by giving them one redundant job for which they become highly-skilled and, thus, efficient. Then: cellular manufacture brings the tools used to make similar parts together, such that a worker would go to a certain U-shaped tool cell and move through with a work piece, building it from start to finish. It's just like the assembly line, but you waste less time on complex part assemblies, and so can produce the same output with fewer workers.
We're always doing things like this. We're making nail guns, we're creating new kinds of machines, or we're coming up with new methods to approach a certain task. Nowadays we build machines--hard tools or software scripts--and call them "automation". It's the same thing we've been doing with every job at all times, continuously.
So no, the wooden shipping pallet didn't affect every single job; something like the wooden shipping pallet was being rolled out for every single job at the time, had been for all of human history up to that point, has continued to be up to today, and is coming in our future.
It won't always be the pin industry. Sometimes, you don't need that many pins, people become unemployed, and then jobs are created in the button industry. Things get shaken up and it's bad for the worker, but good for the economy. This is why we need policies to protect labor while not halting progress--a challenging problem.
Yeah, and look at what happens. Cars today contain the expensive, high-end, luxury features of 1990s cars. Computing technology has improved ridiculously, and new applications have come with it. Phones aren't tethered to the walls. We eat food out of home much more because food is cheaper and cooking takes too damned long (not really: it takes too long if you don't have a dishwasher and don't know how to cook). Clothing is cheaper, utilities are cheaper. Our paychecks are bigger, and the median income has grown faster than expenditure on the same necessities--even houses are bigger, although the housing market had some fun with mortgage rates and exciting get-rich-quick schemes that have messed that up a little over the past decade and a half.
People today have on average more communications, more entertainment, and less spending on necessities. Then: they complain they haven't gotten any richer in 40 years.
I want to move toward a 32-hour work week by taking some of that productivity and converting it to free time. As we grow our efficiency, we trim the work week down a bit.
Yeah but you can easily identify the sycophants.
The optimal political process is a bit more complex. I'm finding that a lot of things make economic sense, yet raise human issues: a strictly sub-optimal path to address the complexities of political issues is often required.
Take the economies of trade, for example. Because of things like wage differential or cost of resources (e.g. is the climate better for cotton in China?), importing pants is cheaper than making them here. Because of that, whether you create or lose jobs, you're going to make people poorer by making pants in the USA than importing them in China (at $3.20/hr Chinese wage vs $8.25/hr +18% payroll overhead American, it's about 1.8 hours of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy Chinese pants, 3 hours to buy American). When the differential is big enough, you actually lose jobs by moving manufacture to America. That "big enough" is only slightly above minimum-wage today.
Okay, so what about outsourcing then?
Well... when you outsource, somebody's job goes away. It's very bad for some .01% of the population, and very good for the other 99.99%.
Here's the thing: a rising tide lifts all boats, and yet it's obviously barbaric for the folks spread across a million boats to torpedo your boat so as to lift the tide a fraction of an inch. Maybe that's net-positive in a big way; maybe it all works out for you in the end (after you abandon ship and somehow manage to get yourself a new boat); but you just lost a boat, dammit, and that puts you at huge risk and places the burden of all our success on your shoulders.
In faster transitions, lots of people's boats get sunk. So maybe, even though it's not as great for everyone else, maybe we slow down that transition. Maybe we have a stronger safety net--we all pay into it, and we still keep a large part of the profit of this new trade deal--so you don't get torpedoed so bad. We crew you on our boats so you can sleep and eat, and you at least have a secure place in life until you can get back on your feet.
Trade, technology, things that create lay-offs. I look at the hard economic facts. When I talk to unions about these things, I push back on globalism rhetoric: I tell them we need to focus on protecting labor, and that global trade and new technologies are coming and we're not going to outright halt progress. Near as I can tell, they like that: it's uncomfortable, and yet it's facing a problem head-on and taking ownership of and responsibility for the impact on working Americans. We're looking for ways to not simply hurl people into the streets, but rather to carry them securely to their next place in life.
I'm frequently surprised by what people will accept when they think you're being honest, when you won't compromise your position, and when you start incorporating their needs into your position. Politicians who waffle based on with whom they're talking seem to take a hell of a lot of flack--as do politicians who have their mind set and don't care what you think.
This is more-complex than mere science. Well, it is if you actually care about doing your job right.
Around 1920, wooden shipping pallets cut down about 83% of the labor involved in shipping: what took a crew three 16-hour days to load and unload now took four hours. It became efficient to stack goods, wrap them, then transfer them on the truck to go to a port, then the ship, destination dock, back onto truck, warehouse, truck, distribution center, truck, retail center. They might unpalletize, rearrange, and palletize to go to retail so as to tailor from bulk stock to store-specific need.
A piece of wood.
Ikea has changed the shape of one of their mugs twice so as to nearly triple the number they can ship on a truck--cutting out 2/3 of the labor of shipping them.
This is what technology is. When someone says "automation", imagine a wooden shipping pallet. When they say, "It's coming for unskilled jobs!", imagine a dock worker. When they say, "It's coming for smart people's jobs this time!", imagine being a charge authorizor in American Express in 1988 (Authorizor's Assistant), or an accountant, or a market trader (look at all the automatic charting software). When they say, "It's coming for everyone's jobs this time!", look at pneumatic power tools and digital computers.
That's right: it's always coming for everyone's jobs.
It's a Winston Churchill quote, allegedly.
I've found the language more-pleasant as I cease to end sentences in prepositions. Indeed, ending a sentence in a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Psh, that movie was awesome. The guy who played President Koopa did an amazing job, and pretty much all of the acting was dead on. It had enough comic relief and memorable moments to turn it into a timeless classic.
"Hey, can you do that again? The way your knuckles smashed into my face?" "............ dance with me."
A lot of unexplained stuff (how the heck did they know about the parallel dimension? I guess they had the whole meteor to begin with and could pass through) and it didn't hold true to source at all, but it was a great movie.
MBAs are mostly looking at "Agile" and reading "no planning!" Problem: Agile development is heavy on planning--it's still easily 60% of the process. Actual execution makes up less than half of your time.
We've hired plenty of programmers who make shit code. We also hired two programmers who flipped chairs over the horrendous mess their predecessors left and three who were actually useful but also not freaking out. The ones who were writing good code were also lobbying for things like coding standards, requirements gathering, and scope control. It took a little effort to get them to actually accept project management: they kept asking for PM, but didn't like the PM label--until they got an explanation of what PM is.
Here's a hint: if you sit down and just start writing code that spits out the expected result, you're probably a bad programmer. If you're plotting out risks like architectural changes, potential reuse of facilities for new features, and expansion of use case to require higher number of users and thus a new back-end architecture (cloud, sharded databases, etc.) before you start coding, you're probably a not-bad programmer. If you think there are any actually good programmers, you haven't quite grasped programming yet. This reasoning applies to many fields--it wasn't until 2013 that the entire field of project management finally accepted that maybe they should consider the particulars of managing people who are impacted in some way by the projects they're managing, because most of us are bureaucratic paper pushers and we need to be people persons.
Same. Lineage OS on my OPO; looking at Resurrection Remix for OnePlus 5.
Generally, we're seeing a trend of individual data centers getting hacked. For IAAS and SAAS, we're finding that guy in data center A who had to deal with a security issue is also guy in data center B who hasn't yet, because they're the same guy: the service provider runs stuff for multiple clients.
It's more-efficient. That doesn't mean the service platform itself doesn't sometimes have flaws, or that the new provider won't get hacked to hell; it just means anything that's been running for reasonably-long (even a small player with a dozen or so clients) is probably more-secure, more-stable, and better managed than whatever you're going to build in-house.
How appropriate, as you're pretending to know what you're talking about.
Agile project management is about reducing risks by scheduling things in smaller, more-manageable pieces so you can verify, define, learn from, and build upon them. Turns out people will break down a project into a bunch of definable work packages that have to all be implemented completely before anything "whole" is delivered; so instead, you build whole building blocks, whole features, whole APIs, whole subsystems, etc. to solve particular problems. That could be a whole authentication API that goes with a whole data management API, and then you can swap out the authentication back-end if needed--as opposed to building the "core library" that's not really done or working or alterable without breaking other things because it's one giant unit with vertically-integrated design.
Incremental and iterative delivery also let the customer test and validate whatever you deliver, so they can come back and tell you that part isn't right before you build the other 90% to rely on exactly how the broken thing operates. It lets your QA testers have at it, too.
Actually, they took the source code, modified it, then said you can have the source code and they're keeping control over the binaries which they built. You're allowed to build, modify, and distribute their work; you're not allowed to download the ready-to-go package, flash it, and sell phones.
They're not downloading Google's Android image, flashing it, and selling phones, either. They built their own--with modified code, even.