Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked when it'd be back in stock. They said their suppliers didn't have the stuff. We're talking car parts: aluminum rotors, metal calipers, brake pads. We're not talking chips. Apparently this US brake company is just an importer and paper-pusher.
I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Seen locally or tactically year-on-year that's not per se the rich's fault. But it nevertheless needs a course correction. Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Congress is a part of the problem here too being more aligned with corporations instead of the middle class.
It's funny, because this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right. Basic nationalism on the one hand, "Buy Local" on the other. They all want the same thing, or close to it. The potential for alliance on economic topics like this is so blindingly obvious, and it's so frustrating that it gets derailed by "cultural" sideshows so that no one can talk to each other or realize they have the same interests ultimately.
There is a framing in which they want the same thing, but each side wants to use a method to achieving that thing that is antithetical to the other. The left wants to achieve it by limiting the power of capital and corporations. The right wants to achieve it by limiting the power of democracy and restricting it to certain demographics. Each finds the other's method appalling.
That doesn't really align any more. Some of the largest, most powerful corporations are now led by ideological leftists, and right wing politicians aren't shy about attacking them.
There is a common misconception that being willing to market products at LGBT people is "ideological leftism". Even worse is if they think supporting a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton is "ideological leftism".
Some examples: Disney, Netflix, Salesforce (Marc Benioff used to host fund raisers for Hillary Clinton), New York Times. Larry Page made donations to Democrat candidates, 88% of Google staff made donations to Democrats so maybe we can include Google as well?
Disney has supported basic rights for LGBTQ+ people. This is one of those things which pretty much isn't up for debate anymore in most other developed countries. Beyond that, Disney has been solidly pro-corporate, anti-union, and generally right wing in its policies. I'm unaware of any stances Netflix and Salesforce have taken beyond similar support for LGBTQ and lip service to "racism is bad". Again, as far as I know, their economic stances are solidly anti-union, anti-worker, and pro-corporate.
None of those are "leftist".
Staff support is entirely different than institutional corporate support. Is Amazon leftist because one of its warehouses just unionized? No, it fought (and is fighting) that union effort tooth and nail. Similarly, Google has punished staff who were too open with their leftist beliefs.
Nor is support for the Democratic party "leftist". The Democratic party is split between neoliberals (who would be considered right of center anywhere else) and social democrats (who would be considered center left anywhere else) for the most part (with some rare Democratic Socialists who might actually qualify as leftist).
Hillary Clinton is a prime example of this. Anywhere but the United States, she would be considered solidly center right. It is only in the United States, where Fox News, et al have dragged the spectrum so far to the right that anything less than neo-fascist or anarcho-capitalist is considered left, where you could even pretend these corporations had a less than rightward slant.
Edit: I will note, this dragging of the spectrum is one of many, many reasons why I try to avoid spectrum based labels (left/right, etc) and stick to actual ideological labels. There is no single "leftist". There are Democratic Socialists, State Socialists, Communists, various flavors of Anarchist, etc who all get grouped together as "leftist", but generally don't agree on much. The other group of ideologies that get grouped with leftist are those supporting historically oppressed minorities - antiracism, antipatriarchy, and pro-lgbtq+ rights. Again, these are discrete ideologies and while people who subscribe to one often subscribe to the others, just as often they don't.
Similarly on the right, neo-facist, neoconservative, paleoconservative, evangelical theocrat, and anarcho-capitalist (the proper term for US libertarians) all get grouped together under the heading "right". When many of these ideologies are (or should be) completely at odds with each other.
Am I the only one that thinks corporations really pulled a veil over the American people's eyes? And that Republican and Democrat parties really differ only on social issues, but when it comes to economics they both favor the corporations? My investing strategy has been to stay in the stock market until there is a constitutional amendment that forbids money in politics. Until then corporations will continue to buy the Senate and Congress (and Supreme Court too which is no longer a-political and thus can be bought)
Corporations and black money from rich people giving to american political parties does provide an endless pressure on both parties to cater to the needs of rich people and companies, of course. But it's not that simple. The republican party has been the party that supported large companies directly, but the populism of Trump and culture war pushed most recently by DeSantis in Florida shows they are happy to score points against say Disney. The democrats have been pushing for people to have nationalized health insurance if they want it, which would definitely reduce the power of corporations - at the same time the dems go along with needs of big business very frequently. Yet dems support unions, repubs are very against them.
I agree with you that the core of this is money in politics leads to money having too much influence with politics. On the supreme court, I think that republican federalism has control over the court, that's the clear place where the 'ideology' of dems would lead to different results. But this isn't a secret, the parties encompass multitudes of views, because we squish all views into two fairly narrow groups with our accidentally designed for two-parties political system.
The problem is that they are both lobbied / paid for / bribed by the same companies / interest group, which seem to have more long-term commanding power over the evolution of US society than the elected president, so whoever you end up electing won't make as much of a difference. Similar to the time of Standard Oil etc., the rules have changed less than one might think. Maybe the real dilemma in US politics is that there are only two parties that stand a chance (and they both kinda suck, at different magnitudes), it's maybe a problem related to the election system and zoning?
If they want the same thing, the laws will get passed. What actually happens is that each side proposes laws that are not even close to acceptable to the other side, proving that they don't actually want the same things.
> We need to swing back to a more US focused economy.
> Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use.
Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow.
> Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow.
Education has been forcefully disrupted, by the institutions themselves no less: Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along, most institutions are just costly degree mills with little to no emphasis on truly educated their students. I personally attend a CompSci program from a university in the UK and it's quite flexible and affordable when compared to US standards.
Meds can and should be outsourced where ever possible: US,,Switzerland, Germany and France are the gold standard for reasons I don't time have to explain here, but there is no reason we couldn't just acquire their drugs and medical devices at wholesale prices from the aforementioned nations if the US pharma complex refuses to play ball and compete on price.
Thousands of nurses are on strike right now as we speak in Stanford, and many more are expected to quit the Industry entirely in the next coming years nation wide after being abused by the system during COVID.
This could be the perfect time to re-negotiate the terms imposed by the AMA and the Industry as a whole, ideally opening the roles to more practitioners and thus lowering the costs.
Housing, is sadly the last (investment) refuge of the dying middle class' networth in the US: I highly doubt that will be disrupted until 3-d printing of homes becomes common place, continuing the remote-first work place will definitely help in that, but right now the transition is that high paid tech workers can move and gentrify previously affordable areas.
I under stand that it's partly creative destruction, and to be honest as a digital nomad with no real need to stay in the US, I'm staying the hell out until these things are resolved--which I'm sure they will in time.
I see no real need to be in the US if my quality of life and standard of living is only going to continue to be impaired to prop up the decaying business models of archaic monoliths who have systematically reduced the standards of living for so many.
> Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along
I'm not sure how things are in the UK, but the sentiment in the US is that Zoom schooling was an unmitigated disaster.
I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
> I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
I feel it's still rather early to say that, we're still on at the optimization level but it's clear things definitely need to be improved (I still haven't received my final scores despite knowing I have 1st honors for my first year with a plugin that has a SQL lookup), but with that said I also got to sit in Master level lectures in AI and ML at Stanford with Dr. Andrew Ng while I was attending my intro courses and for not much money I could have gotten credit for it, too.
I think this appeals most to autodidacts as we get to choose what and how I want to learn, which as a self-taught programmer helps a lot to stay motivated. I'm on a Performance based admission enrollment: previous fintech founder, with professional experience in a mega-corp after being head-hunted for said fintech startup.
It could also be because I was so deeply disillusioned with my first BSc in Biology that I see this as a more suitable outcome for a working professional; I had launched my 2nd business my Junior year of HS and it was starting to get quite a bit of traction in the middle of my Freshman year. University was always my plan B and I treated as such, but since I was paying for it I valued flexibility over actual substance--my discipline and focus as a cellular and molecular biologist was widely used in research but despite going to a good research university in the middle of the Capital of biotech (San Diego) it was woefully underwhelming.
I still speak with my one of my Biochem professors and things haven't progressed much from back then, either.
In my experience after having worked at a megacorp in tech that came from an open-source project (Bitcoin, or Blockchain) I just don't think the on-campus model has done much to earn my trust either. People with MSc and PhDs were showing some incredibly sophomoric mistakes with even basic things like annotations that I thought were understood when you started to make learn to make commits on github. I could make a prototype with limited supervision, despite being forced to do it in Soliditiy which remains a horribly buggy lang, where as they couldn't do much without lots of hand-holding from someone that was forced to learn how to code from free tutorials, youtube videos, hanging out #IRC and tons of hours on Stack overflow.
I self admit I'm not even very good as a developer either, I just knew what I didn't know and knew where to look and how to ask the right questions: which is something I took away from a lecture in a PhD level Virology class I sat in by accident my senior year in University.
3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners.
> 3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners.
I think it's part of the problem, consider the massive boom/bust cycles and material shortages that occur in this Industry. I used to do framing in the off-season of my farming apprenticeship and I can tell you cost of construction and labour is a MASSIVE cost because things always run longer than expected.
I think that 3D printing can achieve several things, but you're right the latter issues are a major problem in major cities in SV, but honestly that place is such a cesspool that I don't even put it into my calculus anymore.
As Starlink gets rolled out more and more, I think development in more rural areas will seem more favorable than major cities.
You're right - cannot be outsourced. Then it'll fall to US labor which is more expensive.
Now, on the other hand, if I was running Congress or the Executive branch I'd do a Consumer reports on steroids for "eds, meds, and beds" (a nice rhyme BTW - borrowing it) which would,
* publish medical costs (now mandated to be available I believe) and ranking them
* publish costs of 4 year education by basic degree category vs. expected income and ranked so student loans are NOT forgiven while students are helped and advised to not spend stupid amounts of money on dumb degrees with no ROI.
* While theoretically government student loans help the borrower not the school, there may be a perverse incentive for some schools to raise tuition and board if they think students can afford with loans
* And good lord, would it kill us for the Fed to negotiate prices down on pills? Not it would not! I'm annoyed that private companies threaten the public with higher prices and/or less innovation. I say, let's see where it goes!
* Maybe the federal government should make generics. I mean if the private sector doesn't play nice, take competition to them.
The larger point is that in meds the consumer has fundamentally less control than say a customer purchasing a service. In a typical setting the consumer knows more about the price and price spectrum going into the sale, and the servicer needs the client to pay. So they both gotta get along. In meds the billing prices are less clear and the paperwork for billing goes between the servicer and insurance company. I do not like that. I want the medical provider to know I have the money, and if I don't know or like what's going on, prompt payment is a question.
* We engineered away stability for JIT
Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked when it'd be back in stock. They said their suppliers didn't have the stuff. We're talking car parts: aluminum rotors, metal calipers, brake pads. We're not talking chips. Apparently this US brake company is just an importer and paper-pusher.
I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Seen locally or tactically year-on-year that's not per se the rich's fault. But it nevertheless needs a course correction. Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Congress is a part of the problem here too being more aligned with corporations instead of the middle class.