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Comment by mortureb | Hacker News Reader

40%? I sincerely wish them the best of luck and I hope they get what is their due but this is probably good news for India, Mexico and China.

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If it was that easy it would’ve happened already. And software engineers jobs would have moved first due to savings and low effort and low infrastructure changes required.

40% of IT work is already outsourced and that’s a number that is rapidly growing and that’s only over a decade and a half. It doesn’t even take into account foreign employees that now just work remotely.

Sort of. There's a lot of outsourced work. It doesn't appear to have cannibalized the onshore work in a significant way.

Tell that to the current SE labor market though it may be unrelated.

why does Meta pay engineers $400k when there’s somebody offshore willing to do it for $35/hr?

hmm…

For a long time the answer was they needed those people to physically come into the office.

So what, nothing prohibits the US and Europe from raising tariffs on industrial products.

The pendulum of globalization is bound to swing backwards for a multitude of reasons.

Isn’t that what leads to Ladas and Trabants.

cough WTO cough

The WTO has been fucked over for years now. Practically they've been kneecapped since 2019 "thanks" to the 45th [1], and even before that, they didn't do much against the clear breaches of good conduct that China committed, and for what it's worth it's not like the actions of the 45th were without good cause, even back under Bush the WTO was infamous for being slow as molasses even compared to other international organizations and having failed to update their rulebook because everyone and their dog kept vetoing stuff.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/25/austr...

I'm just amazed how, with enough money invested into propaganda of economic liberalism (still a paltry sum in the grand order of things), you can have smart people around the world repeating your mantras without noticing for decades that you have not even pretended to live up to your own faith.

Many of them acolytes actually ruining their domestic economy by executing on these principles.

The problem is, the propaganda was all just propaganda in the end. Yes, we got cheap trinkets out of China, but at what price? Insane amounts of economic devastation, as none of the promised benefits other than said cheap trinkets materialized. None of the countries that "change by trade" ("Wandel durch Handel") targeted became democratic, and instead of "trickle down of wealth" we got a "trickle down of shit and exploitation" [1] while the elites at the top got ever richer and richer.

[1] https://www.allaboutlean.com/hoshin-kanri-3/bird-shit-hierar...

> So what, nothing prohibits the US and Europe from raising tariffs on industrial products.

I mean, there's retaliation. Trade is mutual.

Tariffs, which are just a regressive tax increase on car consumers, are a very bad industrial policy. You want to do export promotion instead.

> You want to do export promotion instead.

That's what us Germans did, and look where it brought us to: our car companies make a significant chunk of their profit in China - Deka estimates the Chinese share of BMW profits at ~40% [1], for VW all I could find is that 41% of their exports go to China, for Mercedes it's 37%.

Now the Chinese government is massively subsidizing domestic electric vehicles, and our car companies are headed for very dark times.

[1] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/autoherst...

[2] https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/autoindustrie/vol...

[3] https://www.inrlp.de/ratgeber/fahren/mercedes-benz-china-aut...

Sounds like they made a lot of money they wouldn't have otherwise. If they're not making that in the future, that's still better than the alternative.

You could always sell to the rest of Europe, but since they're in a fiscal union with you and you refuse to deficit spend, they're not very good customers.

The problem is the car manufacturers are massively leveraged against and now China has our economies by the balls. All the CCP needs to do is squeeze them and we're in for many years of pain as we unravel our unhealthy dependency on both China and the automotive industry.

That seems more like a mismanagement of risk outside of, and confirming, the windfall from the overwhelming success of the export promotion.

China has been averaging a 9% wage increase yoy or about 41% per 4 years. This wouldn't be news in China instead it would be the average case.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/743563/china-average-yea...

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/average-salaries-in-chin...

It's interesting to see workgroups that are harder to outsource, and the kind of contract renewals they are getting. Like airline pilots, for example...and not just forward pay increases, but retroactive pay raises for 2+ years as a lump sum, and many other perks and changes to work rules, higher reimbursement for various things, etc.

US market car manufacturing isn't in India/China because of NAFTA. And because cars are big and heavy, of course.

Mexico it is then.

Buick Enclave and Lincoln Nautilus are two Chinese made cars in the US. Expect US car manufacturers to have the bulk of their product lines to be made and designed in China before too long.

Some Jaguars and Land Rovers are made in India and are available in the US.

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