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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> "I’ve been working here for 40 years and I haven’t received a raise in 10 or 12 years"

> "We made a lot of concessions in 2008, but now it’s 2023 and inflation is skyrocketing, everything is through the roof, and we’re just asking for something back. We didn’t even ask for more than we had before."

> "We are defending our way of life, trying to get enough money to take care of our families and stay in the middle class. They work hard here, six days a week, 10 hours a day. We don’t see our family, and we have to work longer hours to earn the same as what we did 20 years ago"

I suspect that a lot of Americans are watching their standard of living decline and seeing their kids have to struggle in ways they never had to at that age. It's no surprise that employees will try to fight to keep what they have, and it'll be interesting to see how much more effective unionized workers are at that.

I imagine that a lot of companies are terrified that if these unions succeed it will lead to the creation of new ones for non-union employees looking for the same thing.

View on HN

The fact that the automaker CEOs (and even POTUS) were putting out statements that they didn’t believe a strike was imminent only to turn around and see 150k workers authorize the strike says a bit about their mindset.

Were automakers significantly less profitable 40 years ago, such that labor had a larger share of revenue and was able to earn enough for a single-income family to live comfortably, or why does it seem so much more like everyone is struggling today?

I haven’t looked into this at all, but I suspect it has something to do with the financialization of the economy and that as the dollar was devalued and interest rates came down, labor took on more debt to maintain and expand its lifestyle and this debt just grew and grew, funding more of the lifestyle and companies didn’t “need” to keep wages growing the same way.

My thinking on this is that everyone of a certain age seems to talk about how people didn’t really have much debt in the 50s, 60s. Small mortgages, no such thing as credit cards or car loans. So companies had to pay enough for people to live on without any debt supplementing their lifestyle. But now everyone just binges on debt in lieu of fighting for higher wages.

Another related concept: when education loans became a big thing, tuition skyrocketed because colleges no longer had to have the discipline to keep tuition affordable without debt.

> Were automakers significantly less profitable 40 years ago

I'll go out on a limb and say that the disparity between how much money the few folks at the top of the auto industry made vs the average worker probably wasn't as wide.

If workers have been forced into debt and yet still can't live as well as households used to with just one breadwinner, I'm not sure how much of that is due to a lack of will to fight and a willingness to accept debt. Certainly the weakening and undermining of unions and the worker's ability to fight effectively has had some impact.

In any case, workers need to accept that they'll need to start fighting a lot harder in whatever ways they still can because clearly they won't be treated fairly otherwise.

> I'll go out on a limb and say that the disparity between how much money the few folks at the top of the auto industry made vs the average worker probably wasn't as wide.

This seems like a culture war red herring because it often translates to “CEOs shouldn’t be paid so much” which distracts from the fact that workers should be paid a lot more. The gap can be closed from either direction of course, but I rarely see the anger directed anywhere but “fat cat executives overpay themselves”. I could care less if a CEO makes $100m a year if the average employee was able to still give a good life to his family on one income!

It's a sign of things going wrong.

It seems bo one read the article. It talks about it.

In the past 40 years: CEO wages in auto industry have gone from 20x the worker salary to 300x. CEO wages have increased ~1400% while worker wages have increased 18%. Etc.

I understand the stats. The issue though is that rather than closing the gap from the top (reducing executive pay), the answer is to close it from the bottom (increase worker pay as a percentage of revenues to historically normal levels, which I believe is the real issue here). If workers made enough to thrive, would anyone care if CEOs also made $100m? I wouldn’t.

The 100 M builds influence. It keeps growing.

The fundamental issue imho is that work is done first by getting your hands dirty and second by building machines to aid the hand work which requires dirty hands and more machines.

Some planning, optimization and designing will have to be done but this should be of a temporal nature and is ideally done by people doing the grunt work.

You can get away with not doing it like that but reality will slowly catch up.

You need to plan the [proverbial] factory and optimize the process but the rewards (while starting big) gradually decline.

Each new design will be better than the last but eventually it is good enough. There is more value in swapping parts and having experience with a fixed design.

People in all positions are way to comfortable where they are and have way to little resources to just walk away, hop jobs or get fired. Simply living is way to expensive because of these same entitlements. It's quite the circular process.

How the system is supposed to work is that if they aren't getting paid what they think they should, then they leave that company and let it fail. This will open up opportunities for other companies that pay better and aren't shitty to take over from the broken company.

Why is that how the ‘system is supposed to work’? Who decided that?

I think, they are arguing from a deregulated/free market capitalist perspective.

Supposedly workers can freely chose to whom they sell their working capacity and thus can negotiate a fair share of the value created.

I personally don't see that working, at least not with strong union laws or even complete syndicalisation of all means of production; the global worker pool and the mobility of companies (vs. the immobility of workers) gives companies just too much of an edge in this negotiation (at least outside of bourgeoisie knowledge workers).

As evidence I point to the decoupling of company earnings vs. labor income share since the 1980ies.

That system only exists in libertarian dreams.

In reality new companies don't just pop up out of nothing overnight. And especially in the US, where labor protections are nearly non-existent compared to the rest of the developed world, the new companies tend to he worse than the ones before them. See: gig economy. See: Tesla's record with unions.

Are these not the highest-paid autoworkers in the world? Besides, VinFast is happy to pop up a factory. Been seeing a lot more VinFast SUVs on the road recently.

> Are these not the highest-paid autoworkers in the world?

Because no American should be allowed to complain about unfair treatment until they are being treated as poorly as the slaves used by automakers in other countries. Let's all race to the bottom!

This is news from this year:

--- start quote ---

A Ford Motor Co. battery plant expected to create 2,500 jobs in Michigan will pay an average salary of $45,136 a year with most workers earning $41,600, according to estimates shared with lawmakers.

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2023/03/new-ford-plant...

--- end quote ---

Median income in Michigan is 62 000 dollars [1]

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MI/INC110221

Says who?

That’s a childish and destructive line of thought. No surprise it’s common in tech.

"if they aren't getting paid what they think they should, then they leave that company and let it fail"

That's what they did, it's called a "strike".

A strike is not leaving the company. A strike is refusing to work until demands are met.

Indeed. Strike is kinda nicer, you're giving the company the option to reconsider their bad decisions, instead of killing them instantly.

A bit less biased, a strike is more like allowing the company a chance to make a deal with their employees before they quit.

Whether the decisions were bad is a matter of opinion, and it's not a given that union employees quiting in mass would kill the company instantly.

(personally I do agree the auto companies have acted in bad faith and would be screwed if these workers all quit, but we'll ever see that happen to know for sure)

I am not biased, just snarky. (The killing and other setup for the rebuttal came from the parent post.)

But I am also a socialist. I think the reverence for the capitalist class in the U.S. is unhealthy, and it permits lot of CEOs to be a-holes and wannabe dictators. I think Americans who are worried about unions destroying companies, you should look at Germany. They give unions a seat at the board, so that everybody is aware how the profits are split, and to see whether compensation is fair or not.

I think socialism can be distilled down to a really simple question (and that's when I really got Marx). If you want to start a new project, say building a genius invention, or an art piece, or just do something useful for the world, whatever it is. Why would you ever want an employee (a subordinate) instead of a coworker (a peer)? Is there any other reason than to control them? Why do you want to be "bossy"? And once you answer that no, I don't want to order people around as subordinates, just to cooperate with them as my peers, then socialism is just technicalities how to make it happen.

Ah yes, the famous "If you're too poor to work that job, just quit" argument.

Companies can pay below subsistence wages longer than you can eat out of the job market.

Better than no work

> How the system is supposed to work is that if they aren't getting paid what they think they should, then they leave that company and let it fail.

That's impossible. They're "too big to fail". Bush bailed them out with $7.4 billion in tax payer money, and later Obama did the same with tens of billions.

However things are "supposed to work" for failing businesses that exploit their workers, in the real world it's all a very different story.

Bush bailed out GM and Chrysler.

The employees of which are currently on strike. However you feel about the auto bailouts, there's no reason to think that the US would allow them to fail today.

> This will open up opportunities for other companies that pay better and aren't shitty to take over from the broken company.

I guess I don't see that result as a given. It seems at least as (probably more) likely that if an automaker falls it'll be taken over by another entity that could be even more hostile to workers.

Bless your heart

the right to strike has been protected by US law for almost 100 years [0]

your opinion about "How the system is supposed to work" is ahistorical and not based in reality.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_o...

Not for railroad workers!

https://archive.ph/j6gW8

Have you had a look at the southern border lately? The working class is forced to compete with illegal immigrants.

Have you looked at the hospital maternity wards and high schools lately? It seems they just keep pumping out new kids that will compete with workers for a zero sum slice of the economic pie. All these high schools graduates are coming to take our jobs

With how US birthrates are trending, maternity wards aren't looking like much of a threat these days, and those high schools graduates will demand minimum wage, paid overtime, FMLA, safe working conditions, and all the other things entitled to them under the law. Illegal immigrants cannot demand these things, and can be exploited in ways that American workers cannot, making them much more attractive to companies. I can compete on relatively even ground with an American high school graduate, but I can't compete with what is basically slavery.

All those folks entering at the US Southern Border are making asylum claims, and asylees are granted work permits, including while their cases are pending, allowing them to work for most any industry (with some restrictions).

What you're describing is certainly a real issue, but it can solved in its entirety by simply providing visas, or even work permits.

That's difficult in practice, because existing companies can standardize on pay, and unlike software it's difficult for new competitors to emerge due to the capital- and infrastructure-intensive nature of the auto industry making it candidate for a natural monopoly.

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

> it's difficult for new competitors to emerge

Counterpoint: Tesla, Fisker, Rivian, Lucid, Faraday Future, not to mention all the new Chinese brands that I don't follow. Difficult maybe but far from impossible, and not at all a natural monopoly.

Seems like you both agree that it's difficult for new competitors to emerge. It's great that a very small number of extremely rich people managed to to gain some kind of entry into the industry, but that's not exactly compelling evidence that the barriers to entry don't disadvantage competition. Especially considering that I really only see Tesla's cars on the road and they are few and far between compared to the cars I see made by the entrenched "big three". Even with the efforts of billionaires, it's a massive uphill battle.

Your "counterpoint" is companies that took quite some time and money to establish and are well known for their anti-labor practices. From Tesla's union-busting tactics and labor protection violations to Rivian's unsafe working conditions.

So are you saying that car-making is a natural monopoly solely because of the unions? <half-joking>

No, I'm saying that it's very hard for competitors to emerge in this space, unions or no unions.

Tesla took 5 years to produce its first car, and another four years to produce a second one.

And it took them 17 years to break even: https://www.statista.com/chart/26705/yearly-net-income-and-r...

How the system is supposed to work is that people are supposed to exercise their first amendment right of free association. Corporations of this scale were never "supposed to" exist.

I don't think our system was really designed with a maximum corporation size in mind, though it's irrevocably pretty safe to say the system wasn't designed to include many of the public policies that allow such large corporations to stay in business.

Take away tax breaks, subsidies, and the concept of "too big to fail" and I can't imagine companies could ever get to the size of a modern auto manufacturer, tech company, bank, etc.

> This will open up opportunities for other companies that pay better and aren't shitty to take over from the broken company.

Ah yes, like the non-union, non-shitty Tesla, right?

"Tesla ran over worker rights, again, US labor judge finds"

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763141

Why is it “supposed” to work that way rather than collective action for better pay like we are seeing?

These companies are gonna die and they will become cautionary tail for the future.

Ford's situation is particularly interesting because until Tesla, they were the only major US automaker to never go bankrupt.

Their taking in massive losses (EV transition) and their balance sheet looks very ugly.

Also as an aside, it will also be a early warning signal for all these companies. It will provide an entire cohort of CEOs with the mandate to invest heavily in automation to bridge the gap.

You how the saying goes, "be careful what you wish for"

Also btw "die" is a matter of perspective. The shareholders will be wiped out, a huge chunk of the management core will replaced and probably a massive layoffs.

Oh and their pensions wiped out (can't have pensions without a company to pay for them).

FAFO

> Ford's situation is particularly interesting because until Tesla, they were the only major US automaker to never go bankrupt.

If Ford goes bankrupt, the two-tier stock structure that keeps the Ford family in control goes away.

As it should. Btw thats the worst of their worries, they will get wiped out in bankruptcy and they should.

The shareholders who didn't fight of unionisation like their lives depended on it deserves to get wiped out.

I'm all for treating workers fairly and with respect but who thought it would be a great idea to give an entity with no skin in the game a massive blank check.

This

Ford himself was at least smart enough to understand that if you pay your workers well they buy your own product.

If you (any company) automate those people away (yeah right) who can afford their product?

Queue the fantasy about UBI but maybe it’s better if companies would pay their workers their fair share of wages.

Or dare I say it: we disband the notion of private ownership of the means of production and give that ownership back to the people.

> Or dare I say it: we disband the notion of private ownership of the means of production and give that ownership back to the people.

Lets be explicit about this lunutism kills millions of people, directly and indirectly, collapses on itself and then hopeful is salvaged by hardcore capitalism.

Sounds like I should have issued a trigger warning.

May I recommend informing yourself as absolutely nothing you wrote is true.

AI and automation will end up creating more and better jobs than the industrial revolution that created these peoples livelihood.

Humanity always strives for more and better. There are entire fields left untouched. We have an entire galaxy to explore.

Dare I say:

"Ownership" was never in the hands of "the people". Property rights are not just something important. It is everything. It is the only important thing. Its the fabric of human civilisation.

Its impossible to have a functioning society with out and I mean that in the literal sense.

Even under your utopia, you will still have property rights, its just dictated by "the proletariat".

What this looks like in real life is, you replace a decentralised ledger of human value with a centralised ledger managed by the AOCs and Bernies of the world.

In other words, you just replaced our current class of elites who (somewhat) earned their station with a new class of elites that just so happened have the gift of gab.

To make it worse, the power of our current elites is scoped and limited whereas this new class of elites will have an order of magnitude more power and there will be no limit.

A cautionary tale I remember vividly from a guy I met in Miami: He is from Venuezuala, his dad used have an energy drinks company. They lost it all and know he is a refugee in America. The one thing I remember him telling me is why the people don't rise up against Maduro: You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Maduro took everything from them but they still support him for the rotten food he gives them from AID. In your utopia, those hands will be AOCs (bartender) and Bernies (Hippie whos never worked a real job).

Don't you see how the structure is fundamentally unstable? Think of it in computer terms, it will be the equivalent of creating a quantum Artificial Super Intelligence that is capable of calculating the actions needed to be taken by hundreds of millions of Americans to create the most perfect outcome.

Now replace quantum ASI with AOC (former bartender) and Bernie Sanders (former & current hippie because he's never had a real job). Even a strongman case like China where there is still quasi private ownership and the central committee selects actual competent people, even there the whole system is full of death star vulnerabilities (ghost cities, population implosion).

This long reply, which you put some effort in - which I appreciate - reads a bit unhinged, sorry.

    We have an entire galaxy to explore.

I rather not focus on that at all. I’d like to focus on

1. Preserving the earth 2. Make the world much more equal for people

Now, I said unhinged because read so much misunderstanding about capitalism / socialism/ communism that I recommend reading a bit up on the actual material, just so that you won’t be wrong.

What I also mostly feel reading this, is that indeed you’ve absorbed exactly everything and then some regarding the virtues of capitalism and the evils of socialism/communism.

That’s not in your own interest. You may see yourself as a ‘temporary embarrassed millionaire’ but even as a millionaire you are closer to the unhoused than the rich people who own and run things

The interesting thing about HN is, although they are incredibly smug, arrogant and often incorrect, at least you can sense that you communicating with smart people. I can assure you, you're not one of them and that makes things pretty tricky for me. To make it worse, although you just called me unhinged you didn't get downvoted or flagged but if I follow suit I will get eviscerated (trust me I tried) and partly its because I can be uhh a little colourful especially in questioning peoples mental capacity.

> ...closer to the unhoused than the rich people who own and run things

Somebody will always own and run things (impossible otherwise). Even the marxists understood this, thats why you have the dictatorship of the proletariat. They tell you its only temporary until the perpetual motion machine is finished, meanwhile they will just keep the god emperor seat warm you know.

Anyways, its not only incredibly silly to even aim towards building such structures, its also immoral. These blowups that happen every time your kin try these ideas are not an accident (i mean..), its a direct result of the moral narratives that drive you people.

The guy that fills up grocery store shelves should be worth 300-400 times less than Elon Musk (IMO even less). A society that puts Elon musk in the same realm as that guy (20x-50x), is a deeply immoral society. A society that values AOC (former bartender) and Bernie Sanders (former hippie that never had a real job) higher than Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimond etc deserves to burn to the ground. There is something deeply rotten about such a society, its parasitic.

Btw you could similar claims the other way around, there would something wrong about a society where the middle class is shrinking and you have this uneven duality of peasants vs aristocracy. I may even agree that in many ways we are headed that direction.

The difference is I think the blame for that can be almost entirely put on your kin. I suggest you look into the Cantillon Effect. What we are facing now are the consequences of FDR era (& subsequent) socialist policies. The check always comes due. You cant create something out nothing. For every dollar, somebody is on the liability side. You can let the barbarians invade the country (short term deflationary), you can create neo-colonialism through the IMF & World Bank (Alex Gladstein IMF) (deflationary), you can move factories to poor countries (deflationary) but at some point the chickens will come home to roost. At some point you will have to pay the pied piper.

At some point the nation that has 50-60 hour weeks for their automobile industry will favoured by nature over the nation that forces its automakers to provide 32 hours weeks (4 days). At some point the nation that reveres and empowers their best people will win and latter will be in ruins. Just like how the management & shareholders of Ford deserves to get wiped out for enabling unions, the nation that betrays its competent, conscientious, industrious class deserves to be wiped out.

P.S.

I think the Elon musk point is a key difference. You guys have a massive reality distortion where you either entirely or mostly discount that value of capital allocator class whether if its human or actual capital.

There seems to be some notion that the Elon, Collison brothers, Toby Lutke, Sam Altman etc are just people who got lucky to win the "owner class" lottery.

In reality these people are barely human, they should be revered and we as a society should aim to be more like them. There is a saying popularised by the founder of this forum that goes something like (really paraphrasing) you wanna start young & naive as a founder since nobody in their right minds would put themselves through this.

Its the equivalent of playing a jailbroken game where you manually set difficulty above hardcore. You need to be top percentile of everything (IQ, EQ, creativity, industriousness etc)just as tablestakes and now you get opportunity to compete against freaks just like you. You can tick all the boxes, sacrifice your life (tunnel vision) to work like a slave and still lose. Even if you win, now you gotta win again and again.

Its really not even close, the asymmetry is insane. Yes there are exceptions (nepo-babies, trust fund kids etc) but usually the former eats these peoples lunches given enough time. Thats why wealth never stays in the same family for more than a few generations.

Btw in your utopia, Bernie Sanders (a hippie that got kicked out of a commune for being a bum) will be valued more than those people I described. Let me repeat you would rather value the former bartender AOC more than people who can retire multiple times over but choose instead to work 70 hour weeks in service of humanity.

    There is a saying popularised by the founder of this forum that goes something like (really paraphrasing) you wanna start young & naive as a founder since nobody in their right minds would put themselves through this.

Paul Graham is laughing so hard that young people work themselves to death for him, and the vast majority ends up with nothing and may be worse off, and it costs PG pocket change. Useful idiots who were naïve and bought the narrative you seem to swallow with such zeal.

Those people you keep name dropping are all extremely privileged due to inheritance or connections and so on. And rich people can try multiple times, but poor people have effectively one shot, if they have one at all (due to lack of opportunity / inequality).

I will always value a bartender more over any billionaire that hoards money through wage theft, Union busting, tax evasion, and so on. You can’t be ethical and a billionaire at the same time. Because those billions can only be accrued by extreme wage theft.

Being a bartender isn’t something to look down upon, the fact that you mention this, shows your true colors.

The funny thing is that I live in Europe and we work far less hours, have trice the PTO and don’t even know that “sick days” are (if you’re sick you stay home). We have universal healthcare, affordable education and I could go on.

I could tell you about the very stringent worker protections so employers can’t just fire people on a whim. And, so on.

And yet.

If you Google “labor productivity by country” my country is ‘very close’ to the USA.

Just to say: your core beliefs are false, just Ayn Rand fan fiction. But if you want, you can become a better, kinder, more humane person if you want. It might make you happy one day.

The funny thing is I live in Europe (UK) too and I can tell you most of these countries are like an old person in pain waiting to die. The entire continent just leeches of the good will and work done by their ancestors like a bunch of trust fund kids (lol).

We don't make anything. You basically work most of the year for the government (50%+ tax + VAT (20%) + forced pension contributions & the sweet sweet 10% inflation) to be forced into sub par services.

> Universal Healthcare

The NHS sucks. Nurses hate it. Doctors hate it. Patients despise it. Its the second biggest line item in our budget, we cant afford it. The cautionary tale for Americans is despite this no political will dare speak against it, its political suicide. NHS has become healthcare, healthcare=NHS.

The conservative party will just use Labours crazy budget proposal from last election cycle and the labour party will come up with an even crazier budget proposal.

Btw this is not an outsider view, my entire family (except me) works for the NHS. My doctor friend described his career as basically indentured servitude. My mum use to tell me to lie to my GPs and pretend like I'm dying or I wont get treated.

> Education

Education is the same, high school was basically forced day care where they turn you into obedient little government slaves. Btw forced is not an exaggeration, parents will go to jail if they take kids out of high school (public indoctrination camps).

> Productivity

I have no idea who comes up with the productivity in numbers but I refuse to 1984 this, we don't make anything in Europe anymore. Even the cars have semiconductors and parts from Asia.

As I look around I'm using an american macbook, asian mouse, american airpods, asian monitor, asian tv, american nicotine pouch, american iphone, asian coffee cup, asian notebook, american coffee, asian water filter, asian glasses, asian office chair, asian wallet, asian clothes, asian washing machine & drier, asian fridge, asian microwave oven etc.

All the people I grew up with works in the services industry. Nobody makes stuff here.

P.S.

I worked as a bartender before and I've done worse (temperature controlled warehouses). Any man (or lady) making an honest living is honourable and respectable.

That said, the type of people who worked in these places are like chimps compared to these people I've "name dropped". Its really hard to get this point across (esp to someone like you), the difference isn't linear. These peoples speak almost different languages.

I know this at an intimate level, I grew up near what used to be the poorest area of the UK. Whenever I'm back home from my world, I have to literally change the way I speak when I hang out with my friends there.

Its not just IQ or EQ either btw, its more. Like a lot more. The sheer volume of perspectives and level of competence.. its really hard to put into words.

Also I've never raid Ayn Rand nor am I a libertarian utopian, thats just being an opposite you, different sides of the same coin. Both you guys have massive reality distortions.

    I have no idea who comes up with the productivity in numbers but I refuse to 1984 this, we don't make anything in Europe anymore. Even the cars have semiconductors and parts from Asia.

Those numbers 100% prove you wrong yet you emotionally brush them aside and you stick to your fantasy that has something to do with only production of physical goods being real and anything else is not real. That's just unfounded opinion. I have no respect for this.

> Its not just IQ or EQ either btw, its more. Like a lot more. The sheer volume of perspectives and level of competence.. its really hard to put into words.

I'm not sure I find you competent at being able to make such an assessment, as I observe so much unfounded emotional adherence to some billionaires (ubermenschen) and the adoration of America + production of physical goods.

The 'chimps' remark basically makes you sound like you believe in Eugenics. Yet you fail to see the bigger contest, how many people never have the opportunities the rich people have, starting with who their parents are and how much money they have.

Why do you do this to yourself, why adore a person like Elon Musk, who is a walking string of lies and lawsuits + claiming work of others (Tesla) for himself and who is running 'Twitter' into the ground. And most, if not all of his companies are funded by government funding or due to other companies wanting to offset emissions. Tesla isn't doing great.

And this is just the start.

The UK is not Europe (anymore).

The UK is indeed destroying itself by choosing brexit and voting for a right-wing government that is hellbent on destroying all social services and to favour the rich. You project that stuff on Europe as a whole, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What is happening with the NHS is the same story: your Bilionaire PM is destroying NHS, why you guys aren't in the streets preparing a 'french revolution' is not clear to me.

Same for Education.

> I have no idea who comes up with the productivity in numbers but I refuse to 1984 this, we don't make anything in Europe anymore. Even the cars have semiconductors and parts from Asia.

If you contest numbers like that because it doesn't fit your own negative narrative, that's not very rational now is it?

Asian Asian Asian: because the billionaire owners found cheap slave labour in Asia at the expense of local workers. Know who to blame. Your favourite pals the billionaires.

> Those numbers 100% prove you wrong.

Not it doesn't. Its mostly tax/banking havens and oil/gas rich countries. The only exception to the rule is US lol.

> Your adoration of billionaires and your materialistic values cloud your judgement.

You just called the richest, most entrepreneurial and ingenuitive man of our generation a hack. Mind you, this is the same guy your kin worshipped like 2 seconds ago.

The guy continually made bold bets, got ridiculed by everyone and was proven right. The Twitter saga being the latest example, the platform was meant implode any minute now like a year ago.

You may disagree with my claims but at the very least I try to present an objective view of the world grounded in experience and facts.

> Can you not see that its not an even playing field?

The playing field is as even and fair as its ever been. This is not an opinion, its a fact and the difference is uncanny. Does this mean why shouldn't strive to make it even more fair, no go on ahead, all the power to you.

> UK is not Europe which is doing great.

The entire union is propped up by Germany (& France). The ECB has no ammunition left. Italy & Spain are about to have a pensions nuclear explosion. France temporarily delayed it at a great cost. Its really not looking good for Europe.

> Billionaires found slaves in Asia

How can you not see the childishness of your worldview? Its reads like a badly written bedtime story. Big bad fat cat monsters vs honest bartender lady who was destined for more!

I urge you, try to get a better picture of the world. I suggest you look into:

- Pareto principle & distribution

- Cantillon effect

- Any Steve Jobs or Elon Musk biography

- History from Mesopotamia to now, the more detailed the better.

- Read up on communism/socialism/capitlaism, use neutral* sources if you must but actually dive in.

At the very least, you'll be able to make better arguments for your cause.

> Conclusion

I hope one day you will realise that the difference between a guy who spars with his buddies vs Khabib Nurmagomedov isn't linear.

There are people in all walks of life (not just business) where the difference between the average vs the great is truly mind boggling. Its a kind of feeling you get where you go "oh there a levels to this shut!"!.

A world that doesn't reward these freaks of nature justly, deserves to burn to the ground. People like Bob Iger or Satya Nadella can retire multiple times over, instead the choose to work 70 hour weeks and its not rote repetitive stuff either, its 4d chess stuff with constant context switching.

I can really keep going here but its just so baffling to me that there people like you in this world (especially HN). I said it before, I don't think its IQ, if you here it means you atleast smart enough. There is something deeply rotten about a society that cannot recognise greatness.

"Back" to the people? The people never owned it.

We can make it a word game if you like but as long as the means of production is no longer privatized I’d be happy.

That's not a word game. It's a question of whether the (historically) normal state is ownership by the people, and what we have is now abnormal. And the answer is, no, this is normal, and what you propose is historically abnormal - unprecedented, in fact.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you're wrong. But it means that you have the burden of proof to show that you're right.

Word games it is then.

I didn’t make a right or wrong statement, I made a proposal.

Up to anyone to choose their own answer.

> It will provide an entire cohort of CEOs with the mandate to invest heavily in automation to bridge the gap.

This is frequently parroted, but never occurs. Invest in automation all you want, robots don’t buy products, the middle class does.

If domestic automakers fail, the US government will bail them out. No one has the appetite to allow Elon (who only owns 13% of Tesla and his position continues to decline) and Tesla to take light auto manufacturing hostage and corner the market. We’ll just print dollars to do it, because we can. Pensions can be bailed out by the pension guarantee corp, funded by the general fund and the top 40% of taxpayers who have a federal tax liability.

The rules are flexible and can change at anytime. Labor is needed to build and generate productivity, shareholders are just rows in a database. If they get wiped out, meh.

I propose an another strategy. Bail them out and hand over the company to the workers, organized as a equal shareholder corporation.

The workers are the ones that have to most to lose when the company goes under. For the shareholders, it's usually just one of many investments, managed by a fund. They are not really stakeholders. The management has golden parachutes, is well connected and will find new employment soon.

For the workers, it is the job they have been doing for years and years. It's their livelihood. Whereas a new management or new finance shareholders will just seek new ways to squeeze as much money out of the company until it has to be bailed out again, the workers might actually try to keep it running for long time.

I could not agree more, and it makes perfect sense to zero out shareholders and recapitalize with workers having substantial ownership when management destroys value sufficiently to require a reorg of the capital structure.

The US government can do that. What they can't do is prevent the resulting inflation. That inflation will wipe out the gains the auto workers get from the raises they get from this strike. Those who don't work for auto makers (and so didn't get the raises in the first place) will be far worse off.

You can't print your way to prosperity.

You can’t automate your way to prosperity either if you assume you can do so to vacuum up productivity as dividends and share buybacks. Velocity of money is what keeps the economy moving, not the wealthy hoarding aggregate productivity (while providing crumbs to the lower socioeconomic strata). People who spend must have the ability to earn. That spending is what drives the economy.

As the cliche goes, “the stock market is not the economy.”

The rules are flexible but not the consequences. The only reason such ideas are even on the table is because of the bailouts of 2008 and 2020 (consequences).

You do realise this will bankrupt the US right? Not because America can't afford a $200 billion dollar check but because it sets a new precedent just like the previous bailouts did.

America will be de-facto guaranteeing all major public companies (TRILLIONS). This will be like dropping a nuclear bomb on the liability side of the US dollar. There will be a massive flight.

And thats only the beginning of America's worries, this action will open a massive can of worms. You will be essentially giving the management of these companies a blank check. You will be giving all the unions a blank check.

P.S.

Shareholders are rows in a database just like how employees are a line item. In reality both are crucial parts of the equation. You do realise these "public" companies are not owned by "robber barons" (hate this term) anymore. They are usually majority held by institutions (index funds) which are mostly made up of pension funds, 401Ks, sovereign funds, college endowments etc.

If you're gonna counter with "bailouts", all I'll say is who bails out the entity bailing out. If your gonna say tax the rich™, even you steal all the money from all billionaires™ in America, it will just be a rounding error for the liabilities here, then as you start going down the ladder of the rich™ it will be like a snake eating its own tail (Ouroboros).

Btw what you say will play out soon (decade or two around when social security runs out) and I wonder whether if the children of the next empire will be talking about how real communism wasn't tried and it was just because they had bad leaders.

> It will provide an entire cohort of CEOs with the mandate to invest heavily in automation to bridge the gap.

Companies are already investing in automation as much as they possibly can. It doesn't matter what human workers do. It doesn't matter if they demand fair wages or allow themselves to be exploited. Companies will toss their human workers aside like trash and replace them with machines as soon as it becomes possible regardless.

Companies will always benefit from replacing human workers with machines. Machines don't get sick, they don't get other employees sick, they don't steal, they don't show up late, they don't take vacation, they don't have kids or family emergencies, they don't get your company caught up in sexual harassment lawsuits, they don't join unions, they don't become whistleblowers, they don't sleep, and most importantly they never say "No".

Human labor is always going to be worse for a company than automation.

You can't scare employees into accepting abuse out of fear of the Bogeyman of automation, because it's coming as fast as it can for them regardless. The best workers can do is fight to put themselves in the best financial position they can today, so that they can better hold out while society figures out what to do after human workers are no longer needed.

> Machines don't get sick

Like McDonalds' ice cream machines? Sorry couldn't resist.

I hope the next generation at least builds the guillotines

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