OS and Software > All Things Macintosh > How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

reply to mozerd

Re: How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

reply to Teasip

reply to Rob

reply to not

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What will improve the economy is companies NOT RIPPING US OFF CONSTANTLY!!!

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Companies don't need to make 400%+ profit

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CEOs should take a % of the profit THEY HELP TO BRING IN. That means, a % of NEW BUSINESS they brought in as part of their job assignment. If they don't improve the business they're running, they don't take home anything...

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reply to mozerd
In a free market, sure. But when you have nations like China, where the government can mandate a wage, manipulate the currency, then the advantage becomes one sided as for as manufacturing is concerned, screwing the people who would like to work, but can't due to lack of jobs.

If I was going to open up a production plant, I'd look at a few things:
1]Which country has the least amount of environmental regulations.
2]Which country will offer me the most in some type of "kick backs". Meaning who would be willing to pay the most, so I don't have to pay that much to get my plant up and running.
3]Which country has less hassles in terms of Human resources. Meaning cheapest wages, benefits, work environment. IE: can I get away with treating the human work force that pieces of shit, instead of like normal humans.
4]Who has the cheapest export/import costs.. etc etc etc.

Until those items are standardized like an International Standards Organization [ISO], the play field for certain types of business will be typically slanted away from the US. Things like manufacturing.
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Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.

reply to howardfine
I have worked many fast food jobs, and very few paid minimum wage. Most started a whole quarter above it.

Unless of course you were a waiter/busboy. They you were paid below minimum wage and split the tips.

I never agreed with a government mandated wage, but many feel it is needed. As it prevents the employers from low balling the employees in wages. Meaning the majority feel if there was no mandated wage, all the employers would work together and drop wages down to a penny a day.

But like you said, offer a higher wage, and you can demand a better quality employee. And the employees would be more willing to do what you ask, with less grumbling.
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Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.

reply to Snakeoil
In the 70's I worked in an IBM plant in my home town in upstate NY that manufactured circuit boards and ceramic chips used in mainframe computers. The production process used all kinds of nasty chemicals for plating, etching and cleaning the boards during the process, such as Trichloroethylene and Cyanide to name just 2 of about 20 others.

The building I worked in had few windows and the outside walls were built using thick prefab cement panels that were designed to fall outward in case there was an explosion in the tower area where resin impregnated with fiberglass was cured.

A also cleaned circuit boards by dipping them into a liquid freon bath to clean them. The vat had negative pressure vents around the inside of the vat with ping pong balls floating on top of the liquid freon to reduce evaporation. I could feel the freon vapors hitting my face as i leaned over to dip each rack.

There were many large tinning and plating machines that used 20 different chemicals to plate the pads on each card. A separate department handled the maintenance and disposal of the chemicals. I worked across from secured and sealed area that had alarms, flashing lights if an accidental spill caused acid and cyanide to come in contact and employees in and out of the area had to evacuate.

There was even a separate plant and holding pond to treat and dispose of the waste chemicals piped in from several buildings. Neighbors and IBM's 12,000 always trusted IBM. When they discovered a small amount of TCP in the ground water, they bought and knocked down several homes in the center of town and built filtering stations to remove the contamination from the ground water. It was a somewhat quiet move, and IBM paid for a new fire truck for the village. I grew up 2 blocks from IBM, which occupied the entire center of town and was surrounded with neighborhoods.

Nobody thought it would turn out to be anything close to the Love Canal discovery. IBM was considered a "clean" industry, unlike the nearby PA coal mines and other heavy industry smokestacks that blew all kinds of junk into the air.

The village water supply was famous because it came from deep artisan wells near the Susquehanna river, unlike many places that treat ground or river water. That was until the toxic plume finally made it into the water table and contaminated the wells.

That's when the shit hit the fan. Cancer rates, birth defects, and other unusual auto-immune health issues were occurring at a higher rates. My sister, who used to work in the same building, is on disability for fibromyalgia. My other sister is disabled with another unknown auto-immune syndrome. We also grew up in a house insulated with vermiculite pellets from the Libby, MO mine that was found to contain long shard asbestos fibers. I helped my dad pour it in, and we used to play with it and use it for potting plants.

When our 1930's built schools were remodeled, the insulated the basement and rooms with spayed in asbestos insulation. Our new church had the same thing, and we used to throw pencils and stuff at the ceiling to knock off chunks of it!

Being a good neighbor IBM footed most of the bill, instead of sticking the EPA and taxpayers with the cleanup costs. Now they sold off all the plants to Lockheed or other unscrupulous corporations who use loopholes or lobbyists to dodge responsibility.

Toxic waste reduction methods have improved greatly, but in today's corporate climate, they use every way possible to buy politicians and regulators to screw American taxpayers. Now they just outsource source their pollution to China, who has billions of people to use as expendable resources.

Do we want to invite that kind of behavior back in the US.

reply to daveinpoway
Do we want to be the brains behind the product or just the mindless robots making them? The US has changed from brawn to brain, and that's fine with me. They are still designed here aren't they?

reply to daveinpoway
I read everything you all said before jumping in.

First (even though I'm Canadian) I disagree with tax breaks, they are simply a form of corporate welfare, they will take your money, go through the motions to "create jobs" and when the time period is up, either demand a sweeter deal ,or go where it's cheaper.

Dell is good example, they had folks working in Ireland for roughly $18/hr, and Ireland had one of the corporate tax rates in the EU. They went to Poland, even though taxes were higher because the Polish workers worked for roughly $3/hr , China and India are even cheaper.

So how much incentive is going to take to bring those jobs home and pay them say 25K/yr(to me that's low but not unreasonable for an unskilled job)?

Then you bring in Environmental concerns, someone upthread mentioned the fallout from the IBM plant,that's a cost too, and why spend all the money complying with environmental regulations, when you just dump the stuff in the backyard and the environment be damned.

The 2nd some of you had said, is that you are willing to pay extra if it's made here. That does 2 things.

1) If an Ipad costs say $100 more because it's made here, the fanbois/girls aside, others will start looking a Android tablets that are similar in features, but that are cheaper.

2) It drives inflation, those wanting to buy an iProduct will need more money to buy it, which then will have them demand more money from their employer, who will have to raise prices to compensate.. Rinse Repeat.

Then you have "The Street", the scumbags who are really driving this. A few years back I recall reading Apple had it's best quarter ever, yet the "Street" punished the stock, it wasn't high enough!!

The same can be said about RIM, outside of having serious innovation issues, they are profitable , have no debt , lots of cash in the bank, and good revenue from the service side of the business, yet the stock is beaten up, buy those more interested in making money selling the stock short, or seeing in broken up and make money on selling the patents and whatever else they can salvage.

Those of you that say, we'll we design it here. Look at what they pay Jonny Ivey, while a bad example, he's a brilliant designer, if you could find someone that was close in India or China to do the job, you bet the CEO of that company will have R&D shipped there.

He'll they're already transcribing Doctor's notes overnight there and doing company books... what's next?
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No, I didn't. Honest... I ran out of gas. I... I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake.......

reply to daveinpoway
A few comments about being an "eager to please" manufacturer. What I am about to describe happened a lot back in the 80s and 90s (I remember there being a big "you've been warned" write-up about it in the WSJ at the time), and in fact I witnessed part of this personally, as I worked for a manufacturing/distribution operation at the time.

GinormousRetailer (GR) and EagerToPleaseManufacturer (ETPM) meet up somehow - perhaps at a trade show, say. GR explains that they are looking for new suppliers, based on their need for higher quality merchandise, customized products, lower prices, faster delivery, or whatever. ETPM provides some samples, and is ecstatic when GR comes back and says they want to do business with them. (ETPM, being a relatively small or maybe medium-size operation, sees this as their opportunity to hit "the big time".)

So GR places an initial order - bigger than what ETPM normally handles, maybe, but not so big that they can't fulfill it by running their factory 24/7, adding shifts, buying some more equipment, and so on. GR is happy, so all is good. Then GR comes back and asks for some customizations - something not quite "off the shelf" - and ETPM bends over backwards to make it happen. New designs are put together, new processes put into place, expensive new equipment ordered, and production starts. There are some kinks at first, but after considerable (and expensive) trial and error and tweaking, GR is happy again, so all is good.

Then GR, seeing that their new supplier is both capable and flexible, comes back and places a truly "monster", long-term order - one that ETPM simply can't fulfill without dramatically expanding their operations. Which they do - buying or leasing new space and equipment, ramping up their systems by a factor 2x or 3x or more, and hiring and training new personnel. The quantity and the timeline for the order are such that ETPM has to manufacture more-or-less continuously (faster than GR can initially take delivery, as it turns out), so they end up having to warehouse a huge amount of the inventory that they've manufactured. But GR is slowly taking delivery of part of the merchandise, so all is good.

Then all of a sudden, with no warning but with plenty of forethought, GR up and cancels the rest of the order! Not because they are unhappy with the product, but because they know ETPM has gone out on a financial limb here, and by forcing their hand they can renegotiate pricing down into minimal or perhaps even negative profits for ETPM. If they're lucky, they may even be able to force ETPM into bankruptcy, and then acquire all of their remaining inventory for pennies on the dollar.

There are more shenanigans that I could detail here, but the upshot of it is that GR (and others who sought to emulate them) are in a great measure responsible for the general demise of US manufacturing. Chinese manufacturers (being fully backed and financed by government money) will eat these types of losses whenever they occur; US manufacturers can't.

reply to 8744675
Sure why not. As you failed to understand what I suggested. I suggested that the American unions take their ideals and try to make them an international standard for all the other countries to follow.
IE: Meaning [repeating myself yet again] that if you get paid 10 bucks an hour to solder wires to a board in the USA, then you will make the same 10 bucks an hour in Mexico, India, Africa, China.
If you can sit while you solder and you're company has heat and AC, then they too will have heat and AC in Mexico, India, Africa, China.
Basically this would eliminate the "I'll go to china and contract out this job. Where the people make 10 bucks a day for doing the solder wires to a board." vs "Why pay a guy in the USA 10 bucks an hour to solder wires to a board"?
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Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.

I am sure American Unions would, if they had any influence in these places.

I know that they have tried to help factory workers in South America unionize at least. This resulted in several people being murdered for their trouble.

What you are suggesting is virtually impossible, but yes if the whole world was on a relatively equal scale and everybody got paid relatively equally for equal work done and was treated humanely with reasonable business hours the world would be a better place.

Until we get some sort of control over the "profit above and beyond all other considerations" motive that we have now, that isn't possible, anywhere.

reply to Snakeoil
As @whataname said, what you suggested as equal pay for equal work does not work everywhere because the cost of living is different. Paying someone $10/hr in some countries would make them rich while that's below the poverty line here in the US.

Then we'll just have to get used to the idea that the US will continue to see a decrease in manufacturing jobs. As the companies, investors want to see the most amount of profit, and the consumer wants to buy cheap goods.

Another area impacted would be college costs. As the only way to get a skill set is by going to a college or trade school, those places can charge as much as they want to. Because either your are going to learn a set of skills that will bring in money, or you'll have to get used to the idea of pimping burgers and shakes, or mowing lawns.
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Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.

reply to mozerd

said by mozerd:

said by Snakeoil:

I'll try restating it:

very funny. Working is neither a right or privilege -- working is a responsibility. Wages are governed by market forces not by government mandates. Governments do mandate but dynamic markets force mandates to be ineffective and unsustainable.

Power is the opium of the few -- entitlements is the cocaine of the masses. Equality is the Utopia of the mindless and expertly exploited by the power hungry regardless of political affiliation.