Comment by throwawayforare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayforare | Hacker News Reader

throwawayforare

I don’t think most Americans are willing to embrace the lifestyle that comes with reindustrialization. Few want to work on farms or in factories under harsh conditions for low wages—jobs that are often left to immigrants when no other options exist. Similarly, in China, many workers endure long hours and low pay. I don’t believe currency manipulation or intellectual property theft are the main reasons behind China’s manufacturing dominance. The key factor, in my view, is their lower standard for human rights, which allows for a level of labor exploitation that would be unacceptable in many other countries.

There’s a fundamental tension between human rights and affordability or efficiency. Take California’s high-speed rail project, for example—it repeatedly runs over budget. That’s partly because we hold ourselves to higher labor and environmental standards.

In the long run, I believe robotic automation is the only viable path forward. Reindustrialization without it isn't a realistic solution.

When I was growing up I knew a few families which worked in auto factories. They had multiple cars parked in their driveway. They could afford multiple kids. The ones I knew could afford to take vacations as well That's a level of consumption I do not see in people who work in the service sector in the 2020s. Obviously we cannot turn back the clock and even if those jobs are brought back they won't provide the same lifestyle or offer it to the same amount of people. But there's a perception that you cannot raise a family delivering food on Ubereats like you could working for Ford or GM

> Few want to work on farms or in factories under harsh conditions for low wages

My family history is a lengthy record of sacrifice so that future generations wouldn't need to do that kind of work. Part of that sacrifice was emigrating to countries with better opportunities, including America.

Who will still be here to implement any reindustrialization scheme involving low-end labor? What's in that for a kid with a work ethic and a head on their shoulders when the burden for moving elsewhere is online paperwork and a plane ticket instead of tall ships and wagon trains?

The key is to redistribute wealth. But this is a hot topic no one ever is going to do anything real about it.

And even talking about it gets downvoted.

America could be both a capitalist's paradise and a worker's paradise if we had a handful of hard caps in place. We're in a death spiral of short-term naked greed.

Do you want hard caps and redistribution on other things or just money? Like a redistribution of grades. The magna cum laude doesn't need another A+, and there's people at the bottom of the curve who's passing or failing could be changed by a few percentage points. Should we redistribute grades from the top to the bottom? What about Talent? You can say that nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody needs to be as good at Baseball at Babe Ruth, nobody needs to be as good at Golf as Tiger Woods. Should we redistribute their points to improve the stats of bottom performing players? Speaking of Tiger Woods he's a self described Sex Addict. Nobody needs to be having as much sex as he is. Should we impose a hard cap on the amount of sexual partners you can have in a year to stop "naked greed"?

What that line of thought misses is that wealth is built off of the backs of labor. The social contract between capital and labor has always been "I'll put in the capital, and I'll pay you fairly for your labor from the wealth we create."

But as decades of economic research and lived reality has shown us, that contract has been broken for a while: productivity has surged and so has the wealth it creates, but wages -- i.e. the wealth distributed to the labor -- have grown very slowly. (There are a dozen other metrics you could use to show this trend.) This has led to extreme wealth inequality and all the problems we see today.

As such, fair redistribution of wealth was the norm once, people are only saying that that earlier balance should be brought back.

That has nothing to do with the other examples you gave. I mean, outside of some truly disturbing scenarios, restricting Tiger Woods' ability to have sex has nothing to do with how much sex I get.

I think naturally when profit is the only thing matters, the ones who win most in the short term win.

> I don’t think most Americans are willing to embrace the lifestyle that comes with reindustrialization.

I don't believe that we need to reindustrialize down to what I call baseline products. In other words, this idea of harsh condition and low wages isn't a reality here at all. Anyone who would propose this simply does not understand reality.

In other words, this isn't about making everything. It's about not getting to the point where you make nothing and you lose all knowledge and ability to produce goods. I hoped the pandemic would result in powerful lessons learned and a set of decisions and policies that would lead to rebalancing global trade. We found ourselves in a situation where we could not make the simplest products at scale, masks. Not only that, we did not even manufacture the cloth or the machines to make the cloth and masks.

From an engineering point of view, this is a system with a single point of failure: China. Anything happens in China --intentional or natural-- and billions of people around the globe pay the consequences. Looking at this from far away, one could easily conclude that this planet is not well-managed (as a concept, there is no such thing as global management, of course).

By that I mean that accepting a situation where everyone becomes dependent on a single provider is incredibly dangerous on many fronts. I am not even talking about the "national security" FUD trope. I am talking about everyday things everyone needs to live, to have access to medical care, to exist and navigate life and career.

A single-source structure is fragile and dangerous. We are often very critical of western government --right, left and center--, and rightly so. And yet, we somehow think it is OK to absolutely rely on the Chinese government for our very existence across all technical and industrial categories? How about we apply the same level of critique and skepticism to them being our overlords as we would to any one political party in the west? And, if that's the criteria, it follows that this global centralization of industrial capacity is likely bad for humanity.

The only thing that would change my mind is that if China radically shifts its culture, government and approach to commerce, which will not happen. For example, I cannot own land or a business in China. I cannot sue a company in China for stealing my intellectual property. I have no access to their courts to address grievances. Their public companies do not play by international rules, cook the books and have not transparency or accountability other than to the CCP. Etc. That's just fine if that's the way they want to live and operate.

I am simply saying that the rest of the world should understand that allowing centralization of nearly 100% of the industrial base in this manner will not lead to good outcomes at all. As AI reduces that number of people who will need to be employed to deliver services, the lack of a significant and diverse industrial base across Europe and the American continent will have catastrophic societal impact.

I'd like to offer a couple of additional perspectives on the discussion around China's approach to intellectual property.

Firstly, it's important to recognize that challenges with IP protection in China are not exclusively an issue for foreign entities; they represent a broader systemic problem that impacts domestic companies as well.

Secondly, a crucial, though perhaps less visible, factor is the state of the legal infrastructure. There's an argument to be made that China's legal system hasn't yet reached a stage of efficiency or possess sufficient specialized resources to comprehensively manage the sheer volume and complexity of IP disputes for all parties. From this viewpoint, the situation might be framed less as 'China deliberately permits IP infringement' and more as 'China is still in the process of developing a robust and universally effective system to tackle IP protection challenges.'

Finally, China's historically export-oriented economic model naturally increases the touchpoints and potential for IP conflicts between domestic and international businesses, making such disputes more visible on the global stage. Compounding this, many first-generation Chinese entrepreneurs, often products of a different era with less emphasis on formal IP education, may not have initially possessed a strong awareness or understanding of intellectual property rights as they are conceived internationally. This isn't to excuse infringement, but to highlight a factor that likely contributed to the prevalence of such issues.

You make a fair point. However, I think the argument fails when we consider the destruction they have caused in the US and Europe by stealing IP. The typical mode of operation is that they go after any product or market that breaks a $5MM ARR (Annual Run Rate) with predatory intent. In other words, as any judge in the west is likely to say, ignorance of the law does not constitute justification.

There's another element of this which might refute the ignorance claim. It is estimated that approximately 750,000 people from China study abroad (US and Europe). In other words, in round numbers, perhaps ten million people over ten years. Another ten million or more actually work abroad. The point is that the claim of ignorance of IP laws in the US and Europe is likely false. The opaque and closed nature of their system makes it so that they can benefit and learn from stolen IP without suffering any consequences. This advances their industrial based and grows the economy while causing damage everywhere else. Not a good situation at all.

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