gatorguy said: Arguing either it's all or nothing is pretty darn limiting (and polarizing).
Who said anything about it has to be all or nothing?
That argument began with the article itself. IMO far too few folks recognize the increasing danger of the US turning into a country of minimal wage hourly servants whose workplace existence is for further enriching the already comfortable masters.
any unemployment stats yet??
lets just see from 2000 until now...
anything?
i want to see the trend of *your* numbers
You can look at official report. They all match my view that Obama did a fantastic job at fixing our economy after the last Republican president.
no, i want to see the data that is showing you 30 million unemployed, and i want to see the same data over the past 15 years or so.
let's see you back your opinion up with data.
Why should I have to back up the official reports from the Department of Labor? My statements are factual, not opinion.
If you believe that nearly 100 Million (42%) Americans are unemployed—or whatever conspiracy theory that's popular today—then you need to provide evidence to support that claim, not the other way around.
any unemployment stats yet??
lets just see from 2000 until now...
anything?
i want to see the trend of *your* numbers
You can look at official report. They all match my view that Obama did a fantastic job at fixing our economy after the last Republican president.
no, i want to see the data that is showing you 30 million unemployed, and i want to see the same data over the past 15 years or so.
let's see you back your opinion up with data.
Why should I have to back up the official reports from the Department of Labor? My statements are factual, not opinion.
If you believe that nearly 100 Million (42%) Americans are unemployed—or whatever conspiracy theory that's popular today—then you need to provide evidence to support that claim, not the other way around.
Deepest of apologies, Soli. Quoting got screwed up somewhere along the way, and i meant this whole thing for tallest skil
Sorry. No. We know how the government “calculates” its shit. We know it’s wrong. I don’t care about their dialectic or how they want to try to reframe the definition of ‘unemployed’. I care about the number of working age individuals who aren’t, and it’s nowhere near 4 and a half fucking percent.
show me **your** data.
even if your absolute number of unemployed is higher, the idea is in the trend over time. so let's see how your data is trending over the last decade or two.
The article conflates employee costs with labor costs. Sure, the average Chinese worker makes about $300 a month (as a floor), and that would be 4 to 8 times more in the U.S. as a start. But the article also states that labor costs account for about $5 per phone currently. Making the phones in the U.S. would raise labor costs to (say) $20 a phone, so that a $649 phone becomes $664 -- yes, it's more but it's hardly a deal breaker for many.
From the article, labor costs are a small fraction of the total costs of the phone. No business person likes giving away even pennies, but assembling the phones in the U.S. under this scenario is not a killer for Apple. That's if the labor cost is truly $5 a phone.
Honest question:
Are your calculations based on gross wages or do they include benefits -- Social Security, Medicare, ACA, Unemmployment Insuuance, etc.?
We know how many employees Foxconn uses for production, they have 1.3m employees total but it's fewer working on just the iPhone:
That says 300,000 for the 5S in 2013 and the unit volume has increased 50% since then. Say they need 400k employees at minimum $15k per year and add $5k for benefits, that's $8b for just over 200 million iPhones = $40 per iPhone and is around 4x Foxconn wages so $30 premium per unit. They need to build factories and supply chain but I don't think the employee cost would add much to the retail price. Apple would be able to absorb that (~5%) into their margins.
That's assuming a 40 hour working week, there would have to be paid overtime and things but it should be achievable without too much added cost and they don't have to manufacturer all iPhones locally. They can just do US-shipped iPhones (so ~1/3 of supply = 150k employees) in the US and use China for international.
Oh wot fun to read all this! Apple's manufacturing is done wherever it satisfies two criteria:
Meets quality standards at lowest unit price. Duh. It's not a political or ideological decision.
Those criteria can't be met inside the US and nobody is going to alter all the contributing factors by political means. It would take a generation of strategic policy, education and cultural change to even come close. America is niw incapable of pursuing any strategic policy that requires more that about two years.
Angry white men, with minimal post-high school education, nostalgic for the factory life/income/benefits their grandfathers secured for themselves and enjoyed, were convinced that their shitty lot in life is due to immigrant/outsoured labor. They were watching The Apprentice, instead of taking night classes toward an engineering degree. They think Big Daddy will save them. They feel entitled to more than they can possibly be worth, so the US economy has rightly left them behind. Sorry. Law of the Jungle.
You have a point. A large segment of the population lost out in the shift to global production and technology. Wealth shifted to some tech types, gamblers on the stock market, multinational companies, etc... Meanwhile those companies have happily sold their products to those angry white people you so look down upon. Guess what, power has now shifted partly back to them and companies had better adapt. It's a different era and wealth is going to move back the other way. This whole notion of convenient economic globalism has generated a lot of winners and losers. The losers now want a share and there isn't much you can do about it. It is the Law of the Jungle and I guess we will have to wait and see who the gazelles are.
oh, and just for reference, the president-elect is now losing by over 1,000,000 votes.
Like all in the political game, he said what he thought he had to in order to win power. i.e., he lied.
The "popular vote" ain't how Presidents are elected. The US ain't a democracy. Never was.
Of course it is a democracy. Federal systems typically do not run on "a majority of the population decides everything" rule. There is always some understanding that different units in the federalism will be protected from complete domination by largely populated areas. Democracy does not mean tyranny of the population by the masses. Mind you, I guess you could further break down different types of federalist systems ( republics and so on ...). The Prime Minister of the U.K. is not elected by a majority of the citizens but I suppose you might want to distinguish between parliamentary systems ( Australia, UK, etc...) and republics. In any case democracy is not a well defined term and keeps getting used in novel ways whenever someone doesn't like the results.
Comments
lets just see from 2000 until now...
anything?
i want to see the trend of *your* numbers
let's see you back your opinion up with data.
If you believe that nearly 100 Million (42%) Americans are unemployed—or whatever conspiracy theory that's popular today—then you need to provide evidence to support that claim, not the other way around.
even if your absolute number of unemployed is higher, the idea is in the trend over time. so let's see how your data is trending over the last decade or two.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/27/foxconn-building-500k-iphone-5s-units-for-apple-per-day-with-nonstop-production-lines
That says 300,000 for the 5S in 2013 and the unit volume has increased 50% since then. Say they need 400k employees at minimum $15k per year and add $5k for benefits, that's $8b for just over 200 million iPhones = $40 per iPhone and is around 4x Foxconn wages so $30 premium per unit. They need to build factories and supply chain but I don't think the employee cost would add much to the retail price. Apple would be able to absorb that (~5%) into their margins.
That's assuming a 40 hour working week, there would have to be paid overtime and things but it should be achievable without too much added cost and they don't have to manufacturer all iPhones locally. They can just do US-shipped iPhones (so ~1/3 of supply = 150k employees) in the US and use China for international.
You have a point. A large segment of the population lost out in the shift to global production and technology. Wealth shifted to some tech types, gamblers on the stock market, multinational companies, etc... Meanwhile those companies have happily sold their products to those angry white people you so look down upon. Guess what, power has now shifted partly back to them and companies had better adapt. It's a different era and wealth is going to move back the other way. This whole notion of convenient economic globalism has generated a lot of winners and losers. The losers now want a share and there isn't much you can do about it. It is the Law of the Jungle and I guess we will have to wait and see who the gazelles are.