[patience]

My new line of work is pretty well impervious to outsourcing, or obsolesence of many sorts. I fix stuff. One of a kind problems, every day,requiring judgement as to what is worth fixing, or not, and how to go about it. The downside is that I compete with the falling costs of the replacement items. If it is cheaper to buy than to fix, that is the right answer. My challenge is to sort that out.

The upside is that I have is no competition because of the limits to what I can charge, and the limited number of people who can do it. The tinkerer has always had his place. It is a no-growth business that has no appeal for corporatization. Won't work, except on a one person, face to face basis, so no investor can figure out how to exploit it, either, as long as I stay out of debt. Starve a banker! Make my day! I love it. Don't care what it pays, as long as I can make ends meet. Free at last! .

[jasonraymondson]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('patience', 'I') spent something over 30 years developing what we called "hard automation", and implementing robots into manufacturing functions. Past member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and involved in their Robotics group in Louisville, KY, where Vern Estes of GE at Appliance Park in Louisvlile, was a pioneer in the field. I can state unequivocally that the effect of robots in the workplace has always been to ADD jobs, when they are successfully implemented. The result is greater output, and the need to have more highly trained people look after the robots and automation. If these are poorly applied, the company pays a big cost for the failure and returns to the old ways.

The Japanese are noted for their failures in CNC applications, as they are with the grand promises of robotics. Lots of big hype, short on delivery of results, like the "futuristic" cars that the automakers display each year, but never put in production. CNC machining and robotics provide consistency and higher quality where they are correctly applied, like programming, garbage in-garbage out. Lots of machine shops in the US went belly up trying to use CNC to do one-off jobs best suited to manual methods, and as many went uner trying to compete with CNC in its' best applications of making 5 to 500 pieces of something, before people learned the right ways. Robots are currently best at painting cars, welding mass produced items, and doing dangerous handling tasks, like loading a forging press with red hot steel parts.

The problems with inadequate nursing staffing go far beyond demographics. (Wife is a nursing drop out.) The business model of hospitals and nursing homes, which is basically ROI oriented, is at the root of it, followed by the insurance model, litigation, and many other woes. Robots do what they are programmed to do, by people, who invariably screw it up. (Old saying--To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.) Both robotics and computers are means of leveraging human effort. If robotics can be WELL applied to some aspect of medicine, we will like the results, but the simplistic idea of directly replacing a nurse with a robot ignores the basic function of a nurse, which is human judgement, a typically Japanese error. It is fine to scrap a few thousand parts getting a manuacturing line set up and running smoothly, but nursing does not have that margin for error. People get irritated if too many die while trying to get a thing worked out, and medical care is fraught with the problem of unique problems--the antithesis of programmed responses.

The same fears were hyped about computerization taking away jobs, and came out the same way--growth resulted, not job losses. Mexico has banned the import of a lot of heavy equipment out of the same fears, that it would put a lot of peon laborers out of work, and cause disruption. So, they stew in their poverty. The steam engine and factories in England met with the same resistance, because the cottage industry of handcarving wooden pulleys for sailing ship rigging was decimated. Yes, job losses happened for a time, but that was the start of that little thing we call the Industrial Revolution, in hindsight.

The future will require us to adapt, an uncomfortable thing for complacent humans, but necessary. Our jobs will change, and we will, too, like it or not.

[patience]

jasonraymondson,

Thanks. Lack of logic and common sense can be forgiven. But I have trouble with the bickering and flame wars. That turns me off quickly. Think I'll back off a bit and watch to see if it gets any better.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('patience', 'j')asonraymondson,

Thanks. Lack of logic and common sense can be forgiven. But I have trouble with the bickering and flame wars. That turns me off quickly. Think I'll back off a bit and watch to see if it gets any better.

[patience]

VM, yeah, but you're a lot of fun!

[americandream]

One cannot blame gobal capitalism for gravitating towards maximised profit. After all, in a world of excess capacity and wafer thin profits, what other choice is there but the Darwinian one of survival by any means including relocation to cheaper economies.

My point is this. Huge chunks of every manufacturing sector in the US will ultimately relocate to cheaper China and I include chunks of GM in there at some stage. Likewise with services and India. The process will be a gradual one as consumer markets are tapped in those countries to make way for profit losses in the West.

The end result will be a uniformly two tiered world. The very well-off dynastic owners of equity and quality and;

a transient, overwhelmingly underpaid and indebted global consumer of cheap trash. Eventually excess global capacity will grind down international wages to levels where poverty and unrest will become endemic.

[ki11ercane]

I used to work a job that paid $10.00 an hour back in 1996. I then quit and became self employed. Thirteen years later I am making $725.00 a week, but working an average of 63 hours a week, so I am making 50c less per hour and working more, but I am the Man of the Mansion. Other than my customers I have no boss to answer for. If I was somehow able to figure out how to claw back 23 hours per week without it costing my company money, then I'd be up to $18+ per hour mark. Since my job can't be taught to someone else without them feeling an entitlement to a "manager's salary," I am trapped. My wife hasn't ever earned more than $14.00 per hour either. With that reality almost 15 years old, we bought an appropriate sized house (1050 sqft) had only one kid (snip snip) had only one car other than the company lease for a truck and made sure if we ever went into debt we got out quick. Now the house is paid for, we have "some" savings in the bank, we own the car, and the debt load is small. But we know we'll never rise higher, and that's ok. With our house more than tripling in value in the past 10 years if we sold it tomorrow we'd have enough for the doomstead. We accepted long ago that we had to live within our means to make it. And we have.

And herein lies the problem. Everyone feels an entitlement is owed to them far higher than they can attain, and the end result has been national bankruptcy on the personal level. The end result is massive personal debt, foreclosures, run-away spending, and the government in tow doing the same thing.

Again, this adjustment is part of the long term pain North America is going to feel.

[odegaard]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'O')ne cannot blame gobal capitalism for gravitating towards maximised profit. After all, in a world of excess capacity and wafer thin profits, what other choice is there but the Darwinian one of survival by any means including relocation to cheaper economies.

[MarkJ]

We've lost most of our local low-skilled manufacturing jobs due to low demand, outsourcing, offshoring, automation, robotics, computerization and other productivity enhancing technology, but we may be adding some high tech jobs which also provide thousand of construction jobs, support jobs and indirect jobs.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Last Piece In Place For Chip Plant


MALTA & STILLWATER — The last obstacle to the start of construction on the $4.2 billion computer chip factory at the Luther Forest Technology Campus has been cleared.

A project labor agreement has been reached between GlobalFoundries and the construction trade unions that sought work on the project, Gov. David Paterson announced Wednesday.

The factory will be one of the largest private investments ever made in the state, and Paterson and other state officials praised accomplishment of the labor deal.

In his announcement, Paterson said the agreement between M+W Zander and the Greater Capital Region Building and Construction Trades Council AFL-CIO will be signed this week.

It establishes that union-scale wages will be paid on 93 percent of the work but doesn’t require contractors to be unionized, said Prairie Wells, a spokeswoman for the council. The remaining 7 percent of work not covered will involve highly specialized high-tech work.

There are also provisions for the “Helmets to Hardhats” program to hire veterans for construction jobs, and local people get first crack at the jobs, Wells said.

The local building trade unions in return pledge not to strike or engage in other actions that would impede construction during the three- or four-year life of the project.

Unions had argued that there should be a project labor agreement because of the $1.2 billion in economic incentives GlobalFoundries is receiving to locate in New York state.

“Bringing economic development like this not only creates jobs and leverages private investment, but it positions New York as a technology giant,” Paterson said in a statement.


GlobalFoundries is expected to spend $800 million on construction of a 1.2 million-square-foot plant, creating 1,600 construction jobs and another 2,700 construction-related jobs, according to Paterson’s office.

The factory, which GlobalFoundries is calling Fab 2, will fabricate 22-nanometer chips, expected to be cutting-edge when it opens in 2012.

The plant is expected to have more than 1,400 permanent jobs with an average salary of $60,000 and create another 5,000 secondary jobs in the surrounding area.

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/j ... _chipdeal/

[americandream]

Odegaard

I agree but who is it who owns the bulk of mature global capitalism in China. The American and Western companies that relocated there!

In much of the conversation I encounter regarding offshoring, there seems to be this disconnect about who owns these businesses in China. Who is it thats benefitting from low Chinese labour costs. The Communist Party cadres? Not likely. It's Western stockholders.

I can only find one reason why Wall Street and its government in the White House is so accommodating of China and that is simply because they are profiting from this arrangement with the so-called Chinese communists.

Which is why I believe that as long as there are cost effective alternatives to American and Western labour, Western companies will do the dirty on us and cannot be relied on.

[odegaard]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'O')degaard

I agree but who is it who owns the bulk of mature global capitalism in China. The American and Western companies that relocated there!

In much of the conversation I encounter regarding offshoring, there seems to be this disconnect about who owns these businesses in China. Who is it thats benefitting from low Chinese labour costs. The Communist Party cadres? Not likely. It's Western stockholders...

[americandream]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('odegaard', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'O')degaard

I agree but who is it who owns the bulk of mature global capitalism in China. The American and Western companies that relocated there!

In much of the conversation I encounter regarding offshoring, there seems to be this disconnect about who owns these businesses in China. Who is it thats benefitting from low Chinese labour costs. The Communist Party cadres? Not likely. It's Western stockholders...

[MarkJ]

One of our competitors in the heating business, recently hired two new relatively inexperienced service techs/helpers for $8 per hour with no benefits. They're being trained by guys making $9.50 per hour which is substantially less than they were paying over a decade ago.

One of their employees said that after working for 3 months, they let him work unsupervised doing annual service.

[odegaard]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', '.')..

I day trade for a living and am amused at times when I encounter those doomers who are so sure that the Chinese are going to do this or that to the Dollar or the Western economy. The Chinese elite are as beholden to Western capital as we are as employees. That dependance will be deepening. Geithner's trips to China are merely to reassure the managers of our super factory that the goods will continue to be sold. I trade on that basis and never make a loss.