Central banks are trying to prop up the deflationary structural changes happening in the broader world economies due to aging demographics and technology reducing the value of human labor.
The end result is an enormous asset bubble as their only solution is to print money to prevent any actual deflation from happening as that would implode the financial system.
Yes but the inflation will come in 5-7 years. Just in time to liquidate the amount of debt the government owes.
Pretty clever trick but it’s only a random accident of the financialized systems that make modern life possible. It’s like how all the pandemic chaos only increased corporate profits and government power.
It’s just endless consistent accidents that never benefit 95% of people.
Central banks seem to accept low deflation now. At least here in Germany we have low deflation. The money the central banks print is not for preventing inflation. They would need to put money in the hands of common people, but it just stays in the financial system and keeps asset prices up.
Yes, nuclear isn’t hard, they’re so strictly regulated because there aren’t other dual use technology that are more controllable, destructive and easily repurposed by sufficiently advanced nations.
My personal opinion is that if we discover a more devastating weapon of some sort, such as kinetic bombardment using bunches of O'Neill space colonies as projectiles, nuclear becomes comparatively benign and that kinds of event can lead to more de-regulation.
Give me rock solid and cheaper 4G before jumping the gun to 5G.
How will going from say 40mbps to 250mbps+ on a phone help me in any way over the next 2 years? For video, the limits of a phone display cap the max bitrate below 5G's speed. 1080p at 60fps is around 16mbps.
If you are in a cell with low congestion, probably the 4G speed is enough. Since, the mobile data consumption is increasing rapidly though, cells will start to become congested. 5G ensures that more people will be able to stream video at the same time.
TSMC is the center of the universe for chip fab. AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, and Apple all rely on their manufacturing. Doesn't this create a systemic risk especially with Taiwan's ties to China?
TSMC just stopped making chips for one of its biggest customers just because the U.S. passed a law. They're building a big facility in Arizona just to satisfy the economic nationalists in the U.S. Plus, Samsung is also outside of China, and while their technology is behind TSMC, they are fairly competitive. I don't think any ties Taiwan has with China are very worrying in this case.
TSMC's ties with the U.S. are, on the other hand, a big strategic threat to China, and maybe to other countries that aren't the U.S.
Samsung has just as many ties with the US as TSMC. Both companies use semiconductor manufacturing equipment from US firms like Applied Materials and KLA. The reinterpretation of US export controls that bars TSMC from selling to Huawei extends from not just barring companies from selling products to China with US technology inside, but also barring companies from using US technology to manufacture Chinese-designed products that are then sold to China. This applies to Samsung just as much as TSMC.
TSMC isn't real bottleneck here. It's US semiconductor manufacturing equipment firms fully under US jurisdiction that underpin the supply chain for any modern fab.
this area of industry is perhaps the most interesting- the firms doing research and at the forefront of chipmanufacture, but in the lay tech press doesn't get a lot of fanfare. Are there good links to write-ups about how this industry is structured, etc? The only other company I know about is ASML who makes the EUV lithography machines...
I'd say that the ties of Taiwan with China are not that concerning, considering that they actually consider themselves to be the legitimate government of China in exile on the island of Taiwan and that the mainland has missile batteries ready to fire missles on them.
I guess the real danger here in our unforeseeable world will arise if the American government becomes either unwilling or unable to defend Taiwan from a sea invasion from the CPC, something that would probably be more serious to American (and world) security than losing a few fabs in Asia, I think.
Do you think the American government is able to defend Taiwan right now?
With China about 100 miles from Taiwan, I don't see how anyone could get close without mass casualties. China has the shorter and more secure supply lines. They could send an invasion force using numerous small water vessels in waters they could easily defend. In the end, the losing side would just destroy all the important places in Taiwan.
Would China actually bother with that? I don't think so. They like doing business with the Americans, and that would basically be a declaration of war to the USA. Even if it didn't boil down to that, sanctions would hurt them plenty, much more than they want. After all, Taiwan wasn't not for a split second part of Communist China, so what's the point of risking anything for an overcrowded island as long as no one recognizes them as independent?
So yes, I think the conflict will definitely remain frozen for the next decades, and it will be at least until either the CPC loses control of the mainland, the USA lose their grip on the region, or some US politician goes bananas and pushes for Taiwanese independence.
Technically, they do, they are forced to remain the Republic of China (and also lay a claim on Mongolia) because any change of status would be interpreted by The PRC as a declaration of independence. So yes, while it's quite clear they don't care about the mainland, they have to de jure still keep the irredentist clauses in their laws and statutes in order to avoid war with the Chinese.
> TSMC is the center of the universe for chip fab. AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, and Apple all rely on their manufacturing. Doesn't this create a systemic risk especially with Taiwan's ties to China?
It does, and that's not only TSMC, or even fabs as such.
Taiwan is a source for a many single vendor semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and consumables. Taiwan going down means the semiconductor industry as such, globally, going down for a few years at least.
First thing that comes to mind are lithography machines, but for the very high-end ASML is the only game in town currently afaik. And they are sitting in the Netherlands (working with Zeiss in Germany). For larger feature sizes there are vendors too.
Equipment, some low profile stuff like coaters, wafer preparation, and cleaning. Packaging equipment, and consumables. Some AMHS. Gas, and chemical handling equipment. Some resist makers.
Clean room material markers, few makers of vacuum grade plastics, FOUP, film, and other carriers.
All GloFO, Sam, and Japanese all use at least in some part something from Taiwanese makers. If for example, the only one maker of particular brand of proprietary resist stripper does go down, I don't know if somebody would even be able to reverse engineer it to know how it works, let alone reproduce it.
They will have to go back few generations in the resist tech to resume production with non TW suppliers.
And like that with many, many other parts of the ecosystem. It's only a tip of the iceberg.
Just curious, what would you have liked to see the U.S. do about Hong Kong? Arguably if anyone was gonna do something it should probably be the British being their agreement was broken. I'm sure the British would have U.S. backing them if they wanted to retaliate.
The U.S. started removing the extra trade agreements from Hong Kong (which arguably is a large part of what made Hong Kong what it is today) and sanctioned individuals in the Chinese government [1]. While this seems to be a "weak" response, I'm not sure what else I would like to see short of getting the military involved.
Given that agreement on Hong Kong independance was set to expire relatively soon, is difficult to justify serious intervention from a cost/ benefit perspective.
The original seisure of Hong Kong was an act of gunboat displomacy, and not exactly an exemplar of justice and law. Consider how its seen in donestic politics in China.
This does not mean that I approve of China's activity, just putting things in perspective.
>if anyone was gonna do something it should probably be the British
Except the UK has much bigger issues ATM like dealing with the social, political and economical fallout of Brexit and Covid-19.
To put it mildly, even if they wanted to, it's tough for them to help put out a fire in a far away village when they have a huge dumpster fire in their own back yard to deal with first.
Building relationships with our allies in the area (TPP), State Department diplomacy, etc. to pressure China effectively. I think TPP was dead regardless of who won, but that State is impaired right now.
It is hard to see what the US should do, but I think the west has a moral obligation to do something (even though it is technically an Anglo-sino agreement).
The UK is trying to welcome people from Hong Kong to the UK (passports left over from before the handover) which could hurt them where it actually matters if lucky.
The 'government' is not an independent actor - its soft power. And its especially soft in US. This whole thing with 'executive power', look at me I am doing things - its all smoke and mirrors.
Obama promised to end wars close down Guantanamo bay and in the ended up keeping up all war campaigns and on top of that he started droning people around the world.
The 'big boys' of the industry have enough fingers in the pie(s) to have their say in things that would affect them.
And independence of Taiwan is definitely one.
> Hong Kong fell without a peep from the U.S.
Because it was mostly Chinese businessmen window to the world, is fall of independent HK really that big of a deal for US or UK?
HK isn't a sovereign nation, Taiwan is. Also, having the US go in would be questionable. Wasn't the "one country, two systems" treaty an agreement between uk and china?
I mean, you can make the same argument with "the earth is flat... depends on who you ask". At least when it comes to the Taiwan (the island) I don't think there's any doubt that the ROC government has a monopoly on violence there. They also have their own military, police force, and collect their own taxes, independent of the PRC.
Best I can recall, it was formed by Nationalists, partly Nazy government that had to flee after like a third Communist uprising when they relised there were more revolting peasants than they had bullets.
Obvious a lot of time has passed, but it's not quite flat earth. It just requires a sence of 'historical justice', however unhelpfull
It's a little bit more complicated than "ask Taiwanese", depends on whether you ask the indigenous people or those coming from mainland ~1949 and their descendants, you may get different answers.
I don't think you mean Native Taiwanese (as in Native Americans) here, so I have to say people are not unanimous about whether "Taiwan" is a sovereign nation.
Except completely reclassifying it to remove the thing that made China want to seize control in the first place: special trade status.
Other than that, what could the current administration do that wasn't screwed up by its predecessors?
My allusion to incompetent government in the U.S. should not be construed as limited to the current administration. The U.S. government has been screwing up a lot of things for a very long time now.
Yes, with many thanks to the Republican party that doesn't believe in governing competently. The party of anti-government has been doing everything it can for decades to get the government to break down and screw up. Instead of improving government, they've been systematically destroying its ability to deal with real problems.
> you guys understand that Hong Kong has and always been part of China, correct? UK gave back a land that wasn't their to keep.
PRC signed an agreement with the UK that set out the legal parameters for this transfer of sovereignty, and PRC is contradicting that agreement with their actions. While it may not legally be the UK's to keep, it was not China's to take in this respect either.
> What can any Western country or US president can do? Do you declare a war with a country over a piece of land that is rightfully their?
Well, in the mean time, the U.S. has terminated the special status of Hong Kong which allowed it to serve as the conduit between the civilized world and a country with essentially no rules that regularly outweigh pure class/political privilege.
The English legal system and liberal order that the UK imposed on Hong Kong was in large part what made them so dazzlingly wealthy and dynamic; and if PRC wants to corrupt that, the result is that the benefits of the system they are corrupting disappear with that system.
Also, it is not always right to honour the law, when dealing with bandits. The CCP does not care for the law, so their assertion of a legal right to Hong Kong (which has not matured anyway) is hypocritical, and can essentially be ignored at no moral hazard.
Furthermore, even if we asserted that the CCP has some agreed legal right to Hong Kong that will mature in some years, I would not agree that it has a moral right to take its people as property.
A true leader would have gotten on the phone with all of his counterparts in all of our allied countries and given notice to China that the new laws to curtail freedoms are a red line. And come up together with a list of collective sanctions (including banking) to threaten China with.
Instead, Trump has spent so much of his time kissing up to Xi to get his help to win the re-election (per Bolton's book). And check out some tweets from 2020:
"Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country."
"In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
"“Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus."
"Of his many tweets over the three-day Memorial Day weekend, when the Hong Kong issue was at the top of the news, none was about Hong Kong. During the Hong Kong protests of 2014, Mr. Trump tweeted one of his few clear statements on the plight of the territory: “President Obama should stay out of the Hong Kong protests, we have enough problems in our own country!”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/china-hong-kong-l...
> A true leader would have gotten on the phone with all of his counterparts in all of our allied countries and given notice to China that the new laws to curtail freedoms are a red line. And come up together with a list of collective sanctions (including banking) to threaten China with
This is literally, exactly what the White House did.
Can you please point me to an article where Trump called the leaders of all our allies to create a coalition? And also which collective sanctions were created?
The UK and Australia are willing to flap their mouths a bit [1] over it at least, and the UK is much closer to actual sanctions (Australia has, for the time being, not terminated their special trade arrangements with Hong Kong).
Ultimately only the U.S. has taken any leadership on this matter, even if I think it will be inadequate. There is more to be done; but with the U.S. Presidential election looming, one thing that would steel the resolve and buff the resources of PRC assets in American politics would be a major announcement.
Nothing is as simple as the free world bullying the nominally-free world to condemn the only major state in the world conducting a holocaust; because apparently those "allies" don't give a toss.
I think you might be over estimating how long things were shut down in Asia. Outside of Hubei, China had an extended Chinese New Year for a couple weeks (in February) and a longer post holiday ramp up. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan didn't shut down.
Pretty much any company that imports stuff from China would have already had additional supplies built up to cover the normal CNY shut down and ramp up so the supply chain issues were lower than if COVID had shut down China at a different time of the year.
TSMC has fabs in Washington and they are going to open another one in Arizona. They also have a bunch of design centers in the US, so no. The strategic planners have thought of all of these things way ahead of you.
Even with that, the global supply chain in semiconductor consumables will go down for a few years. With all respects, its not humanly possible to operate such a "born global" industry as semiconductors manufacturing without a globally integrated supply chain.
Russia for example still keep tries to have a 100% internal military semiconductor supply chain. Their best chips made on a domestic process are 10μm. TI military foundry is not much further ahead.
I doubt that any actual "strategic planner" actually put his hand on any American policy making process in the last 30 years. The way how terribly unprepared the US was to even such an insignificant nationwide emergency like the virus, is the best proof.
With all due respect, the US Gov doesn't have to depend on TI for defense/national security chips. They could cut a deal with Intel as soon as the ink is dry on the security clearances.
In principle, in case of extreme urgency on a level of national emergency, they can, but this will also mean that it will be Intel who will have to redesign, and adapt the mask. Some military IP is so old, that it isn't even digitised, or is a non-syntheszed, hand drawn IP. Some of it will likely be completely unworkable on a new CMOS process because of dependency on some, now exotic, high speed CML logic.
And we are only talking about digital chips. Analog chips case will likely be hopeless without a specialty analog foundry.
In the peacetime, it is very, very unlikely they will be able to "reorient" to make defence chips, as it will seriously disrupt the company.
And in the end, it may not matter at all if the supply chain for materials will go down in case of a military conflict.
Now imagine Chine acquiring outdated, but still somewhat decent fab capability to sustain itself in a pickle .. and then rolling over Taiwan. Wouldnt have to be in the open, a big 'oopsie all TSMC fabs burned down overnight' would create chaos for not prepared nations.
The important machines from TSMC are made by other companies. Competitors can and will also make 5nm chips. TSMC definitely has a headstart and it requires a huge investment to realize a fab (machines, clean rooms) also a lot of integration work and many optimisations to become profitable.
Don't forget the non-emotional constant demand for Apple shares caused by stock buybacks combined with a 7% weight in the S&P 500. Every new dollar invested in an index tracking ETF/mutual fund needs to buy 7c worth of Apple stock from someone.
It's a huge supply/demand problem. At what price will someone forego Apple shares? What happens when Apple is 10%, 15% etc of the S&P 500 index? Where will these shares to sell come from? At this point, why would anyone holding Apple shares outright sell?
This demand may only lead to a self reinforcing feedback loop where: a greater market cap (3T?) -> higher index weight (10+%) -> greater buying pressure -> more shares locked up in index funds (not available for sale) -> repeat
This is explains why there has been increasingly volatile movements in Apple shares. This lack of share liquidity works both directions: buying and selling. Not enough active investors are available to step in when passive investors (who now make up an enormous portion of capital markets) decide to start selling index tracking funds in bulk.
Share buy backs raise the share price, but not market cap. so if you have 101 shares of Apple. And Apple buys 1 of those shares back from you, not much has changed as far as who has more value.
Sure in a perfect world you decide to sell 1 share to Apple. The share price increases to account to for the lost share and market cap stays same.
In reality, enormous swaths of shares are held by index tracking funds and everyday investors who don’t sell their shares into buybacks. In this case the market price based off supply/demand must rise in order to find someone who will let go of a share so Apple can buy it.
you haven't said anything new here. Price must rise to account for destruction of a share, but market cap stays the same... (price / share goes up, price / fraction of company stays the same)
by this logic a reverse stock split would increase the market cap. No need to even waste money buying back any shares... free market cap rise, bonuses for ceo, cfo, existing shareholders rejoice :)
What does reverse stock split have to do with it ? Buyback happens on the market and it removes stocks from circulation, if the demand is still there but buyback eliminated supply because people are holding on to the rest of the stock then the price automatically goes up and increases the market cap more - it's about liquidity - if you do a buyback of 1 billion suddenly there's 1 billion on the sell side that's gone but people still want to buy the stock - so the price goes up.
the price changes immediately when buybacks are announced, not when the buybacks are executed. Case in point, intel jumped 4% today immediately after announcing a stock purchase of $10 billion (to be executed by end of the year), which is about 5% of its marketcap. No shares needed to change hands, the bid / ask moved instantaneously. The quoted price of a stock reflects people's willingness to buy and sell at certain prices (bid / ask), its not simply the last traded price, which is almost useless, given new information.
Your logic is flawed in that shares aren't simply "destroyed" they have to be bought back on the open market at an agreed upon price from a willing seller. The sellers of the shares may not want to sell and will therefore require more than the perfect price 𐤃X that accounts for adjustment of market cap based on reduction in shares.
In theory if no one wants to sell shares of Apple during a buyback the share price will head towards infinity. There's always a price though that someone will let go of a share at.
Speaking of splits, I love how Apple’s stock split justification is:
“We want Apple stock to be more accessible to a broader base of investors.”
https://investor.apple.com/faq/default.aspx
Yet it’s one of the top stocks held on Robinhood (#3 at 700,000 users)
Apple is in the DOW and the DOW is a stupidly weighted index where share price affects what percentage of the index that company holds. Right now a 1% increase in Apple pushes the DOW up 10 times more than a 1% increase in Cocoa Cola.
Companies in the DOW tend to have share prices below $500/ share and most are under $200 and the DOW won't add companies with high stock values as a result (Apple was added only after their last split).
It's likely being in the DOW bolsters and stabilizes stock prices as a lot of indexes are based on a the DOW. It also brings a company a certain prestige.
Whether any of this affects the Apple board's decision to split the stock or not is entirely speculation... it just seems a far more likely reason than the idea that they are splitting to make it accessible to people with $500 they want to invest.
Very few people invest in the basket of companies that make up the Dow Jones. Its use as an index of how the stock market is behaving is really a historical artifact at this point. One ETF in the top one hundred [1] ETFs is based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and that one is ranked 43rd. Joining the S&P 500 is a big deal, on the other hand, as the three biggest ETFs are S&P 500 funds.
Fair enough. Even so, I think inclusion/ exclusion in the DOW is far more likely to affect Apple's choice to split or not than making the stock more accessible to investors.
I doubt it, and I think there is a misunderstanding about the investors Apple referred to in their public statement on the split. As a company's share price rises the stock becomes less liquid, because trades happen in smaller quantities; Berkshire Hathaway's class A shares are probably the most extreme example. Low liquidity is a problem for mutual funds, which have to sell assets whenever an investors sells their shares in the fund (which may be a relatively small sale e.g. a retirement account distribution), because low liquidity makes asset sales more difficult. In general institutional investors will have liquidity rules that constrain the assets their funds can hold to avoid that kind of problem.
Given how much investment capital is held by institutional investors, companies have a good reason to split their shares if the share price is too high. Berkshire Hathaway created a new share class to support the needs of institutional investors, and I would read "accessible to investors" as "conforming to the liquidity requirements of institutional investors."
“Accessibility” is always a bogus reason nowadays. Stock commissions are dirt cheap so there is little reason to buy in lot sizes anymore. If you have $320,000 in your account you can buy a single share of Berkshire Hathaway for less than a $10 commission.
Stock splits are just a low grade attempt to pump up the stock price.
Accessibility does not just refer to retail investors, it also refers to institutional investors who are constrained by liquidity rules; this is why Berkshire Hathaway created its class B shares.
Section 1. (a) The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.
I don't think it was vague, the executive order stated:
> The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.
Similarly, and I honestly feel a bit silly asking this, but does this ban US investors from purchasing Tencent stock? It doesn't seem so - are these literally just bans on app transactions? Or does this also mean that, for example, WeChat couldn't host infra on Azure in Africa?
Did you edit in the quote from the EO after? It specifically says "any transaction that is related to WeChat". The TikTok/ByteDance order doesn't include a "related to" qualifier like that, the same section in it just says:
any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, [...] with ByteDance Ltd.
It's still not clear what exactly that will mean, but the intention definitely seems to be to restrict it to WeChat and not hit everything from Tencent.
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite and the Epic Games store. This might be a symbolic move more then anything, because unless they intend to be rigorous about Tencent’s connections with all these companies (e.g Can’t buy anything on Epic’s store, or make micro transactions in games from companies owned by Tencent), they really are not stopping anything.
Your purchases through Epic or Riot (League of Legends, Valorant) are not seen as ‘direct’ transactions with Tencent.
Basically it’s exactly the kind of grandstanding Trump would partake in.
I think you're thinking of league of legends, unless they also have a controlling stake in Activision. I believe their stake a Activision is very much a minority position.
The lack of real world experience on a HackerNews UBI discussion is infuriating. Western society's white collar elite are completely unaware of truly how many "sucky" jobs there are in the world that all enable our (currently) superior standard of living. Your entire existence relies on a globalist system of slave level labor producing products from all corners of the world. Automation of every industry is impossible unless we have true human replacement robots (many decades out). UBI will over time simply raise costs of all goods/services to subwelfare level that people "can't live on".
Whos going to: - clean your hotel/office/home - cook your food - serve your food - fix your household - grab your garbage - build new houses - build/maintain roads - build/maintain water, sewers - deliver your packages/mail - Drive trucks around - pack/unpack trucks - produce meat products (have you seen a meatpacking plant?) - maintain farms/livestock - provide difficult medical services - be a nurse aide (clean poo?)
I have not even started to list all the jobs required in order to "magically" produce our cheap goods from overseas including clothing and electronics. These are farrrr from completely automated.
Lazy Americans don't need to work right? Discussion about UBI is an expression of guilt over how well our standard of living (general hacker news crowd) compared to the vast majority of the world.
In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it. For example, the pay for a garbage truck driver is actually quite high, because it's an unpleasant job and they need to attract people to do it. And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated, with pickers that grab bins and empty them into the truck.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, the same job is done by three people, two of whom jog outside next to the vehicle in the sweltering heat and manually empty the bins into it. They're breaking their backs and get paid like crap.
> In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it.
Having worked in the service industry in wealthy Iceland for years, I can’t say I agree with this statement.
While working exusting 12 hour shifts with mandatory minimum pay (sometime a little less because of exploitative unpaid overtime), the owner of the business was regularly found to be the highest payed person in the country.
In other words, my work, contributed to some rich guy getting richer, while my compensation was only as little as he was allowed to pay me. That doesn’t seem fair does it. Ask any working class person, in europe and I’m sure they have a similar story.
I live in Vietnam and get to see the rubbish truck go past my house every day exactly as the person above you described. It's summer time here, 35-40 degrees and high humidity every day. One person drives the truck, the other two go through people bins and sort their rubbish, extracting the recycling since nobody here has the habit of separating their waste. I don't know the exact wage of these guys, but judging from other government jobs it's probably around 3 million VND/month (~$130), slightly less than $1600 a year, and it's likely they work 6 days a week.
Food and rent is cheap here, but not that cheap. You can barely survive on that wage, especially if you have a family. You will be eating mostly rice and probably scrounging for other work on the grey market.
In Iceland, you'll get at least minimum wage, $2500 a month, ~$30,000 a year. Of course, the economies are different. However, using PPP (purchasing power parity) [1], Iceland minimum wage would be equivalent to around $13,000 a year in Vietnam, or 8 times a garbage collector's pay here, for significantly easier work and less hours.
I'm not trying to say that you had it easy, or that it was OK to pay you that amount for such long shifts and to stiff you on overtime. However, by objective comparison people working equivalent jobs in developing countries have it much, much, worse.
Even though the working class in rich countries like Iceland is constantly cheated out of their fair compensations for a (relatively) shitty job. One must not forget that in the grand scheme of things, we still have considerable privilege by the nature of our birthplace.
We can—and should—complain about how we get the shorter end of the stick in the current economic system. But we must not forget that globally we constantly are the beneficiaries of much worse cheating of the foreign working class.
As I write this we are still calling for the arrest of Icelandic business owners who were guilty of bribing Namibian government officials in exchange for a privileged and unfair access to common Namibian fisheries in a scandal known as Fishrot. We are also waiting for the justice system to act on a slumlord who took advantage of imported labor, and left a house he rented them with inadequate fire escapes. The house burned down with three people (all foreign laborers) still in it unable to escape. The Icelandic justice system seem to be unwilling to pursue justice in either of these scandals, demonstrating how Icelanders are criminally benefiting in the international context.
Fairness is relative. In Iceland, that minimum wage guarantees that you can live in some comfort. In the US, you can work in a similar job with similar hours, but your shifts are often completely unpredictable (and intentionally kept below 35 hrs/week to avoid paying benefits), you can be fired at any time, and a single unexpected expense like a health problem can see you reduced to homelessness.
>> In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it. For example, the pay for a garbage truck driver is actually quite high, because it's an unpleasant job and they need to attract people to do it. And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated, with pickers that grab bins and empty them into the truck.
This is true in America as well, FYI. It's a large source of union jobs.
They actually stopped using prisoners, but are still only paying $10.25 an hour and work one of the hardest jobs I can imagine. They are basically not allowed to use the lift on the truck because it slows them down, so they hand lift my cans every time in the 95 degree heat.
In Southeast Asia? Try New Orleans, Louisiana where sanitation workers have been striking to make $15 (they currently make $10.25 with no benefits) and jog along side the truck and empty the cans by hand.
> And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated
That isn't really obvious to me as having a cause/effect relationship. Could you please expound? Why would high salaries cause heavy automation in a given field?
Automation only reduces cost if wages are already sufficiently high so that the cost of initial investment and maintenance is economically justified in the mid/long term.
The reason you see trash pickets riding robotic trash collectors in rich western countries is simple: it's far cheaper to buy and maintain a robot than it is to pay the salaries of enough people to achieve the same goal.
You don't get robotic trash collectors in southeast Asia and Africa and South America because for the price of a single robotic trash collectors you can pay the salary of a bunch of people for a few years. Hence, you get people carting wheelie bins.
> Whos going to: - clean your hotel/office/home - cook your food - serve your food - fix your household - grab your garbage [...]
People will take these "sucky" jobs, but they will be compensated well enough to justify it (since they will have an option of not working). This raise the prices overall, but not at the same level. For example, meat products prices will grow more than let's say organic vegetables. Note that demand for many of the products and services is pretty elastic (most people don't have to go to restaurants, they can cook something at home). This way at least people will have an option of having UBI and living frugally, instead of doing a crappy job.
UBI, at least Andrew Yang's UBI, is not going to remove those jobs - they will still be around and still be in demand because UBI isn't an income, it's a basic income, or around 1/3 of what an income should be for most people.
If anything, the wages of those jobs will go up because the demand of it from laborers will go down.
This is basically how it works in Saudi Arabia. Citizens are guaranteed a job where they can get away with doing nothing. If they happen to be fired, they get a monthly stipend until the government finds them another job. As a result, most of the real work is done by immigrants.
Thank you. These are necessary functions of society that require hard work that although maybe rewarding To some people in some capacity is mostly not desirable labor if other alternatives are available such as spending more time with family and reading whimsical books. How do you convince enough people to clean poo or raise and maintain livestock or climb inside a fuel cell in order to fulfill necessary the needs of society? We know how communism and capitalism traditionally have coerced people to do so. The reality is not pretty from either angle, but are we really even close to that alternative yet? It’s a noble premise but we have a long ways to go.
Most of that stems from the fact that the US dollar is the main global reserve currency - so people around the world are willing to accept them in exchange for real goods and services.
This won't be the case forever. Once it flips, the magically cheap overseas goods become the expensive imported goods only rich people can afford.
Yeah, just a century ago the reserve currency was the pound sterling, a century before that the franc, a century before that the Dutch guilder. I guess people in those times also expected the status quo to last forever.
> The lack of real world experience on a HackerNews UBI discussion is infuriating. Western society's white collar elite are completely unaware of truly how many "sucky" jobs there are in the world that all enable our (currently) superior standard of living.
Your comment makes it complete clear you have a severe lack of real world experience.
Go to a wealthy country. I mean an actual wealthy one where even lower class people are paid well enough to buy a house, have a project car, get at least 6 weeks vacation a year, get generous maternity leave etc. etc.
Now look around and notice that all those sucky jobs you talks about are getting done.
Also notice that in those wealthy countries people can quite readily choose to get welfare to the tune of a few grand a month. They could perfectly sit around and do nothing and get enough money to live, if they wanted to.
But they don't.
Why do you think that is? It's because they're paid well to do those jobs. As long as jobs (even sucky ones) pay well, there will always be a line of people willing to do them.
If there are no people willing to do them, pay more.
As a real-world example I used to live in one such country and I worked in a factory stacking boxes. All day, every day. Pick up box, turn around, put down box. Starting hourly rate was $45/hr. Time and half on Sundays. Double time on a holiday. No union, those were just the pay rates.
The company I worked for still made a healthy profit, and so did the end company the boxes were being stacked for (Safeway, actually)
Not sure if you are thinking of Scandinavian countries? If so, I think you're exaggerating the wealth of your average citizen a tad, even if the point still stands.
But in Scandinavian countries it seems to be mainly immigrants that do the sucky jobs, even if they are better compensated than elsewhere (although of course everything is more expensive, food, housing, etc).
The end result is an enormous asset bubble as their only solution is to print money to prevent any actual deflation from happening as that would implode the financial system.