Apple Pledges $1 Billion Toward Creating Manufacturing Jobs In US (cnbc.com) 285
Apple announced today plans to create a $1 billion fund to promote creation of advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Cook told CNBC in an interview that Apple will announce the first investment later in May. CNBC reports: "By doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond. Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them," the CEO said. Apple has already created two million jobs in the United States, and Cook showed no signs of shrinking the tech giant's reach. "A lot of people ask me, 'Do you think it's a company's job to create jobs?' and my response is [that] a company should have values because a company is a collection of people. And people should have values, so by extension, a company should. And one of the things you do is give back," Cook said. "So how do you give back? We give back through our work in the environment, in running the company on renewable energy. We give back in job creation."
Funny they mention the environment (Score:3)
Not to mention the wasteful packaging...
Re:Funny they mention the environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Apple products are the most difficult to recycle. By design.
Who cares? The volume of Apple products in landfills is totally negligible. More disposable baby diapers go to landfills everyday than all the iPhones ever made.
You need to get some perspective. America consumes 20 million barrels of oil everyday. Don't you think we should focus on that, instead of worrying about what happens to a few iPhones? You remind me of my idiot neighbor who drives ten miles to the recycling center in her gas-guzzling SUV to drop of a dozen grocery bags that collectively weigh less than a gram, and thinks she is an "environmentalist".
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Does Apple make baby diapers? Is it Apple's fault that the USA consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day?
We're simply pointing out that while Apple keeps talking about the environment, they're making non-upgradable, hard-to-repair devices thus putting profits before the environment - and that makes them hypocrites.
Re:Funny they mention the environment (Score:5, Insightful)
We're simply pointing out ...
... and I am pointing out that you should be pointing at something that matters. Apple products consume a negligible amount of resources. Their employees' daily commute has more impact on the environment than their products.
... and that makes them hypocrites.
Can you blame them? Many environmentalist, like you, focus on "environmental theater", so they put on a act. If you really gave a crap about the environment, you would be complaining about Exxon's refineries, Ford's SUVs, or Cargill's feedlots, and not focusing on silly trivialities like iPhones. They don't matter.
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... and that makes them hypocrites.
Can you blame them?
Yes, because Apple makes $400 on every iPhone they sell. Instead of adding every single one of those $400 to the pile of 200 billions idle dollars they have hidden in foreign countries, they could do things properly.
They have no problem building a $5 billion head office that they will tout as "green" but they can't be bothered with the environmental impact of their products. They are repugnant in a way that even greedy banksters will never approach.
Re:Funny they mention the environment (Score:5, Informative)
You are demanding the worst form of environmental theater. Let's say it would cost Apple $5 to make their phone more recyclable. For $5 they could buy carbon credits to eliminate 800 kg of CO2. Yet you are whining about them not spending the same amount to recycle the 2 ounces of plastic in an iPhone.
If Apple spent money on environmentalism, spending that money money on "recycling iPhones" would be about the least effective possible way to do it.
So why don't they spend it on things that make more sense? They do [computerworld.com].
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You are demanding the worst form of environmental theater. Let's say it would cost Apple $5 to make their phone more recyclable. For $5 they could buy carbon credits to eliminate 800 kg of CO2. Yet you are whining about them not spending the same amount to recycle the 2 ounces of plastic in an iPhone.
You are being a child. They can reasonably be held accountable for both, and if they can't operate under such a scheme then they should fuck off and let someone who can take their place.
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It's not the plastic, it's the stuff they have to mine to get at. The rare earths, nickle, cobalt, lithium. The batteries in particular are highly recyclable, and the cost to do so is below the cost of building new. Even at phone scale... So long as opening the damn thing isn't too difficult.
The other issue is that landfill is itself a problem. Again, burying large numbers of LiPo batteries that have not been fully discharged is turning out to be not such a great idea in the long run.
This isn't theatre, it'
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Agree 100%.
Another question: How many people throw their old iPhone in the trash when they get a new one?
I've had 4 or 5 iPhones over the years, my wife about the same. Every single time we upgraded, we either sold the old phone back to Apple or gave the old one to a family member. (Same thing with previous non-Apple phones, by the way.)
Why should I care how recyclable an old iPhone is? I haven't recycled a phone ever.
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This same excuse is used by everyone for not acting. There is always someone worse.
iPhones, like all phones, do use some materials that are well worth recycling. Do you know where most of the lithium and rare earth metals come from?
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Recycling the materials in a phone doesn't require Apple to do anything. Just turn the used phone in at the store, or a recycling station for used electronics.
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Last time I check pampers doesn't contain significant amounts of rare-earth metals.
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Last time I check pampers doesn't contain significant amounts of rare-earth metals.
An iPhone contains very small amounts of tantalum, neodymium, and europium, but not enough to make recovery cost effective. None of these are a health hazard in landfills, and certainly not in the milligram amounts in a cell-phone.
If you made a list of a million things we could do to help the environment, and ordered them by importance, this wouldn't be on the list.
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Who cares? The volume of Apple products in landfills is totally negligible. More disposable baby diapers go to landfills everyday than all the iPhones ever made.
You need to get some perspective.
Anyone with some basic common sense should care, because baby diapers are indeed a much lesser issue, than iPhones. First of all, diapers are made from cotton and a very tiny amount of sodium polyacrylate (which then absorbs the baby pee and expands to about three orders of magnitude of its original volume). Neither cotton, nor the tiny amount of sodium polyacrylate, are a serious concern to the environment, unlike the inert polymers and metallic alloys in a smartphone, not to mention the horrible shit that
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Why do you put baby diapers in landfills instead of burning them for energy?
Re:Funny they mention the environment (Score:5, Informative)
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Not to mention non-upgradable...
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And excuse me, have you actually ever seen the packaging for
So, caring for robots (Score:2)
That's a lot of robots, but nothing compared to what they're doing in China.
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I guess it's possible Apple is going to 'in-source' the final steps of the product build. It might help them out in lots of interesting ways (not least, it obfuscates the import bans on their products). Doubtless this is a PR-play to appear to be reacting to Trumps calls for such things. I suspect Apple will only do half what it says it will, and will cite 'changing economic circumstances' or some such as the reason.
It's also possible Apple will build it's own chip fabs. I doubt it though, because for a fab
Trump fear (Score:5, Insightful)
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They said why: as a gesture to Americans, to share some of their success with people who want manufacturing jobs in the US.
It's a continuation of what they already did (Score:2)
1 billion USD is a large sum. Is it because they fear president Trump's wrath?
It's because Apple has been trying out doing more manufacturing in the U.S. - as with the Mac Pro - and they would like to see more of this being possible.
If you want to think of Apple's reasons as being purely selfish (and many Slashdot Apple Haters can only think that way), then imagine they simply want a manufacturing environment were they have much better control over leaks.
Or a last way to look at it is, Johnny Ive has decide
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1 billion USD is a large sum. Is it because they fear president Trump's wrath? Or is it part of a deal that involves bringing back tax-free some cash from offshore?
c) It could have nothing to do with Trump.
Now here's the real question, regardless of the reason do you give Trump credit?
Giving Trump some jobs to crow about should protect you from regulatory action, and maybe even result in a favourable ruling thrown your way.
But Apple has a very progressive target demographic, one that is unlikely to look kindly on giving Trump political favours.
Such is life under crony capitalism.
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They have spoken to Trump... Presumably he offered them something, tax breaks or other favorable terms.
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Re:Trump fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Donny has proven more of a barker than a biter. But the Bully Pulpit of the Prez can embarrass companies into at least token action, kind of like the F35 price "cuts".
It reminds me of an old Soviet proverb: "We pretend to work and the gov't pretends to pay us."
So Trump fakes pressure and co's fake reaction, and it all makes for glorious Fake News.
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Shut the fuck up about taxes already.
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Democrats also love to raise taxes, which is what causes corporations to hoard cash. So, whatever.
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So the solution to corporations hoarding cash is to give them more cash by lowering taxes?
Yes. Right now, Apple has a hoard of cash in other countries. Lower taxes, and they would move their cash back the US, and spend the money there.
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And why would that be better than when they spend the money in the countries where they earned it?
It would be better for the US, which would be the place were taxes were lowered. And of course, other countries don't have Silicon Valley.
I smell BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I smell BS (Score:5, Informative)
2 million jobs? So apple is claiming to be responsible for almost 1.5% of US employment? sounds like bullshit marketing speak to me
According to Wikipedia, Apple has 115,000 employees. I have no idea how Tim came up with "2 million".
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Perhaps they mean indirectly, if you count up people working in their supply chain.
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Perhaps they mean indirectly, if you count up people working in their supply chain.
I don't think so. Tim said two million jobs "in America". Nearly their entire supply chain is in Asia. The screens are made in Korea, the CPUs in Taiwan, etc.
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About half the semiconductor industry works with them on some part for some product. They have a large number of products. Add glass, metal, chemicals, transportation, real estate, banking, etc. I could see an argument for getting to a phony number like 2 million.
But it's probably a spreadsheet function that says $x expenditure leads to the employment of roughly n people, where n turns out to be 2.6 million or something, and then you safely say 2 million.
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I think they include "app developers" in their numbers.
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Re:I smell BS (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure how this'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of what has made Apple successful in Asian manufacturing has been low wages coupled with conditions that favor the employer. Workers do not have overtime, do not have a lot of other protections. Some workers seem to essentially be prisoner to the company town, living on company grounds in company dormitories, shopping in company stores, eating in company cafeterias. That sort of thing is generally unacceptable in the United States.
American wages, even wages for manufacturing, are probably too high if the products are still priced roughly where they are now combined with the amount of manual labor used to individually assemble devices like phones and tablets. This means the alternative to all of this is automating as much manufacturing as possible. It may mean paying a manufacturing engineer a couple hundred thousand a year to work with designers to adapt designs to machine-manufacturable products, such that humans barely if at all touch the actual products being built- humans will be more likely to work on the factory itself, reconfiguring for new products or maintaining the machinery so that it keeps on producing units.
The effects of manufacturing will not be as strongly felt as they used to be. Sure some workers will still be employed at the factory, and arguably those employees might even be higher paid due to the technical work of maintaining the machinery, but the total number of workers won't be enough to support whole communities like it used to, and due to the technical nature of what work there is, the jobs are more likely to go to existing urban areas rather than rejuvenating rural towns. If the manufacturing was labor-intensive and unskilled then of course it would make sense to consider towns where wages could be lower, but that won't be as much a factor in this era.
Nevertheless I would like to see manufacturing come back; some jobs are better than no jobs, and higher paying jobs are good when the wages are fair for the kind of abilities the work requires.
We'll just have to see what happens.
Re:Not sure how this'll work (Score:5, Informative)
Workers do not have overtime, do not have a lot of other protections.
Workers in China have a right to overtime pay. It isn't always enforced, but it is certainly enforced in the export factories in Shenzhen. Chinese workers in non-SOE companies also have a right to strike. Chinese workplace health and safety regulations are not as strict as OSHA, but they are reasonable, and they are enforced in Shenzhen.
Some workers seem to essentially be prisoner to the company town
Bullcrap. Some factories have dormitories, but living in them is optional, and most workers do not live there. This isn't the 1990s.
shopping in company stores
More bullcrap. I have never seen a "company store" in Shenzhen. It is a bustling metropolis with plenty of options for shopping, and there are no restrictions on how or where people can spend their money.
Have you ever been to China?
Re:Not sure how this'll work (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with ShanghaiBill's observations. Not to say that it is a worker's paradise over there but far from as bad as naive and outdated opinions allude to.
I would like to add that the professional expertise of my customers over there is excellent.
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I agree with ShanghaiBill's observations.
But you seem like a shill. I visited your posting history and you said nice things about lords of the back door, Xiaomi, you plug HMT, and you repeatedly fellate Apple.
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I've been to Shenzhen numerous times, most recently about 3 months ago. He's largely correct.
I'd rather live in Guangzhou, though--it's much cleaner, the people are much nicer, and there's lots of local culture.
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Outside the Louvre in Paris, there's a sign in Mandarin which tells visitors not to defecate in the surrounding grounds.
Bullcrap. This is an internet-myth. There is no such sign. Feel free to prove my wrong providing a citation to something other than a rumor in a blog ... none of which have a photo of the sign.
I lived in China for many years. I never, not once, saw anyone defecate in public.
Also, there is no such thing as a "sign in Mandarin". Mandarin is a spoken language, not a written language.
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Wages across the world are equalizing to a point where it no longer makes sense to do manufacturing abroad and shipping things all over. The wages in the US on the other hand aren't raising nearly as quickly as they do in China or India. I think this is just a bet on manufacturing jobs becoming cheaper in the Americas again, the people that invest now and if/when the economy supports it, they'll make a huge profit.
Another line of thought, just like they started designing their own chips, they may want to sh
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I think you're going by old news stories about Foxconn. China still has much progress to make (remember Tiannamen Square) but it's going overboard to describe today's China as a labor colony. Like India, there is a middle class larger than ours who live quite well. Indeed, in some ways they make the US look backward.
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Like India, there is a middle class larger than ours who live quite well.
And like India, there is a massive peasant class shitting in the water and burning plastic trash. And it's larger than our entire population. The relative size of the middle class is far from the most relevant statistic. They have three to four times our population, they should have three to four times as many middle-class citizens, right?
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Apple's profit margins are huge. They can afford to pay better wages, and doubtless extracted a tax break when they met Trump too. I'm sure they have done the sums on minimum wage factory jobs.
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Hire token workers in the USA to accept the product lines in a shipping box from Asia.
Workers in the USA unbox the bulk imported products. Assemble high tech part A with part B.
Place into a really pretty box with Made in the USA on it for each consumer.
Profit and PR win.
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Some workers seem to essentially be prisoner to the company town, living on company grounds in company dormitories, shopping in company stores, eating in company cafeterias. That sort of thing is generally unacceptable in the United States.
You are confusing Foxconn with Samsung's plants in Malaysia. At Samsung's plants, people have taken their passports away, own recruitment agencies tons of money and can't leave until that money is paid back. At Foxconn, in large part due to pressure from Apple, the company has to pay back any money that an employee paid to recruiters. They can leave any time they want to leave.
Company dormitories and company food keep the cost of living down - which is exactly what young people want who come from a tiny
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Maybe we could just send those excess kids to China? Rent therm out.
Just pay their taxes (Score:3)
If Apple would just pay their taxes and stop hiding money in foreign countries, this would be a moot point. They are of course not alone or entirely at fault for taking advantage of loopholes bought and paid for by corporations, but the point remains.
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"Hiding" , you mean by telling the public exactly what they do is "hiding". You expect a corporation to pay more than they are legally required to do is absolutely nuts.
Tim Cook wants to give back? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about giving back an actual pro laptop with something truly innovative, instead of that silly touch bar? How about giving back the MagSafe power adapter? How about giving back a laptop with a variety of useful ports?
How about giving back an honest-to-goodness pro desktop?
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Yes, the MagSafe adapter is a loss. It saved my Macbook Air once. Also agree about the ports. Apple is usually ahead of the curve in removing old ports and adopting new ones, but here they went too quickly. No
One billion dallars to ... (Score:2)
... promote.
Part of the campaign strategy is to have people change their Facebook Profile picture to a silver ribbon with the Apple logo on it for promoting "Advanced Manufacturing Jobs in the U.S. Awareness Month."
I wonder how they'll weasel out of this. (Score:2)
If it's just going to more Silicon Valley types, that means next to nothing.
If it's going to the Rest of Us, then that would be news.
How very magnanimous of them... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If one is not legally bound to pay, then not paying cannot be called theft. Unless you're a greedy, shit-wad who deserves to be tortured.
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Apple is legally bound to pay. See Italy, and every single other country apart where Apple has sales.
Yep, and Apple does pay taxes in those countries. Then the US wants to tax what's left -- which is a rather weird thing to do, actually. The United States and Eritrea are the only countries in the world that do this.
This excludes only the USA due to cheap corruption.
Umm, it's simply not an issue for companies in any other first-world country, because other countries don't try to tax foreign profits. They leave that to the countries where those profits are earned.
Company tax doesn't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)
...to offer to bring back a tiny, tiny fraction of the vast sum they've avoided paying a cent in taxes on so they can get some good PR and hope we ignore the rest of the money they've stolen from the US public. (And make no mistake, tax evasion is just another form of theft, with the victim being society.)
I'm no fan of our current global tax system and the wealth distortions it has created. But going around trying to label companies/people legally minimising their tax 'thieves' is not much different from the RIAA moral police style anti-piracy campaigns. It's childish, and discredits serious arguments.
Firstly, almost every western country's tax system is based on self declaration. We don't have tax inspectors hovering over every transaction you make, with the big eye in the sky then sending you a bill at the end of the year. You go about your business, and at the end of the year, you report to the government what tax you think you owe. In the vast majority of cases, the government does not challenge your assessment. It is an honesty based system (albeit with stiff penalties if you abuse it) and it tends to work pretty well. By claiming that all these billions or dollars are being stolen, you are insinuating that the integrity of the system has broken down. This is dangerous, because the next step then is to crack down on these phantom tax cheats, by doing things like banning cash, and having your bank account data fed directly to the IRS. Obviously this would have no impact on what Apple and Google etc are doing, because the IRS already knows what they are doing. All you have done is given the government a populous excuse to invade our lives further.
Secondly, company tax is nowhere near as big a moral issue as you think it is. Fiduciary duty means that a company is limited in its ability to live it up on income like an individual can (and perks like staff parties, corporate jets, are generally deductible anyway, so company tax is irrelevant). Net profits must ultimately be either distributed to shareholders or re-invested in productive activities. Saving them just delays this, but unless you save them forever, the company must ultimately 'consume' the profits by distribution to shareholders or investment.
If it re-invests the profits, then almost always it can claim the tax back over time through depreciation. In other words, it might earn $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, spend the resulting $8000 to buy a machine, but over the next five years claim back $2000/5 in tax credits due to the depreciation of the capital asset. Ultimately the taxman gets no tax on the profits, but the company has to lend the taxman the tax for five years. For small and medium sized businesses trying to grow off cashflow, this is really stupid. If the machine they wanted cost $10000, then they would have to borrow $2000 to lend onward to the taxman for five years. Indeed, many small businesses have to do just this, which is why most countries have generous capital allowances to prevent such pointless cashflow disruption.
Alternately, if it distributes the profits to shareholders, the shareholders pay tax on the dividends against their individual income. You might notice a potential issue with this - distributed profits get taxed twice. A company could make the $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, and then pays $8000 to a shareholder. The shareholder might then pay $2500 of tax on that, resulting in a net dividend of $5500 arriving in the shareholder's account. Of the $10000 the company made from a profit on selling widgets, barely half gets to the owners. People in partnerships (as opposed to limited companies) don't have this problem, which puts companies at a big disadvantage (even if you think such a punitive effective tax rate is okay). This is why almost every country has various tax credit systems or lower dividend tax rates to prevent this issue.
Now where I agree with you there is a problem is in the loopholes that develop when you start tryin
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If there were a sensible separation between those megacorps and policymakers, I'd agree with you. But since it's possible for the very rich to buy/extort their laws, no.
Then why hasn't Apple changed the law to allow them to bring their big pile of cash back to the US, rather than having to keep it parked uselessly offshore?
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No, they paid taxes on the money - in the countries where the earnings were booked. The US gov't is not owed taxes on earnings in England on devices manufactured in Asia (for example), England and Asia are.
How about Apple's own manufacturing! (Score:2)
Apple does most of its own manufacturing in Asia. If they really want to create manufacturing jobs in the US, how about just bringing some of their own manufacturing back to the US!
Uh huh (Score:2)
Citizens United (Score:3)
Wasn't that same argument the basis of the infamous "Citizens United" decision, that corporations are collections of people, and that corporations have the same rights as individuals in many respects?
Interesting.
Still trying to get that tax break (Score:2)
Re:See Qualcomm story (Score:5, Insightful)
Those $Bs of jobs will go poof as soon as the Qualcomm battle is over.
The Qualcomm battle will drag on for years and years. Most assembly is done with robots, and it doesn't matter much where those robots are parked. The days of cheap labor in China are ending. The Chinese leadership knows this, and they are trying to shift their economy more toward services and domestic consumption, and away from exporting labor intensive goods.
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Re:See Qualcomm story (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many dozens of American manufacturing workers are required to operate a $1 billion automated factory.
Not as many as people think they might. When John Deere opened a new factory, they had 10,000 applications for 800 positions.
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10,000 applications for 800 positions
Sounds better than a "cute girl on Tinder" ratio
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't mind if manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of automated factories.
Those factories still need bodies to keep them going. Someone has to build the factory, network it, install the machines, and keep them going.
Also, someone is delivering raw materials to the factory, and someone is shipping finished goods away from the factory.
Those factories are also tax ratables that help offset the cost of police, fire, and public education.
If automation is an unavoidable trend, I'd rather it be here than there.
PRECISELY!
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I wonder how many dozens of American manufacturing workers are required to operate a $1 billion automated factory.
More than if that factory was in another country.
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everyone can wonder why American corporations keep getting their asses handed to them by more pragmatic approaches made by foreign companies
Like Volkswagen? BP? Toshiba? FIFA? Olympus? Tesco? MG Rover? Parmalat? Barclays?
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"Most assembly is done with robots, and it doesn't matter much where those robots are parked."
Yes, it will be done with robots, but it does matter where they are. We want the development and service jobs that the robots will require.
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Why? You're really that interested in getting more H1Bs into your area?
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It's impossible to compete with someone that will work 80+ hours a week for peanuts
Sure it's possible. Just work 90+ hours for peanuts.
Re:See Qualcomm story (Score:5, Insightful)
But to me the fundamental problem is that while the means has that nice side effect - using foreign labor that gives non-US citizens better economic options - the end goal by the companies using H1B is to decrease industry-wide labor costs. Instead of a $60,000 annual cost job opening being filled by a $60,000 annual cost American or alternately by hiring a $45,000 annual cost American and training him or her until they can do the $60,000 job and collect the $60,000 pay, the companies can use a $45,000 imported worker.
Or to put it in more snarky terms: supply and demand is wonderful when it works in favor of the executives and majority shareholders. When supply and demand works in favor of the workers, it's a terrible problem and lawmakers need to be bribed until they create a fix.
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The problem comes when you have $3.20/hr labor versus $21/hr labor--although the worldwide data suggests a manufacturing job in the United States actually carries a cost of $78/hr.
I use pants as a model. Given the number of pants imported, their price at import, their price at retail (average $14.56), and the price of shipping (40-foot shipping container from China imports for under $1,300 with 20,000 pairs of pants, or 6.5 cents per pair), I came up with some numbers.
Those numbers start with $6.12 for
Welcome your Chinese robot overlords! (Score:2)
And who makes those robots?
Chinese-owned companies!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So how long have you been working for the airlines?
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Go for high molar sulpheric acid or something similar that will leave a lasting impression.
Re:Yes 20 human workers and $5 billion of robots (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tax breaks on horizon? (Score:5, Insightful)
They did pay the taxes they were obligated to pay (sales taxes, wage taxes etc). Why would you want to pay an extra 35% if you don't have to? You don't take the standard $9-12k deduction on your Federal taxes?
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They did pay the taxes they were obligated to pay (sales taxes, wage taxes etc).
They are a member of a class that actively works against paying their fair share. They actively work to reduce that obligation. They don't get a gold star for meeting it.
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Giving a tax break to bring money to the US is not actually at the expense of the taxpayers. This is because the alternative is not seeing the money at all, and it isn't seeing the money and taxing it all. If Apple brings the money to the US, it's going to spend it in the US. Even if Apple doesn't pay anything to the government directly, the money will end up there as Apple spends it.
There are only upsides to the US economy for a tax amnesty.
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That's a lot of words with zero anything to show for this having anything to do with Trump.
Re: Credit for this great news (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no indication this has anything to do with Trump.
As mentioned in the comments above yours, it's likely automation in some areas is at a point that it negates the benefit of cheaper labor costs in China and they get to avoid the complications of setting up there and pretend they're heroes (as Trump and his supporters do whenever a single new job is announced in the US, unlike when they complained constantly when the same was happening to a far greater extent during Obama's administration).
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Big. fucking. deal.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Apple is doing this. But as a proportion of Apple's resources, this is so small that it's like Walmart announcing that they're opening another store. It's not notable or praiseworthy, and further I'm 99.44% sure the decision has nothing to do with which pinhead is in the White House.
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How about rewriting the headline? "Company with 250 billion in cash assets decides to invest 0.4% in an automated manufacturing facility."
Big. fucking. deal.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Apple is doing this. But as a proportion of Apple's resources, this is so small that it's like Walmart announcing that they're opening another store. It's not notable or praiseworthy, and further I'm 99.44% sure the decision has nothing to do with which pinhead is in the White House.
Just look at it as an experiment. A toe in the water. In that regard, it's enough to make a reasonable go at it. If it doesn't pan-out, then the money lost is low enough that the shareholders won't want to lynch upper management. If it does work, then they can always "up" the investment.
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blah sorry too early to click correctly...
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you know that whole putin thing is really getting old. arent you guys tired of grasping at straws now?
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't they give some of their iPhones to poor black children?
They already have iPhones. In many poor communities the smartphone is the only way to access internet, and it comes bundled with the carrier contract.
According to a study by the Pew research institute, when it comes to internet access, "12 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Latinos are smartphone-reliant, compared with 4 percent of whites."