One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way. I don't think they're right. I do think they will continue weakening the dollar.
> One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way.
Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.
> Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.
Under conditions of free trade with low-wage countries.
Free trade with low-wage countries is a policy choice, but a lot of people confuse it for a natural law.
That is the point of cheapening the dollar, BTW. The local wages can stay 'high' dollar denominated, but the euro-denominated value of those wages drops. It was for some time the strategy of the Chinese central bank; you can keep export good costs low by controlling your currency to weaker. The trick is to do that while everyone is paying you for your stuff.
Cheap labor wouldn't necessarily bring manufacturing back to the USA. Over time much of the labor can potentially be automated. But environmental and zoning rules effectively ban entire industries such as metal casting. If we want those industries back then we'll need a major realignment of public policy that goes beyond just labor.
Of course, but even if Americans were willing to do that kind of work for those wages it wouldn't have much impact. The kind of manufacturing that makes serious money doesn't and usually can't use cheap labour, not in the long run at least. And in those parts of the economy where cheap labour is effective, agriculture for instance, the availability of cheap immigrant labour is simply holding back innovation.
But the US is a major manufacturing nation anyway. US manufacturing output is more than half of that of China while having only a quarter of the population.
When groups like the far right say bring back manufacturing they are just posturing to those voters who have been disadvantaged by changes in the commercial landscape that reduces the number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. If they really cared about those people they would support massive improvements to education and training so that at least the next generation had a chance rather than idiotic schemes to 'bring back' the kinds of work that no one needs.
You have a baseline of prosperity and life in your head.
The Heritage guys have a weird perspective where they idolize the early Federalist US and the Reagan Era. Prosperity for the common man wasn’t a highlight of either era, to put it mildly.
In 1790s New York, for example, “local control” meant that many of the people of upstate New York were a sort of serf-like tenant living on the estates of the great men, Dutch patroons who played ball with the colonial and State political infrastructure. They had the freedom to pay rent until their landlord was willing to let them go. That existed into the 1840s, when the country started getting woke.
So we can address housing issues with creative solutions. Why do poor people need their own apartments? Stuff them into a tenement. You can easily fit 15 people in a two bedroom apartment so they can build drones or whatever.
I mean ”optimal” is not well defined. It is not great for the economy or societal stability and if wealth is more and more unevenly distributed. But the wealthy benefit in the short term by gaining power in society.
Most billionaires will lose both money and power on the timeframe of a couple of years due to the destruction of the value of the dollar. Even internally to the US.
Some may gain both. Someone will probably gain both, and the odds are good some billionaires are included.
the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap
so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way.
And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest.
That is just plain evil.
And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery.
Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work?
Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either:
1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty
2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term.
3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while.
Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.
I believe the idea is to support the “real” economy vs a “paper” economy. The “real” economy manufactures stuff in meat space instead of making value through abstractions like financial derivatives. The real economies are tied to a stronger middle class and national security. That’s the thesis as I understand it.
The fundamental problem is the asymmetry of value creation. Software is perhaps the pinnacle of this, and why tech companies are so unfathomably wealthy.
A team of 10 SWEs can create a product worth $1B with the cost of 10 laptops. You get ten people worth $100M each.
To create $1B in value with any kind of manufacturing business, is going to take hundreds of people utilizing millions in various costs. You end up with something like 10,000 people worth $100k each once you wind your way through all those supply lines.
You said it better. I think the idea is that certain "paper" economies are disproportionately valued in the economy when the dollar is strong. A strong dollar leads to offshoring manufacturing, which leads to an over weighted "paper" economy, which leads to an eroding middle class.
I agree, depending on what services you’re speaking of. Although I don’t know that it meets the explicit aims of the heritage foundation (which was the OPs question).
I didn't realize that such causes like 90+% income taxes, lower income inequality, single earner households, and high unionization rates are "conservative" too.
Of course because that’s how marginal tax rates work.
As to how much actual money was taxed at 91%, we don’t really have records for that but certainly the top 0.01% paid significantly more in taxes as a rate than they do today.
"That reality" was one in which the wealthy had countless deductions, loopholes, and shelters that were unavailable or inapplicable to everyone else, which (almost) everybody agreed was an undesirable state of affairs.
Actually, a past that never existed. It's pretty typically for authoritarian regimes to create idealized versions of the past as they attempt to rewrite history to better fit with their talking points and agendas.
The United States is current getting the base material for its entire economy from a country that is openly at war with it: China. If the US attacked East Tiawan because East Tiawan attacked Taiwan, East Tiawan would simply stop exporting rare earths, silver, steel, and electronics to the US. As a result the US needs to manufacture at home. So too does the EU.
The endemic anti-intellectualism among white communities (especially rural and southern) has resulted in a steady decline of white people in well-paying professions in America. If you count the Jewish as a separate group, white people are likely a minority in corporate America. Combined with social upliftment of other groups ("wokism") and the opioid crisis (that has disproportionately affected hinterland communities but immigrant groups seem immune to), white people are sliding down the American totem pole. Trumpism, alt-right, anti-woke, and the general resurgence of racist rhetoric are basically just reactions to all this.
These people want manufacturing because manufacturing is largely considered a "white people sport". If America becomes a manufacturing-first society, the hope is that it puts white people at the front and center of American society again.
The data you linked shows that Native Americans, Blacks and Whites have the highest per capita rates of overdose (in that order), which validates my claim.
White American overdose deaths per capita are 6x that of Asian-Americans.
Even if not quite true, it doesn't change my argument since it was more about the rate of change.
You can construct the definition of white collar in a way that makes it seem like it's mostly white people, but among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites.
> Even if not quite true, it doesn't change my argument
This is one of the main points of bigotry. The facts don't matter. So when a person says something obviously ridiculous like
> among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites
the proper way to interpret is "I feel like there are too many unworthy people working there," where "too many" is entirely subjective and could be as few as one.
Right, when people are talking about white people being disproportionately represented (or under-represented) in high paying corporate jobs, they're definitely looking into the cultural background of those people and determining which ones fit "non-Jewish white" rather than looking at the black guy and putting him in the "not white" category based on appearance....
In my experience, you wouldn't know most Jews are Jews unless you start quizzing them about their religious practices.
At my FAANG in Sunnyvale, I often feel like the last white guy on earth.
But I don't resent the people who stepped up to fill the jobs.
Rather, I am disappointed that these amazing jobs were basically gifted to US residents, but my fellow white people "Opted Out" of these high paying jobs.
I'd love to see the (abridged) log when you reach iteration 10000 or so!
The first sentence in each of Analog I's responses very much is sycophantic. I agree with the sentiment of another poster - don't fall into the sauce, just taste it.
Netflix has started showing simplified subtitles recently. We watch with subtitles on and these inaccurate subtitles are infuriating. It's part of their "second screen" strategy I think - people are on their phones while they're watching, so don't make them try too hard to read the subs.
I have (self-diagnosed) aphantasia and SDAM. I do not relate to your belief that SDAM is related to the emotions felt. I don't believe I have ADHD nor autism. We don't currently have a scientific understanding of the mechanisms that cause these differences in experience, so everyone forms their own ideas of what's going on based on their own grab-bag of internal experiences and qualia.
That's fair criticism, I'm obviously coming at this from my personal perspective and that is shaped by how my brain experiences the world. I should've been more precise, I didn't intend to suggest that alexithymia is the only pathway to SDAM, there are likely multiple aspects or pathways that can contribute to or cause it.
However, I would challenge the premise that SDAM is entirely unrelated to emotional processing. It's important to distinguish between the conscious feeling of an emotion and its subconscious role in the mechanics of memory formation. There's significant evidence that emotional salience is a crucial part of how the brain tags and consolidates strong autobiographical memories. A disruption to this process doesn't have to be a consciously felt emotional deficit; it can be a mechanical one operating below the level of awareness.
We can look at this as two distinct points of failure in the memory pipeline:
Failure at the input stage: If the emotional signal required to "tag" an event as important for rich autobiographical encoding is never met, the memory is formed, but only as a semantic fact ("a thing that happened"), not a re-experiencable episode. The processing can't happen because the right input was never provided.
Failure at the retrieval and re-experiencing stage: For someone with aphantasia but no issues with alexithymia (like you, I'd assume), the initial emotional tagging might function perfectly well. The disruption happens later. The core deficit of SDAM is the inability to "mentally time travel" and re-experience the past. Aphantasia, by definition, removes a primary tool for this: visual imagination. The brain processes and integrates emotions by revisiting them. If you cannot truly "re-live" a moment because the visual data is inaccessible, then the episodic, first-person quality is lost.
This second point matters beyond just losing access to nostalgia. We process and regulate emotions by mentally revisiting experiences, integrating them into our broader life narrative. If you have greater difficulty "re-living" moments of joy, achievement, or connection because you lack the tool of visual imagination, your ability to extract meaning from them and build emotional understanding is compromised.
Both mechanisms effectively lead to the same subjective experience: a past that feels like "someone else's life" that you know facts about but can't emotionally (re)connect with. The specific pathway might vary between individuals, but I now strongly believe that the underlying issue remains the disrupted relationship between emotional processing and autobiographical memory formation.
Does this potential explanation align more with your personal experience?
I might have to spend some time over the long weekend to explore this a bit more, and to properly back it up with studies.
Thanks for the follow-up. I find this stuff quite interesting.
I feel my emotions strongly as I live through them(as much as one can say, we can't feel others' feelings), but feel them not at all when I relive them (because I cannot relive them). My emotions are a guide for me, but after the initial feeling of them, they guide me semantically (why was I feeling anger during a particular conversation? maybe I need to reconsider my position).
Incidentally, I generally think of this as being able to "let go" of emotions/grudges/etc that I might otherwise spend unnecessary time worrying over. It does set me up for being an "especially boilable frog" in that I can quickly acclimate to conditions that others might have trouble with.
I would modify the fitness function to do something like subtract from the score the area of the largest circle which could be drawn over a bread-only section. This would deal with your having a very unsatisfying empty bottom right corner in your last example.
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