Jensen: 'we've Done Our Country a Great Disservice' by Offshoring

If changing the system is off the table, then this is what any solution would inevitably look like. I do not think the problem is a flaw in the system though. Calling it a systemic issue is misleading, because the system is largely functioning as designed. The logical response, therefore, is to change the system itself.

That idea sounds frightening, largely because most political parties treat the system as untouchable, presenting it as if there are no viable alternatives (thus convincing people that there are none, making them feel helpless). This creates a dead end: people experience the full force of the system's pressures while being told that nothing fundamental can be changed.

In that vacuum, scapegoating becomes an easy outlet. When the system itself cannot be questioned, frustration is redirected towards marginalised groups, under the implicit belief that punishing or excluding them will somehow relieve the pressure on everyone else, and that's how we ended up at this point (imho).

A system centered on people's needs would judge success by outcomes like health, stability, and quality of life rather than by growth metrics. If a policy reduces stress, improves wellbeing, and lowers long-term costs, it should be pursued even if it shrinks parts of the economy or even the economy overall. The fact that we currently treat any reduction in economic activity as a failure, regardless of human benefit, reveals how misaligned our priorities are.

I hope Zohran succeeds in improving people's lives, but I'm not holding my breath. I've been burned too many times before...

> But one of the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?

I think this primarily relates to how people are socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society', i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place.

And in any case 3 years might not finish projects but it might seed a lot of private investment and R&D

The factory I'm thinking of had 2000 people in 1950, and around 250 today - while producing the same amount of product. Automation is continuing to come to that factory - there are number of things that could be automated but their volumes are not quite high enough today to justify the upfront costs.

He was a super-rich guy, who had had too many people telling him he was a genius for way too long (reminds you of anybody?), and so was way too sure of himself. A bunch of his ideas were crazy, which doesn't mean others weren't trying to dismiss his views.

The Weathertech CEO (or maybe I'm misremembering, in any case it was a big private company CEO) has a good talk about this IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Basically, A company is bound by legal precendence to focus on capitalistic gains. It would be better if we argue the existence of other structures/their prevalence but I don't think that we can blame the entire companies but the darn structures that they are in

A CEO makes 100x (yes its not becoming hyperbole, sad reality) than workers. He is given power and he is given incentives to cut money wherever he can. He sees off sourcing and does this.

But I am not seeing America go towards a path like this, on the contrary, we are seeing America try to actively talk about workers in here and then talk about businesses without doing anything about all the issues in the first place.

There is a fundamental conflict of interests and America's promising both sides. It honestly feels political to me now because the news cycle for America is moving so damn fast (which is really really bad) that nobody comes to question these things in the first place or most aren't because they aren't literally having the time to do such with all the news cycle imo

I don't really know what America can do at this point.

> This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to being locked out of the market on machine tools.

Do you have any sources for this, I found it quite fascinating that machine tools can play such a big impact.

If it is, is it a sort of chicken and egg problem where machine tools require factories themselves which again require machine tools. If so, why couldn't Soviet Union just import some from other countries to bootstrap the production of tools which could then bootstrap all factories?

An example of a country with "good healthcare" and such a system would be Germany. Extra insurance does exist there as well nowadays from what I understand but health insurance isn't tied entirely to employment and the extras are things like a 20 EUR per month to cover the co-pay on large and expensive procedures. While private insurance exists there too, I want to compare to the often touted "free healthcare" i.e. public system. There are still different providers even under the one public system.

So from a quick search, Germany has insurance rates from ~14-16% of gross salary, half of which the employee pays from their gross salary. But most insurances have an extra percentage they charge on top. I found one as an example that charges 17.29% total, which if you're self-employed, you have to cover yourself (to be comparable to your marketplace bronze plan being entirely self-paid).

Now the question becomes: Are you paying more or less as a percentage of your salary and by how much?

(and side question for your parent I guess: how does that compare to the $10k the employer pays, which would be 8.645% in this example)

The last time I had reason to look at full market-rate price for a family of four for a good PPO (Seattle market, circa five years ago, large tech company), it was around 3300 USD per month, or over $39k/yr. That was for cobra coverage, so a combination of what I would have normally paid and what the employer would've (about one third us and two thirds them when I was employed by that corp). I can only imagine it's gotten more expensive since then; we left the country three years ago.

Individuals do not cost $10k per year under any normal circumstances, and if you're paying almost $2k a month for a family bronze plan, you either have a lot of kids, you have some unusual needs, or you are getting ripped off. Even more so if you're waiting for a PCP appointment, because that is unusual as well.

Depends on if you make 35k or 200k/year

It kinda does, bigger players have more bargaining power. There is no bigger player than the government in a universal healthcare system.

Furthermore, a significant cost in healthcare is all of the bureaucracy around billing. Much of that goes away with single payer.

I think its because I suppose we can either talk about small businesses who can be very cost cutting because their overall profits are very thin (you really can't blame them that much I think)

And the medium to large corporations either take Venture funding and want to cost cut to show more growth or maximizing share holder profit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

(taking an short summary from ddg AI)

The case you're referring to is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., decided in 1919, where the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that a corporation must operate primarily for the profit of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of employees or customers. This case is often cited as a foundational example of "shareholder primacy" in corporate law.

This is the root cause of the issue.

Do you know that there is a solution to it

They are called social enterprises and there are legal frameworks to do that. You might've seen some labels given by independent parties to show that as well

So they exist, but nobody creates them, why?

Because, its insanely hard to raise funding in them compared to the average structure. I looked up into it and the system of funding is just created such way where it rewards any and every cost cutting

I think that just like non profits get good value from doing good. A middle way where a company's purpose becomes some aspect of social good and not entirely profits. This might help but we need govts supporting them (similar to perhaps even non profits)

I have a hypothesis that if you provide easy access to lower interest loans with less collateral overall (perhaps even none?, provide micro-grants perhaps) at a federal level/banking level might be the best way to really start up some new innovation whose idea is social mission

Most people have an idea of enough, I think that academically inclined people who create companies would really appreciate this and this could even include the creation of things like google etc. which really just turned evil from dont be evil because of the wiki link/case that happened imo

Taxation as you say in the 25% tax won't really work that well imo as we saw recently in the tax scandal recently in America where billions were lost.

Although so much of US especially its politics is so much lobbied etc. that I find the idea of this change just stopping because it could prove a real threat to the completely capitalist corporations which will fire 1000's of people in an instant

Also whenever you position something as tax, the capitalist forces would find ways to evade it anyway, here let me give some ideas on top of my head

What would happen if people paid outsourcing companies via stablecoin crypto, how would you tax that?

What if things like this can count as gig work and laws related to that?

What if an outsourcer creates their own mini company and such creates an invoice, I am not sure but this would be considered a service so how would that work, is there a service tax if so how much %?

Suppose somebody got a consultancy company to work on a project and then just created the project end to end and deployed it and just tweaked it enough where its a mini saas designed just for that company, the company/consultancy can argue its a saas, so how would the taxation work for saas. Are we gonna reach a point where even things like saas could be highly taxed?

The easiest way seems to me crypto for (bootstrappable outsourcing?) but depending upon the size of the outsourcing, they can employ multiple methods as I gave.

How would the govt approach the multiple loopholes as such?

The whole issue stems from a pure capitalist system where it sometimes rewards to do malicious things so long term, countries need to find ways of supporting social entreprises/funding them.

I’m hoping that free markets tend to produce winners more often than protectionist ones. I don’t really want stagnant US companies to just stick around because they cozied up to the government.

Of course they will, Americans banks and “tech” companies are always coming up with creative ways to extend shady lines of credit to the poorest Americans.