You are going to confuse him with facts. Oh…wait…it’s Le JackAss! :smack: He would never let anything like facts get in his way.
The Tech industry has actually done better (IN THE FUCKING RECESSION) than other industries, jobs loss wise. According to this:
You see, we had this recession thingy. I know, I know…no one told you about it and it’s REALLY hard to find information about it. It’s a big secret after all, and it’s hardly surprising that you don’t know about it. But, well, we had it. And, you see, in a recession, people and businesses, well, don’t buy as much stuff. It’s hard to follow, but when the economy is in a recession for some odd reason unemployment goes up and people and businesses just don’t feel all that confident about buying new stuff. Go figure. Instead, they make due with what they have and try to stretch it out until, well, the recession ends. After that, there is generally a period where people and businesses take a wait and see approach before jumping back in to buy stuff they either need or want. At that point, curiously enough, companies that make stuff that they want to buy get new orders to build all that stuff and, looking around, feel the strange need to hire people in order to make all that stuff. It’s weird, I know. This whole ‘supply and demand’ thingy is really counter intuitive and probably some sort of economists conspiracy…sort of like 9/11, the Kennedy assassination plot, the moon landings and Global Warming.
Those cites show unemployment went down during the years of the tech boom. It cratered, going just below 4% right before the big bust. Unemployment has never been so good since.
Dude, we know what you really mean when you call me a tamagotchi. You can’t ignore me because you keep digging a deeper hole every time you respond.
Go ahead, put me on ignore. I don’t care. I’ll keep exposing more and more holes in the defense of offshoring and leave this as something for Googlers to see later. The more you talk, the more fuel you provide. That’s my goal here.
People who are looking for anti-offshoring links will probably find your epic failures of logic before they find all the union groups and liberals who are fighting against offshoring.
Now, once again, I shall ask you… what jobs have been created by offshoring?
Why should anyone answer this odd question? Can you cite the poster who claimed that (U.S.) jobs were created by off-shoring, (your straw man)–as opposed to posters who simply noted that new jobs were created at the same time as off-shoring?
To be honest, Le Jacquelope: those who stumble open this thread are going to see one individual foaming at the mouth, figuratively screaming, linking to political cartoons drawn by amateurs, throwing a tantrum and flinging bizarre insults at each member of the group he is arguing against singly. In fact you’re not even really arguing; you’re simply repeating that your opponents are stupid and evil and face overwhelming, insurmountable opposition, over and over again. No reasonable person could possibly take you or this thread seriously (to the extent they would even bother reading through its many hundreds of posts).
And just so we’re clear, this is beside the point of whether you are correct about offshoring. Your behavior is childish; your hostile argumentation is self-defeating. If you wish to provide a resource to those who might share your point of view, you would be much more effective comporting yourself as an adult – and you could start by providing a thorough and complete argument without heaping abuse on those who disagree with you.
People are going to come here and see that you are just a bunch of bullies that can’t deal with getting abuse thrown back at you. Every one of you that gets harsh treatment from me, started the abuse in the first place.
People who stumble upon this thread will discover that you guys have been telling us that jobs lost to offshoring are replaced by better jobs, but you’ve been unable to back that up.
People who stumble upon this thread will see that you guys believe that higher unemployment is good for employers, even though it also means a steep loss of customers and business.
People who stumble upon this thread will see that you continually refuse to recognize the fact that offshoring depends on nations of poor people with shockingly low wages and standards of living. As soon as these nations become prosperous jobs move away from there to other poorer nations. It’s all based on the exploitation of poor economies.
People who stumble upon this thread are going to see you claiming that productivity doesn’t have an affect on wages when it comes to the cost of production. And they’re going to laugh at you.
Most importantly people who stumble upon this thread will see that your entire forum is pro-offshoring and that you cannot handle and will not tolerate any kind of opposition.
Because when you’re a single mom trying to put food on the table and you lose your Whirlpool job to some people in Mexico, and there’s no other work out there for you for 2 years, and after 2 years all you can get is a lower paying job, and you find that you’re just one of millions of people in roughly the same boat, and you find yourself going deep into debt getting a college degree for a KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY job that has suddenly gone overseas and now you’re deep in debt and underemployed…
you do, in fact, find yourself wondering…
what benefit, at all, did offshoring and foreign outsourcing provide for America?
But, you see, this being a board stacked entirely with pro-offshoring people, nobody cares about this - even as this sad story repeats itself in roughly the same way for millions of people: millions of Americans lose their jobs and wind up either giving up or waiting for months for a new job, only to get one that pays even less than before. This was happening in the 2000’s even before the Recession.
Offshoring promises much but delivers nothing.
I don’t expect you to understand this. But millions of Americans - perhaps as many as 86% of the country - do.
Listen to us now or listen to us at the ballot box.
Well, you see, when you’re a single mom trying to put food on the table, working that low paying job, you’re probably thankful every single day that you can buy cheep crap from Walmart that was produced in China.
You keep saying that Americans oppose offshoring. But like you, they vote with their wallets every time they buy cheap crap from China.
The America you know and love depends on cheap-ass crap from China. It started off dependent on slave labour. Then cheap immigrant labour from Europe. Then cheaper immigrant labour from China. And now cheaper immigrant labour from Latin America. Eventually all that got too expensive so it looked for cheaper labour overseas. Are you surprised by this?
And it’s not just labour, Americans want cheaper steal, coal, oil, corn, and diamonds. You’re bent out of shape about offshoring, but cheap coal means massive environmental damage; oil means terrorism; cheap corn means health damage; diamonds caused massive destruction in Africa.
You want jobs created by offshoring look at Walmart, Apple, Dell. Name a company that offshores its production and you’ll find they employ Americans. The stuff doesn’t just appear in our houses. Americans make a fortune importing and selling it to other Americans.
What benefit does it provide? It gave you the computer/router/modem you use to rant on the internet, at a price you could afford. Admit it, you love offshoring. Your house is filled with the bounty of offshoring. You’re one of us, accept it.
No, what I mean by calling you a tamagotchi is that you’re my little pet that I feed twice a day. A couple of lines about economics and you’ll rant incoherently for hours, providing endless entertainment. Like a chew toy I can say things like “employers like higher unemployment because it brings down the cost of labour” and you’ll go to town for days.
Plenty of them in low paying jobs have no choice. Hell, now they buy stuff from Dollar Tree.
Watch what happens to Target and all the other stores up the value chain when times are better.
That is by far the oldest and weakest argument ever. That’s called putting the cart before the horse. They depend on China because their wages are crap. As soon as things get better - if they do - I strongly suggest you sell out any DLTR stocks you have. Or did you buy any? I happened to buy in around Aug 2007. They went up a good 20 points since then.
Cheap is also known as crap.
America did make a mistake trying to stretch its dollar by going for cheap imports. Now their dollar is shrinking - as in, they have less to spend. A better analogy than yours would be that America got itself a narcotics habit.
Cheap corn means health damage? Uhm, I am quite opposed to the use of coal. I would STRONGLY prefer we use renewable sources of fuel and research a replacement for oil to make plastics, etc. Oil? Really? I am the biggest opponent of an oil-based economy. Diamonds? Dude, I’m African-American. I despise buying conflict diamonds.
I am, after all, a tamagotchi liberal.
All THREE of those companies were created by American labor. Walmart, in particular, used to pride itself in “Made in the USA”. Shit, I can still remember that ad-song well enough to sing the last 6 notes.
Jobs weren’t created there by offshoring. Jobs were lost and then replaced with lower wage labor. Which is pretty much what happens across all sectors affected by offshoring - high paying jobs leave and are replaced by lower-paying service jobs.
Fewer than before, and for less wages.
Correction: nobody has a choice but to buy from China now, because that’s all they make.
And… I’d have to put a bullet in my head to become one of you. I’m no more one of you than slaves were American when they were forcibly brought over here. (Hint: they were still African.)
Your memory is, perhaps, a bit faulty. You began this thread by calling those who disagree with you “bastards” and “retards”, that their arguments represent “callous attitudes toward the working class”. As far as I can tell you haven’t let up since.
It’s very difficult to do economics without narrowing one’s scope to particular sets of causes, considering such sets separately, and then working back up. All things equal (!) it is inarguable that higher unemployment is “good” for employers, because it implies greater labor market competition and cheaper employees. More broadly, does it imply a steep (offsetting) loss of customers and business? Maybe and maybe not – that will, among other things, depend on the kind of firm and the depth of the recession. A discount grocery store might clean up; I wouldn’t want to be an upscale jeweler. Regardless, labor will be cheaper, mitigating to some degree the effect of the recession on employers.
I actually find that line of argument a little odd. You seem to believe that China is doing a rather fine job managing and growing its economy; will your predictions hold out for them? Why would a firm wait until a nation was “prosperous” before moving production to a still poorer nation? Why is it important to be concerned about exploiting poor economies when your proposed policies are not going to make things any better for them?
I’m having trouble parsing this. What precisely do you mean by the restrictive clause “when it comes to the cost of production”? An exogenous increase in productivity, taken alone, would be consistent with any number of partial and general equilibrium predictions. Has anyone claimed that a shift in productivity would not affect wages? I have not read every post in this thread, but I seem to recall the discussion of productivity focusing on the effects of ending offshoring on the price of the relevant goods.
A lot goes on in this set of forums, and most of it – overwhelmingly – has nothing to do with offshoring, and most of its members – overwhelmingly – have not engaged you (or anyone else) in a discussion of offshoring.
Anything that exposes the bullshit that is pro-offshoring is “rants” to you.
“Why should anyone answer this odd question?” I did answer that with the above post. It’s not an odd question because if offshoring does NOT create jobs then no one has any reason to support it.
Why should anyone answer this odd question? Because if you lost your tech support Whirlpool job to Mexico or your job at Hewlett-Packard to tech support folks in India, you’re going to be out looking for work and your line of work has gone overseas. It hasn’t been replaced by automation or made obsolete by technology. The jobs are still out there… they just moved to cheap labor nations. So while offshoring has in fact thrown you for a loop… what benefits, then, does it offer in return? What opportunities does it present for you?
Now is that clear enough of an answer? For most people, it is. Which is why opposition to offshoring has been growing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, argumentum ad populum or whatever-um. It’s also called democracy. You’ll understand what I mean when the US Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party can no longer stop this issue from going to the ballot box in the form of statewide initiatives and a solid nationwide political platform.
That’s a lot of ranting tamagotchi’s for y’all to feed.
You are dreaming. Le Jac comes on just enough to keep the thread perking along. And he’s just so damned funny that it’s hard to resist.
Probably why we have the such a low personal income vs GDP and it’s dropping like a stone…
Oh! Wait! We don’t and it’s not.
Yes…that’s probably how you became one of the elite top 1% of earners in the US. You’ve parlayed your small business in insurance (or, hell, perhaps it’s a big business…you may be the founder of Progressive or Geico…hell, perhaps you are the founder and owner of State Farm!! As an aside, I have to ask…did you invent the internet??) into 10’s or 100’s of millions of dollars…while still remembering the little man. I’m getting all teary eyed here…
So…you are a rich (top 1%), liberal (with bigoted right wing views on foreign labor) insurance salesman/owner of an insurance company who is also an African-American? Interesting. Are you also a transvestite Jew who is also an atheist left handed Anabaptist? Just curious as how many check boxes your can get in to augment your, um, arguments here.
No body? So, everyone in America is forced to buy from China? Well, that seems to match well with the data you’ve been shown and…
Oh! Wait! It doesn’t actually match that well at all!
That’s after you guys started flaming in the Great Debates and got the moderators to ding me for giving you equal amounts of hell in return.
Do you realize how many businesses closed in 2009 and 2010? Far more than normal. I did, in fact, cite this. Was high unemployment good for them?
My predictions are if China drops its protectionism they will slam the door on new entrants to their middle class workforce. Just like what’s happening in America. The rise in the number of workers earning under $25,000 is TWICE as high as the growth of those earning over $75,000, and has been that way since Bush got into office. As soon as China moves closer to free trade this will be their fate. Their middle class, which is growing right now, WILL stop growing. Take that to the bank.
Because a firm would wait until labor costs go up before looking for a cheaper alternative. Why would they move before that? Labor costs go up when a country becomes more prosperous. This is, in fact, playing out in China right now. ESPECIALLY since they’re stepping off the golden brick road and relaxing their tariffs.
Actually it’ll be better than the U.S. going bankrupt trying to support all its unemployed and welfare recipients - when that happens there’ll be no market for China to sell to. You do remember that 20 million Chinese jobs were lost when we stumbled in 2008, right? I also cited this a while back. China depends on America for jobs - we, on the other hand, depend on China for jobs like a hemophiliac depends on a vampire for blood.
We had a growing middle class, we had job security for workers and wages did keep up with inflation - until we threw ourselves face-first into the scam that is globalism.
Emacknight seems to believe that
If you have a Chinese worker producing iPods at a labor rate of $1 an hour with a productivity level of $12,000 GDP per person per year (this was cited; these figures were specifically for the manufacturing sector)
If you have an American worker producing iPods at a labor rate of $5 an hour with a productivity level of $100,000 GDP per person per year
(And this is not even talking about the difference in defective product rates - which you can guess at by the sheer number of Chinese knock-off products, much of which are made right in the same factory that the “genuine” stuff is made)
that the 5-fold increase in wages would not, in his world, be offset by the 8 fold rise in productivity.
It’s arguments like this that make emacknight easy to dismiss out of hand.
Laughing about Apple’s woes in this arena won’t gain America any jobs but it’s still hilarious to see Apple get stung by China doing an iPad knockoff and undercutting them. Anyone want to bet they stole Apple’s designs and intellectual property to make this happen? Like the way Huawei illegally (by Western standards) ripped off Cisco and then started competing against them globally?
If these knockoffs make it to the U.S. Apple could be driven right out of that sector of the market BECAUSE they offshored production of the iPad. Wouldn’t that be ironic for the disciples of the “if we don’t offshore, companies won’t be competitive” argument?
Go, iPed. If for no other reason but to teach Apple a hard, hard lesson about what happens when you dance with the offshoring devil.
Average manufacturing wages in the US isn’t $5 an hour. That’s below the minimum wage. The average factory worker earns $18 an hour. I can’t find a cite for an average Chinese manufacturing wage.
Are US workers 18 times more productive than their Chinese counterparts?
Question for Monsieur Lope:
Are you proposing that American companies should not purchase any goods or services from any other country?
If you are not proposing that, then please explain exactly where the line should be drawn. Do we make a list of specific goods and services that we are allowed to purchase and others that we aren’t? And how would that list not be arbitrary?
