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Comment by lazyeye | Hacker News Reader

And the obvious side-effect which nobody really wants to talk about is the destruction of the manufacturing industry in the US and the off-shoring of jobs to China.

This is why it's so galling to see people in Silicon Valley moaning about the recent round of IT retrenchments. The f*king nerve of them.

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Your bitterness is misplaced.

Tech companies didn’t cause offshoring of US manufacturing. That’s been a long running trend since the 70’s across business sectors.

Not to mention that generally it’s executives at the companies who made the decisions leading to offshoring, and executives aren’t the ones losing their jobs.

Tech workers are grossly overpaid, but even so at the end of the day they’re still working class.

Its the people at the very top of the corporate ladder who makes the calls to offshore. Always good to keep in mind when these same companies bitch and moan about China but are also the same ones who chose to offshore to China. China is, from my understanding, upfront with what they want out of the deal, so there isn't any actual, "well we didn't know so don't blame us." Nah, China told them upfront what those offshoring deals meant.

The government's you guys "democratically elected" cause pain to the working classes and did everything that the wealthy and asset owning classes dreamed of. What is the point of democracy if there is no democracy at the workplace itself ? Most workplaces are top down central command authoritarian structures and that is what we all have to face day to day, everyday.

"What is the point of democracy if there is no democracy at the workplace itself?"

Do you mean this seriously? Corporations come and go all the time, and if they make a catastrophic decision, usually the worst possible outcome is bankruptcy, not war.

Yes, there is a tiny amount of "too big to fail" corporations whose characteristics are closer to a state than to a private organization, but compared to the government, any single corporation has negligible influence on your life.

Modern governments have enormous powers.

I would say it depends. Technology has actually pushed this quiet a bit. A small tech company whose tech you rely on today could make a decision that is catastrophic to you as much as the government. Think of like a password manager, a tech company that sells you an IOT device that you have in your home with poor security. Technology has made this a game change where even a sole proprietorship could do this. But this is more of a side effect of tech and how cheap and accessible tech has become. That isn't to say tech is bad, but it has trade offs like all things do. You can make a product that thousands of people use and become self employed by just developing a simple app that you sell in a playstore. It has never been possible for a single person to develop a product and it have the capability to be distributed and used by such a large group of people. Sure, it may not launch a war, but it could still lead to catastrophic outcomes to you as an individual. You don't need to be a behemoth anymore to cause serious impact. It may not cause a war, but it could lead to someone draining out your bank account.

I think there's a massive scale blindness here.

Like, obviously I'd be in a big trouble if my password manager suddenly put all of my data online and it could lead to massive financial damage.

At the same time, there are governments that literally have the power to kill their citizens (or citizens of nearby countries). At least LastPass can't declare a war upon me.

"it could still lead to catastrophic outcomes to you as an individual"

True, but an individual is vulnerable almost by definition. A schizophrenic neighbor may decide that you are an alien in human skin and kill you. (I have a friend who barely survived precisely such encounter, being shot no less than 9 times from a CZ75. I have seen the (healed) entry wounds, that guy was extremely lucky.)

Nevertheless it takes a government to ruin lives of an entire nation.

Hear, hear! Though it's probably reasonable to distinguish between representative democracy, which we're all familiar with, and direct democracy, which is satisfying but hard to scale beyond small groups. I would say that our autocratic workplaces were not designed to plunge workers into misery, that's just a side effect of making all that money. Worth shining some light on, since the basic underlying principles of capitalism are supposedly benefiting everyone (just not very equally...). Unfortunately it's hard to run any experiments with alternatives, though there are coops and workers' collectives.

US manufacturing output is up, though, just not jobs. That's generally good, just like it's good we aren't all subsistence farmers anymore. US unemployment is of course currently the lowest it's been in 50 years.

China got low-value-add final assembly work, and it's now starting to leave them as their wages have risen.

Up relative to what?

Itself in the past measured in real dollars.

Looking at what time periods?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/25/most-americ...

As long as there's Fred data, so 2005 [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

Exactly. These are the ones who gave us ads most of which are outright scams.

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