Ah the famous trickle down rebranded as "spill over".
"Trickle-down" has become a thought-terminating cliche.
Of course your country is better off if you have successful companies and high-income jobs.
Readit Newsertian commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
ertian commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
You really going to mention all that, which had some impact on the US middle class, but you're not going to mention anything about the US "wealth distribution" dynamics which has had its regulations and protections removed to the demise of the middle class?? Income tax roof being more than double before, corps being taxed more than double, the top earner vs bottom earner of any corporation much closer.. Less workarounds, no-one using the stupid "buy-borrow-die" strategy that is all too common now..
That's just the byproduct of the rest of the world coming back online (plus communications & logistics improving).
Look, if you own a company, or are in a leadership position: the entire world is now open to you, both as source of labor and as potential market. The impact of your decisions has exploded, and the potential revenue and value of your company has also exploded.
OTOH, if you're a line-worker at a factory in Detroit: your competition is now most of the population of the world--and they all expect lower salaries than you do.
What's your argument for why you should keep making 10x or 20x what people in China or India make? Do you just naturally deserve it? Do you figure that companies owe it to you because you share a home country? If so, either the company will bounce and move abroad to one of the many countries willing to welcome them with open arms--or they'll be swiftly replaced by a Chinese equivalent which has 1/10th the labor costs. Either way, your extravagant salary is going to dry up.
American labor in the 50s was simply in the right place at the right time. That's no longer true. There's no way to stop the rest of the world from growing and improving in order to maintain the special status of the American worker. They don't really have a choice: they need to skill up. And yes, push for better social safety nets, though their instinct seems to be in the opposite direction.
ertian commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
> If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you.
Sure, but the vast majority of the wealth of building SpaceX and Google doesn't go to me. It goes to people like Musk and Larry Page.
So you'd be better-off if SpaceX and Google were Chinese companies?
Also, a lot of the wealth from the tech industry does spill over to the larger community. You're strictly better off having it. If the US had just stuck with their 1970s economy on the theory that any new industries wouldn't distribute their benefits equally, it would be vastly smaller, less powerful and less wealthy. Surely that's obvious?
ertian commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
The elephant in the room is how dismal more and more Americans quality of life is. Home ownership is out of reach. Living in the city at all is often out of reach. They have to work multiple jobs and those jobs often mistreat them.
I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.
Home ownership rate is higher now than it ever was in the post-war period, actually. It peaked in 2008, and has fallen since then...still higher than the 50s and 60s.
Also, did you ever spend any time in those post-war homes? Most of us would be appalled at the idea of living in a bare-bones 1000 sqft box (with more than 2x as many children per average family).
ertian commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy
The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can. Immigrant labor contributes to that because we've got inadequate labor protections and because we bought into the idea that lower consumer prices was a fine reason to ignore both labor and antitrust.
The hollowing out of the American middle class is because the huge, wealthy middle class was a post-war anomaly, from a time when the US had the only intact industrial plant in the world, and lack of communication technology and logistical sophistication meant production had to be localized and centralized. So, if you happened to be living in the right places in the US, you could have a house and a car and put a couple kids through college on an (artificially-inflated) factory worker's wage. At the same time, 80% of the population of the world was on the edge of starvation.
Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).
It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.
What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.
Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.
ertian commented on PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin newsroom.paypal-corp.com/... · Posted by u/DocFeind
Okay and the key difference between crypto and cash/credit/whatever is supposedly that it is decentralized. Or have we abandoned that false premise now?
Cash has centralized distribution, but it's very decentralized in use. That's what makes it useful. However, sometimes people might choose to use a centralized service provider (like a bank, or a credit card company) because it's useful. They still have the option of using cash. What's important isn't that every single transaction happens in a fully-decentralized way: it's that decentralized transactions remain an option. That means that banks and credit card companies have to compete with cash, and that they can never have full control of your financial life.
The same is true of cryptocurrency. It's not a problem that centralized service providers exist. If they stop providing useful services, people can just take their cryptocurrency and go home.
ertian commented on Public static void main(String[] args) is dead mccue.dev/pages/9-16-25-p... · Posted by u/charles_irl
My experience may be different from the rest of people at HN. But I am used to work in large projects that last decades. How main is written is totally irrelevant for my day to day work or my career.
How does it affect you this change day to day?
Many of us took programming 101 in Java and so typed this dozens of times without having a clue what it meant.
ertian commented on PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin newsroom.paypal-corp.com/... · Posted by u/DocFeind
I thought the whole point of a decentralised ledger was not needing companies like PayPal…
The point of cash is that it represents transferrable value that doesn't require an intermediary between you and the person you're transacting with. And yet, banks and credit card companies exist and deal with cash. This does not mean that cash is a useless concept.
ertian commented on Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text github.com/denizsafak/abo... · Posted by u/mzehrer
Like post post ww2 say we produced 1 car for every American. Also we produced 1 house for every American. Every car and house was produced in America because Europe was bombed to shit. Now 20 years later, Europe has recovered a bit and can start producing cars and houses again. Why wouldn't the US still be able to produce 1 car for every adult? Oh sorry, Germany is no longer a pile of rubble, you and your spouse need to share a car now. Also your adult kids need to move back in with you, no house for them either.
This is obviously absurd. US would be even richer since they no longer had to spend massive amounts of money funding the war effort and then massive amounts of money rebuilding Europe. Hollowing out the US middle class was a choice, not some law of nature.
To do that, they needed cars, machinery, home goods, electronics, etc. They had the labor to produce those things, but not the infrastructure. It takes time to build factories, and a skilled labor pool, and a logistics network, and so on.
So where did you go to get the goods & services you needed to rebuild? There was really only one option. The US was exporting cars, factory equipment, heavy machinery, steel, radio, coca cola, etc. They had an intact industrial plant, and had lost (relatively speaking) very few working-age men in the war. That helped them ramp up quickly with internal demand (fed by pent-up war wages).
For reasons laid out above, it wasn't practical to move factories overseas, or outsource parts, or automate. So workers in the areas with factories were in very high demand, and wages went way, way up in those areas. That had knock-on effects: America was just beginning to import oil in large quantities, so American coal & oil was suddenly in high demand. Same with mining, logging, etc. That caused a general boom--specifically favoring labor.
It wasn't because the rest of the world was poor that the American middle class was rich. It was because the rest of the world was developing, and America had a near-monopoly on the means of doing it. What's happened in the meantime is just that the US has lost that monopoly. Now American workers face relatively fair competition. This has been a huge net positive for the world, with cheaper goods and higher wages pretty much across the board...except for American workers.