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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't go so far as to call it racism, but I do find it somewhat xenophobic to suggest that it is wrong to outsource you work to other countries. Why is a Chinese worker any less worthy of a job than an American one? $1 in in a developing country goes further than $10 in a developed one. Globalization has granted billions of people access to things we take for granted like electricity and heating.

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We call ourselves “Developed”. It’s already implicitly throwing in the towel - there is nothing more to be done. We’ve already developed. This entire thinking and it’s psyche in our society feels like straight up propaganda. It used to be first-world and third-world.

Chinese labor force isn’t going to help defend Taiwan by making tank gadgets for them. Investing in Chinese labor has so many issues. If we didn’t have a rust belt (that led to Trumpism), we would have left a better nation to lead the world and maybe we can think about leveraging world wide labor - but this time with fair conditions and well paid workers.

It’s not just US, it is the same in EU and many other G20 nations.

Your thinking is appealing to emotional and not rational understanding of the globalism. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

> We call ourselves “Developed”. It’s already implicitly throwing in the towel - there is nothing more to be done. We’ve already developed.

I don't agree with this take. The terms "developed" and "developing" is just a politically correct term to classify countries based on their industrial base.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country

It's use has less to do with developed countries and everything to do with the need to frame the issue as countries working to get where others already are at the moment.

> This entire thinking and it’s psyche in our society feels like straight up propaganda. It used to be first-world and third-world.

I also don't feel you're right here as well. "Third-world" does not refer to a ranking. It was a classification based on where a nation was with regards to the Cold War. Either they're a NATO and NATO-aligned country, a Warsaw pact and USSR country, or you kept yourself out of the cold war and thus were a part of the third world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

Development and industrialization and economic output had nothing to do with it.

It seems a backwards causation, as in the Third World didn't get money's to build the industrial complex to support cold war era efforts, and thus in current times it became the developing countries, vs the developed ones who got all the war-mongering monies

The Rust Belt was primarily a product of Japan rather than China. It's only a very recent development where Chinese manufacturing jobs could have feasibly benefited American workers. Before the mid 2000s, they were mostly manufacturing cheap trinkets.

Outsourcing also freed how labor pool to other pursuits such as college and white collared jobs. Without a large pool of workers eager to leave to Rust Belt, Silicon Valley may not be the same place that it is today.

I think people from the rust belt are less common in silicon valley. At least in the engineering side.

https://quillette.com/2021/07/21/silicon-valleys-cynical-tre...

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