Opinion The Fall of America is here

[panamaican]

It might not be something common that you've seen . . . and I know how this place feels about anecdotal discussions but hear me out. I have a BS in Environmental Health Science and an MPH in Occupational Health and Safety Management. Over the last 25 years I may have put in 12 in my chosen field. The other 13 have been in various IT positions. I've been program managers and a supervisor in both. For the last 3 years I've been the Chief Information Officer and have been supervising 8 people and providing IT and IT security guidance to 15-20 facilities and over 40 field IT staff.

I learned on the job and developed the skills to completely change "industries".



A regional manager in the food industry would definitely have the managerial skills to manage people and projects (to an extent) . . . all I'm saying is that various jobs develop skills that people can use to build on and move to different jobs (with other training). I get it that those opportunities aren't super prevalent, but they do exist.



But you'd at least have a baseline skill to build on . . .

Sure, but as you said you learned on the job. Which means your job provided those learning opporunities. What part of McDonald's shift supervisor provides on the job training for a manufacturing gig?

Now, if you're saying "Regional manager", I won't argue with that. But regional manager is a very far journey from manager/shift supervisor at a single McDonald's. By the time you reach regional manager in any company, you've long since left the low wage part of the fast food business industry.

As for the lawyer thing, you might have a baseline to build on but no one is hiring you to run the department because of your baseline, they need you to to be up and running on Day 1. Which is why if you want to make that transition, you do it on the job at the first firm...which of course requires your first firm to have enough opportunities for you to actually get meaningful experience.

 

[Islam Imamate]

I agree, in part, that Trump is not doing himself any favors by keeping Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump around although Obama did the same thing with people like Valerie Jarrett whose sole job in the WH was to inflate Obama's already gargantuan ego with blather like this:

Is she related to Obama?

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

We're still better in certain metrics like the dynamism of our multinationals and the influence of our culture globally and research output and whatnot but yeah in terms of living standards we're unfortunately behind. I was talking about this with a friend of mine the other week, he made the point that in 1970 no one in Sweden or Japan wouldn't rather live in the US but nowadays that's not the case anymore.

Or Germany, France, Norway, Italy...Even if some of these countries are poorer the difference is so small in living standards for your average middle class person that it makes no difference.
Even many much poorer countries are gaining in that aspect. If you're a Chinese or Indian genius you had to leave the country to flourish, not so anymore.
The cultural influence is due to being bigger and having a widespread language thanks in part to the British Empire, of course, it's also a self reinforcing thing, the more people that know English the more people that study it.

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

It's not just about wages. We'd have to first induce manufacturers to bring the jobs back, which would probably be more expensive than wage-lifting ideas. The whole thing just seems needlessly complex, overly expensive, and certain to have large, unintended consequences. Why not just see what we can do to increase incomes by working with the economy we have?



But if we employ protectionist policies to induce manufacturers to reshore factory jobs, prices for consumers would go up, and they wouldn't have a choice about that either. From the consumer perspective, it's the same as higher taxes. It's just less efficient. To just take an extreme example, the estimate of the benefit of trade with China is $10K for an average American, right? And that's a pretty well-distributed $10K. So the cost to ending it would be about the same, with the hope that we'd then have more sweatshop jobs in America (that would have to pay at least MW). Before this latest downturn, we wouldn't have had enough workers to fill the jobs. So basically, we'd be implementing a regressive tax that costs an average of $10K per person to make some factory owners richer and pull workers away from some industries in order to raise the wages of small number of workers. If that's attractive to someone, why wouldn't they just support a $10K per person tax and give the money directly to fast-food workers?



Are we offshoring a lot of plumbing jobs? It would apply maybe to some reshored jobs, but not most of them.

I don't disagree with anything in specific but I guess a benefit of moving jobs from China to the US would be to not rely on them. It seems dangerous to rely on China for things such as N95 masks.
Arguably a better strategy would be to shift these industries to smaller, more friendly countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and the like.
There is also a shift of non-sweat shop jobs out of the US. In fact, if you take China, their main industrial growth is not in sweat shops anymore, it's in middle tech industries such as solar panels, chemicals and others that could give decent middle class incomes to people and also teach them some on the job skills above flipping burgers that could be helpful in the long run, although I'm speculating here.

 

[AndroidRage]

I would have to agree to an extent. Democrats are all about that globalism, and globalism only works for the rich. That and spreading covid, it's pretty good at that.

Another Repubtard who doesn't understand the meaning of the word Globalism......

 

[Jack V Savage]

I don't disagree with anything in specific but I guess a benefit of moving jobs from China to the US would be to not rely on them. It seems dangerous to rely on China for things such as N95 masks.
Arguably a better strategy would be to shift these industries to smaller, more friendly countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and the like.

To the first point, we don't rely on them. It's not like we wouldn't be able to produce masks if China were hit by a meteor. It's just better for us to focus on what we're good at and what our economy supplies best and let them do what they do best. It's just like people don't rely on restaurants to keep them from starving. They just cooking isn't the best use of their time on that day or that they'd prefer restaurant food that day.

I think the guy was getting more at the economics of it. They took our jerbs and we need to get them back. I don't see any real benefit to that other than maybe appeasing populists (might not work, though) and there is a cost.

 

[spamking]

Sure, but as you said you learned on the job. Which means your job provided those learning opporunities. What part of McDonald's shift supervisor provides on the job training for a manufacturing gig?

Shift supervisor to Regional Manager then to another industry would make more sense . . . regardless, most management positions share some common duties and responsibilities that could span different industries, etc.

 

[spamking]

To the first point, we don't rely on them. It's not like we wouldn't be able to produce masks if China were hit by a meteor.

Yet we do rely on them to an extent though. At least that's how things seem lately. Of course companies could retool and make masks like you or I could buy groceries and cook our own food.

How many US companies have jumped into the mask production business within the last 2-3 months? Do you think it would make sense for some of them to continue doing so if possible?

 

[panamaican]

Shift supervisor to Regional Manager then to another industry would make more sense . . . regardless, most management positions share some common duties and responsibilities that could span different industries, etc.

But that's not what you said originally. Originally, you said a shift supervisor transferring to another industry. When the conversation was about low skill. low wage workers.

A regional manager is quite a few rungs up the corp ladder. Their transfer opportunities cannot be compared to each other.

 

[spamking]

But that's not what you said originally. Originally, you said a shift supervisor transferring to another industry. When the conversation was about low skill. low wage workers.

A regional manager is quite a few rungs up the corp ladder. Their transfer opportunities cannot be compared to each other.

I understand that a shift supervisor and regional managers are different. Even though I view a shift supervisor as a manager or part of management, I shouldn't have blurred that line . . . regardless, I think both positions my have skills that could translate across industries. Not all cases, but some.

 

[Denter]

Because we have democratic gov't. If the public has a lot of false beliefs, that's an obstacle to a reasonable response to problems that arise or good gov't more broadly, and also creates the opportunity for gov't corruption (if the public falsely believes that the gov't is not corrupt when it is). For example, if a big enough share of the public is convinced that human activity isn't causing climate change, that makes it less likely that we address the problem. Or note how austerity mania inhibited a proper response to the GFC (moreso in other countries, but still to our detriment in America).

Well there's yer problem right there.

As to the media: throughout our history, people have always known newspapers lied, mis-framed, and were partisan. People chose to read publications that favored their worldview. Everyone knew the biases existed. Then, after WW2, we had a brief period where media was considered disinterested and neutral. That era ended in the 1990s, and we are slowly returning to form. It's just the way of things.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Well there's yer problem right there.

As to the media: throughout our history, people have always known newspapers lied, mis-framed, and were partisan. People chose to read publications that favored their worldview. Everyone knew the biases existed. Then, after WW2, we had a brief period where media was considered disinterested and neutral. That era ended in the 1990s, and we are slowly returning to form. It's just the way of things.

Putting aside the value of democracy for its own sake, I don't have any confidence that non-democratically selected leaders would be more reasonable, and there would likely be a big conflict of interest. A major cause of unreasonable governance *in our present system* is a misinformed public, but it's certainly not the only conceivable cause of unreasonable governance. Also, we still have an excessively neutral media. We just have a portion of the public that has been convinced not to trust it. The situation might be different if we had symmetrical bullshit (not good, just different).

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

To the first point, we don't rely on them. It's not like we wouldn't be able to produce masks if China were hit by a meteor. It's just better for us to focus on what we're good at and what our economy supplies best and let them do what they do best. It's just like people don't rely on restaurants to keep them from starving. They just cooking isn't the best use of their time on that day or that they'd prefer restaurant food that day.

I think the guy was getting more at the economics of it. They took our jerbs and we need to get them back. I don't see any real benefit to that other than maybe appeasing populists (might not work, though) and there is a cost.

In the case of masks it will take a significant amount of time to set up local production, I believe around 6 months. It's not something you can just open up a factory and start to produce them next week. It's just an example too, it's a somewhat low tech enterprise it could be worse if you get suddenly embargoed in some more crucial product where a few weeks can be too late.
In no way I believe any developed country should have sweat shops with people cranking out T-shirts and assembling toys.
I believe relying on places like Mexico or Vietnam would be much better compared to China. That was my point.
That guy you're responding to is just misinformed about basic economics.

 

[skysolo]

I don't disagree with anything in specific but I guess a benefit of moving jobs from China to the US would be to not rely on them. It seems dangerous to rely on China for things such as N95 masks.
Arguably a better strategy would be to shift these industries to smaller, more friendly countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and the like.
There is also a shift of non-sweat shop jobs out of the US. In fact, if you take China, their main industrial growth is not in sweat shops anymore, it's in middle tech industries such as solar panels, chemicals and others that could give decent middle class incomes to people and also teach them some on the job skills above flipping burgers that could be helpful in the long run, although I'm speculating here.

It's not the "jobs" that they care about. It's the production.

 

[Wingslaught]

Is she related to Obama?

No, she's not but it's still quite similar, imo. Notice Liberals didn't bat an eye for 8 years when it' Obama doing it.

 

[Islam Imamate]

No, she's not but it's still quite similar, imo. Notice Liberals didn't bat an eye for 8 years when it' Obama doing it.

But its not really though if they're not related. That's largely what makes Ivanka and Jared's presence kinda disturbing, the way Trump is turning his White House administration into his family businesses.

 

[Jack V Savage]

No, she's not but it's still quite similar, imo. Notice Liberals didn't bat an eye for 8 years when it' Obama doing it.

It's more the case that Trump is actually doing the stuff you were falsely claiming Obama was. I mean, there were hacks saying that Obama was "blaming Bush" because he noted that he took office during a massive recession, but Trump actually blames Obama for stuff that Obama has nothing at all to do with. And a lot of Southerners would insist that Obama was a narcissist. Trump is showing them what a real one looks like. Obama was constantly trying to reach out to the right, and he was called divisive because Republicans irrationally hated him. Trump doesn't even pretend to want to be president of the whole country. It's almost like a deliberate thing.

 

[Nameless Ghoul]

I just watched a "panel" on MSNBC talking about how the country will rebound from the pandemic. It boiled down to:
Free housing(Human right)
Universal Basic Income(Human Right)
Free Healthcare (Human Right)
$15 minimum wage (Human Right)
Free College(Human Right)

..it's nauseating how out of touch with reality this mentality is.

 

[Yodhin]

Trump = savior of Western civilization, actually. But nice try, cuck leftists.

 

[heloder]

I just watched a "panel" on MSNBC talking about how the country will rebound from the pandemic. It boiled down to:
Free housing(Human right)
Universal Basic Income(Human Right)
Free Healthcare (Human Right)
$15 minimum wage (Human Right)
Free College(Human Right)

..it's nauseating how out of touch with reality this mentality is.

I would settle for affordable healthcare. What we have in this country is a bad joke which has only gotten dramatically worse over the last 15 years. How Conservatives can look at it as some sort of triumph is absolute madness and showcases how out of touch with reality they are. If you were to tell someone from basically any other country in the world how much medical care costs in this country they would be appalled.