Comment by frmersdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frmersdog | Hacker News Reader

Hey, hi, yoohoo whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part:

  Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”.

You might think that this article is just about Japanese animators, but it's also about the state of the job economy and the careers of several generations of workers in the developed world, globally. The obsession with per-worker productivity - of only ever hiring the 10xer - is how you get here.

The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).

I worked with CNC machining shops in Sweden and the people working there made the exact same points. CNC is not exactly an art form, but programming the machines definitely has some craftsmanship aspects to it. Even considering that after a part is programmed it can then be mass produced.

- Very hard to get young people in because entry level pays very poorly AND requires non-trivial amounts of training.

- Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well

- Overall not great work conditions compared to an office job

- Retiring experienced older workforce with no one to replace them

- Having a shop in China machine the parts for you can be quite acceptable, especially in higher volumes

However I disagree with your argument of "obsession with [...] only ever hiring the 10xer". It is not so much that, but rather that if you hire average people with average skills or people that require training *you go out of business* because the shop next door won't.

Basically it drains the expertise completely dry until is just completely moves to another country having a demographic boom. And this is happening to software engineering right now. People who complain about immigration don't seem to realize that non-developed countries are seeing massive population growth reductions too.

Eventually the world is going to run out of countries having demographic booms, then society will have a massive lack of people to maintain existing infrastructure and corporations. The only upside is that wealth inequality should drastically reduce in this scenario (unless some governments manage to push caste systems back into fashion).

>It is not so much that, but rather that if you hire average people with average skills or people that require training you go out of business because the shop next door won't.

If only workers would form some kind of a community, which would take monthly contributions and that would then be used to upskill. It would unite most, if not all people in the same industry.

> - Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well

> - Having a shop in China machine the parts for you can be quite acceptable, especially in higher volumes

Yes, in some circumstances, your idea can work. To a degree. But there are plenty of trades and whole industries where domestic employment has fallen by 100X or more, because global capitalism found plenty of cheap workers in distant countries. Where 10X (or more) lower pay didn't seem so bad, compared to their local alternatives.

My point is that the expertise drain is going to hit those other countries too, within our work-lives given the demographics of China, Korea and Japan. The same thing is happening over there to even worse degrees, youth unemployment is already massive problem in east asia and when all those trained workspeople and engineers leave the work force in ~30 years.

Sure then that expertise could migrate to other countries, possibly some in Africa. But the demographics slow down is probably already going to afflict those countries before the expertise leaves east asia in the first place.

I truly believe that within 40 years we are going to have a massive infrastructure maintenance problem, where the world will run dry of trained professionals to maintain everything that is already built. And, like I mentioned above, the wealth inequality will reduce because the owners of capital will need to pay premium rates for qualified workforce (think how cobol is today).

Are there countries where trade unions are still active in training? Most places I see they are entirely focused on wage bargaining, and are happy to gut training for the young if they can maintain the generous pensions of the old.

Trade unions in the US do educate and train apprentices, I’m most familiar with the IBEW (electricians).

Local IBEW halls have apprentice programs (JATC is an common name for this program) where the apprentices go to class at the union hall one day a week for 20 weeks a year and spend the rest of the time working in the field.

I am pretty sure that sheet metal workers, pipefitters, and plumbers unions offer similar programs.

Capitalism's core aspect is exploitation, of course this is the result. Capitalism, that "nothing can beat this economic system" winner is a winner because it is immoral, folks. It is based on exploiting those with no alternative. Of course this decimation of competing participants is part of its core operation. Capitalism is a controlled conflict. It is slow violence.

Those being hired in the low labor cost countries don't view it as exploitation. They view it as a gift, opportunities and outcomes they didn't have before.

People complain about inequality. This migration of jobs from rich to poorer countries is the market dealing exactly with that. Maybe inequality is ok if you're benefiting from it?

That's a propaganda lie, ask how the Foxconn staff think about this, those that have suicide nets outside of their work skyscrapers. you're being a parrot for a culture of exploiters and punching downers.

You think those people in low income countries would prefer what they were doing before? Then why do they take these jobs? Is someone holding a gun to their heads?

Don't compare these jobs to some unattained ideal, compare them to the alternatives they have.

Yes! Guns or their prior way of life destroyed by industrialized nations, it does not matter. We in our capitalistic drive exploited them, and now these economic slaves have no alternative. Yes! They prefer to make their own destinies, whatever they may be, through their own means with their own cultures. Not ours, not our corporate servitude.

> - Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well

If the margins are so razor thin that people the shops can't afford to pay well, what is the point of having the shops? Have the people go do something that pays well. There seem to be alternatives if people don't feel pressured to enter the industry in the first place.

If Sweden has picked a policy mix where it can't profitably run an industry then it'll either have to give up some material comfort to do it uneconomically or give up the industry. You don't make it sound like there is a hard conversation being had around intentionally lowering living standards to support machining shops. So let them go.

> Eventually the world is going to run out of countries having demographic booms, then society will have a massive lack of people to maintain existing infrastructure and corporations.

Under such circumstances, margins will have to rise to the point where machine shops will be able to hire some snot-nosed apprentices. Economics is pretty brutal about that sort of thing.

It is not a problem of Sweden specifically, I imagine this kind of problem will hit China hard in 20-40 years too. Companies in China behave just the same way as in Sweden, they have huge youth unemployment problems there too.

There are a bunch of upsides here. Industrialisation increases standard of living compared to an agrarian economy. A service economy, where services mean things like industrial engineering and product marketing, increases standard of living even further.

I get that tool and die is going to be in demand again one day, but that's not an overall downside. For that to happen, every country which could be outsourced to will be too wealthy and have a service economy, and they'll have to use their wealth to hire the last remaining tool and die makers as instructors. Compared to the upsides of nobody being a subsistence farmer or sweatshop worker anymore, and of most people living in advanced economies, that downside is small.

If this is happening in software engineering it would imply that Americans are moving to other, higher paid work which doesn't seem to be the case.

Investing funds don't want to know about 10 years in the future. Next quarter is fine and damn with the rest

Why would Japanese studios outsource when Japanese artists are paid less than Chinese ones?

Yep, the current systems incentives are not aligned with it's continued existence.

>As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea)

Good news!

You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak.

/s

I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.

>we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level

Who is this "we"? As if society at large gets a say? Do people owning land and houses ask the homeless of how to organize home ownership?

All it takes is a populist with a good message to make a political group. All functional Western nations have voting mechanisms that allow for radical government change, if there is enough public support for it. It might take a decade to fully manifest, but if we're entering an age of such extreme, then I would expect people to eventually vote for such change.

>All functional Western nations have voting mechanisms that allow for radical government change

Voters never get what they vote for.

The RNC tried to stop Trump from winning the candidacy but he won regardless. The fact that MAGA movement is seemingly enthralled to him means at least some people are getting who they voted for, and therefore your statement can't possibly be true.

I doubt they voted for increased fuel prices.

>The RNC tried to stop Trump from winning the candidacy but he won regardless.

That's not an example of people getting what they voted for though.

It's RNC trying to prevent people prevented get the alternative to what they decidedly didn't what. RNC just wanted the same old politics and career players (that people didn't want), and tried to prevent Trump for that reason (same as Dems did to Bernie).

Not that Trump wining changed anything. After he won, he negated on his promises, and just gave same old neoliberal/neocon RNC shit combined with some theatrics for the gullible.

So people prevented from electing who they wanted, and when they finally elected him anyways, they got the same shit they voted him as the alternative to.

Having the mechanism does not equal guaranteeing the positive result that this mechanism theoretically allows.

Politicians' whole schtick is to promise the sun and the moon and then give their buddies the lucrative government contracts, do insider trading, and generally create hidden rings of influence.

Voting and democracy in general are a facade and have been probably ever since they first existed. Not seeing that seems... a strange form of idealism, to me.

A lot of "us" thought quite thoroughly and, you might say, even correctly, about "how to organize work at a fundamental level".

News flash: the truly influential people that hold most of the capital on the planet don't want those ways of organizing work at a fundamental level. They want serfs and -- if possible -- slaves.

Get to work enacting a change. Most of us are busy surviving and feeding families. You know where the "1%"-ers are. Let's see some results -- on the news.

I am seriously super tired of seeing this "we" trope. As if there's a true democratic way of changing things out there. When was the last time the worker class has been truly listened to? Point me at some real history.

> Get to work enacting a change.

At least in the US, it's questionable as to whether "people" (writ large) really want change deep down inside.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."

This quote helped me explain why and how average working-class and poor Americans vote for people who think of them as subhuman.

Very good quote, thank you. And it seems like propaganda worked on these people.

You're welcome.

But I would add that at this point I'm not sure this is really "propaganda". In my mind, it's more "the culture."

America is a highly individualistic society and always has been. By some measurements, it's the most individualistic society in the world and perhaps the most individualistic nation-state in history.

If you're American, you're basically taught from an early age that anything is possible and that the sky is the limit. You could be born poor and still become one of the world's richest people. Technically, some of these beliefs are true. But they're exaggerated and the end result is that you have a ton of people who devalue things (like, say, universal healthcare) that they come to see as a threat to the lottery ticket they were born with.

To put it in blunt terms, this is how you end up with a poor redneck in West Virginia voting for a foul-mouthed socialite billionaire from New York City. The latter thinks the former is trash; the former thinks under the right circumstances he could have become the latter.

Why do you think globalization is even possible to reverse via human thought?

If you accept global competition, then expecting there to be hundreds of millions of job positions with meaningful protection from competition seems literally futile.

Even tens of millions would be a huge stretch. So probably not even a full 1% of 8+ billion people could attain that.

Unironically, ever since generative art tech arrived I have been anticipating full automation of in-betweening. I am rather (pleasantly) surprised it hasn't already been done.

Full automation of in-betweening was achieved during the 70's, I was there, it was a big deal, and then nobody used it. Interpolation animation, splines and vector morphing are all versions of that tech. The automation is in-betweens is how modern animation software works, but a lot people want 3D characters, 3D views, and the freedom to change perspectives after beginning. So "in-betweening" is now used more for the creation of certain motions that either cannot be motion captured, or are some signature motion for that character and the motion is designed - and that will be in-betweens for the motions between key poses, but those are all 3D motions, so different views can be chosen later. Even if the final production will appear to be 2D hand drawn, it is 3D production beneath, and our original in-betweening method at the individual joint level within an articulated body.

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