Amazon has been developing a no-check-out system for retailers…the idea is that the customer just picks up up what he wants, walks out, and automatically gets charged the proper amount. The systems were initially installed at some Amazon Go stores, and there is now one installed at a Whole Foods in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, DC.
I needed to pick up some groceries, and had been curious about how well the system actually works, so stopped into this store last week.
You scan your phone (with the appropriate app installed) when you walk into the store. There are cameras everywhere; they watch what you get and, anything you put back on the shelf. When you’ve picked up everything you want, scan your phone again when walking out (there are numerous parallel stations for doing this) and just walk out. Within an hour or so, you will get a receipt that shows what your bought and what you were charged for it.
I didn’t have a lot of time (the Uighur restaurant across the street was very slow), so didn’t get a much. But I did pick up 3 black plums, 2 bananas, and a steak…being curious about whether the system could really deal with picking an item and then putting it back, I did just this with a can of black beans…took it off with the shelf, took it around in the shopping basket, then came back to the shelf where I found it and returned it there.
The receipt did show up about an hour later, and was correct, including the absence of the black beans from the list.
Interesting question as to why it takes so long to get the receipt. I’m sure there’s a lot of image processing involved, but an hour seems long for a fully automated process. I suspect that there may be human involvement to deal with cases where the automation gets confused.
This system would seem to have quite a few advantages for a retailer…lower labor costs, potentially-improved customer satisfaction (compared with the often-very-irritating self-checkout systems in common use), AND better use of floor space…the typical grocery store requires a nontrivial amount of its space for the checkout lines and stations.
On the other hand, there’s no assistance for those who would like help with bagging. And people without credit cards and phones are out of luck, there have already been some objections from activists on this point.
Has anyone else had any experience with one of these installations, either at the Whole Foods or at one of the Amazon Go stores?
Also, so many things such as different types of produce or a salad bar are sold on weight – I would assume that everything there is by the “each” for this type of store if you are just walking out.
I always use self checkout whenever possible but this just seems creepy to me, PanopticonMart, no thanks…
I buy about half my groceries from Amazon, and have them deliver them. Cost me nothing, and I don’t have to leave my house.
Not everything can be done like this, but I save about 25% on price, on most things I buy there, more on some others. I can buy some things cheaper locally, but I save so much on Amazon.
I’ve visited an Amazon Go store in downtown Chicago a few times. Each time it has worked very smoothly, and I also tested putting things back without any issues. For me, I think it has taken more like ten or fifteen minutes to get the receipt.
I find most self-checkout systems to be very irritating, like a science fair project patched together by a kid who didn’t have time to finish it properly. Some are better than others.
Sounds like a classic response to the “living wage” movement. A basic principle of economics is that you can only pay an employee based on the value they provide to the company. If a checkout person is only providing 12 dollars of value per hour but you’re forced to pay them 15, you’re losing money. You can increase prices to try to make up the shortfall, but that inevitably leads to a decrease in sales volume. Depending on your market and/or the products you’re selling, increasing prices may very well actually decrease revenue rather than increase it. You could try to increase the productivity of the employee, but this is typically very difficult to do. They can’t very well be stocking shelves at the same time they’re running the registers – here are finite limits to what an employee can do during a given hour. The final option is to find a way to eliminate the need for the employee altogether; with the rapid growth of automation and self-service technologies, this is often the most practical and effective response.
The bedrock rule of minimum wage laws is that the true minimum wage is always zero.
The US has historically been a high-wage country,..which has encouraged mechanization and other types of efficiency improvement…which enable further wage gains. There has been a beneficent positive feedback loop between wages and productivity; however, this loop has been interrupted to some extent by the offshoring option.
“Amazon has been developing a no-check-out system for retailers”
A few years ago, there was a PBS documentary about the impact of automation. One of the segments was on a Chinese store which had no checkout staff. Video of a pretty Chinese lady walking in, picking up a few items, walking out; costs automatically deducted from her bank account.
I have no idea how widespread that system has become in China in the few years since that PBS documentary was made. But I suspect a lot of Western viewers would immediately have jumped to the concern that now the Chinese government would be able to know even more about their citizens, right down to which brand of aspirin each prefers. Fortunately, not a concern in the US, where Amazon & the DC Swamp are at arm’s length. (Ha! Ha!).
}}} And people without credit cards and phones are out of luck, there have already been some objections from activists on this point.
1 — what person without a CC or a phone is gonna shop at Whole Foods, FFS? They are already overpriced as hell and cater to the hoity-toity** liberal asshole who doesn’t want to have to rub elbows with the Plebes. The only reason to shop at WF tends to be
a — more money than sense
b — liberal idiot
c — vegan. But that’s just a specialization of “b”.
Yes, there’s
d — it was convenient this time.
;-)
2 — Funny that no one complained about being tracked to hell and gone, since you clearly can’t use cash.
=====
** For “toity” my spell check suggested “toxic”. Almost let it keep that. LOLZ…
}}} There has been a beneficent positive feedback loop between wages and productivity; however, this loop has been interrupted to some extent by the offshoring option.
Nope. We moved manufacturing overseas because cheap labor was the only way to keep margins up. Now it’s reshoring because labor over there is high enough to balance the transport costs, and robotics have advanced to the point where the factory can continue on 2-5% of the labor it used to take.
MEANWHILE we’ve shifted all those former factory work employees into doing IP & Services, which runs to a much higher wage anyway.
There is a REASON the USA which “doesn’t make anything any more” has a manufacturing sector which is the world’s third largest economy, by revenue, after the USA (complete) and China.
Yes, it makes more money than all of Japan or all of Germany does. Despite “not making anything”. They profit from knowing HOW to make “the thing”, and licensing that out to places that do it cheaper than we do.
Now, Covid has shown some of the issues with single-sourcing stuff, and also with shipping stuff halfway around the world, so, yes, a lot more of it is getting done here, or in the process of getting done here. But that was inevitable, too.
“MEANWHILE we’ve shifted all those former factory work employees into doing IP & Services, which runs to a much higher wage anyway.”
Meaning exactly what, in tangible terms?…”services” is an awfully broad term, it includes food service, lawn service, and day-care services as well as, say, management consulting.
Is there really a significant % of former factory workers who are employed writing code or doing management consulting?
I think you can argue we’ve shifted those JOBS around, but certainly not those people.
Nor as I’ve mentioned recently do “IP & Service” jobs have the same impact on personal satisfaction and quality of life as the “old” manufacturing jobs did, especially not for men. Not to valorize factory work, but “we” have never had a reckoning over the tradeoffs that “we” made in the past 50 years to get us to this point. Pick a random small to medium size city downtown and find a picture of the downtown in 1972 compared to 2022 and try to argue that things have gotten better.
“we’ve shifted all those former factory work employees into doing IP & Services, which runs to a much higher wage anyway.”
Services? Like call centers? Oh no, those service jobs have gone to the Philippines and India.
Well, professional services, like legal work? Oh no, a lot of those service jobs like Due Diligence have been outsourced to India — smart educated people who work for pennies.
Well, what about really critical high-skill professional services, like interpreting X-rays and other medical scans? Guess what — the scans are sent over the internet to India — more smart educated people who work for a fraction of a US wage.
The acid test is the Trade Balance. The unsustainable US trade deficit shows that the value of IP & Services exported does not come close to the value of Real Goods imported from China, Japan, Germany, even France. Unilateral Free Trade killed the British Empire, and now it is killing the US.
“IP & Services” I guess you mean IT and Services, but hey. IP Services comes up as services related to IP or Internet Protocol, IT in fact. ;)
I used run servers, its fun and quite fulfilling. I drove and fixed my own trucks for many years, and that too was fun and fulfilling. I liked running servers better, but then I really enjoyed the glue code that glues everything together, and played with that a lot.
“I find most self-checkout systems to be very irritating, like a science fair project patched together by a kid who didn’t have time to finish it properly.”
I used to work on the self checkouts for a then major, early adopter that rapidly became a minor player. They were put together with the cybernetic equivalent of bailing wire and chewing gum. The cabinet was a tangle of cables with USB hubs and serial converters coupled with proprietary interfaces. The software ran on an under powered slow Celeron with too little memory, a slow hard disk and a list of drivers loaded that went on for page after page. If I could have all the time I spent standing around waiting for one to reboot back, I’d be years younger. A lot of times I’d walk into a store to find all of them not working with no trouble ticket on file. The stores had shut them down because they were tired of dealing with them. I, on the other hand made browny points by getting them up and running. There was just the littlest bit of friction there.
When it comes to shopping, I won’t use one unless forced to. They are slow, there’s a long list of things that you need an override from a clerk in Texas. alcohol and spray cans among other things. Amazon won’t be able to sell those in its robot store here.
Then there’s the legal jeopardy that attaches. Lately I’ve been hearing about cases where Wal Mart after looking at a security tape has filed shoplifting charges months after the fact on the basis that they think something wasn’t scanned properly.
Every time I’m in a Wal Mart, I repeat to myself; “I am a valued customer. Not valued enough for them to bother to have someone to take your money or someone to answer a question without standing in a long line but valued none the less.” Guess who came up short by 28% last quarter.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon app on your phone is also telling them what other stores and probably where in those stores you’ve been. The same goes for all the other store apps.
Groceries in the store here are still considerably cheaper than on line, I’m sure there are other places where that isn’t true. I used to live in some of them where the nearest store with more than one aisle was at some considerable distance. That last mile is still pretty expensive, especially for perishables.
Sailorcurt up many comments ago hit it for me, a business owner. Trust me if I didn’t have to have employees, I wouldn’t, as they are always your highest cost.
I’m sort of sad that I’m too far along in my career to see the warehouse guys (and who knows who else, maybe even me) replaced with robots. They work 24/7, don’t need vacations, etc. Of course they need maintenance and all of that sort of thing, but in the end would be FAR cheaper than employees. I think this sort of idea of being able to just grab and go and not interact with a cashier is interesting, but impossible to do right now if you sell a lot of items that require technical help like my company does.
Also, groceries are sort of finite as far as skus go. Right now I have something like ten million skus with all of the parts and support. If a guy needs a widget but blue and not green like I stock, we have to special order it in. Special orders in industrial distribution are frequent since the universe is so large. Food is quite a bit more basic. The idea could work for basic needs in my world and some are already trying it.
“Trust me if I didn’t have to have employees, I wouldn’t, as they are always your highest cost.”
So why should I as a conservative American prefer you over the $15/hr crazies? Both you and they clearly have preferred policies that will result in even more of the economic and social devastation that we’ve seen over the past 50+ years.
There’s nothing “wrong” with you wanting an easier, and more lucrative, situation for yourself. That’s 100% understandable. But why should society say, yeah, the guy who would like a robot warehouse is the guy we should listen to? Seems to me we’d be better off in setting up a system where in that case you’re crushed, and the guy next door who is happy to run a warehouse with human employees survives (and of course, where 10 guys who each want to do that fight it out to see who’s best, etc.).
@Brian – if I didn’t have to have inventory, I wouldn’t. If I didn’t have to pay a lease I wouldn’t. If I didn’t have to deal with freight claims due to warehousing errors bringing shipments, I wouldn’t. If my vendors didn’t need distribution, they would fire me. There isn’t anything special going on here and your hand wringing is weird. If society didn’t like robots, we would have basically no products. Do you buy anything? Well, there is probably a robot somewhere in the line of production or distribution at some point. It is related to the OP where there aren’t cashiers. Amazon is giving it a shot, and they have robots in their warehouses as well.
I don’t understand your comments about other parts of running a business. I’m purely talking about employment. What are you talking about? What does “inventory” have to do with anything?
What you think is my “hand wringing”? I could say your defensive whining is weird. Such emotional silliness is what’s weird. I’m just saying we need to move to a system where we incentivize employment, rather than our current system that does the opposite, so moving to robots isn’t an attractive option.
PS. I 100% want to see Amazon ripped to pieces.
Man is the tool-maker, and robots are simply the next generation of tool. Tools make us more productive — try to drive in a nail without the benefit of a hammer. And tools also have impacts on human society — think about the impact of automatic looms on the whole social structure of cloth-making which existed before the Industrial Revolution.
Taking the long view, better tools have ended up making life better for everyone — better diets, better products, better health, more leisure. But the process of adoption of new tools has often created collateral damage to existing society — similar in some ways to the collateral damage created by the Unilateral Free Trade which offshored factory jobs without thinking about the wider costs to society.
Mankind is not going to stop developing better tools. If one political jurisdiction prevents the adoption of new tools, it will simply fall behind and eventually disappear. But we do need to think about how to mitigate the collateral damage. Telling unemployed former factory workers or former warehouse workers to “learn to code” just is not adequate!
“Taking the long view, better tools have ended up making life better for everyone — better diets, better products, better health, more leisure”
Hard to make that argument for the past 50-60 years…Easy for a timescale of centuries, but something appears to have gone horribly wrong…
At the risk of being pedantic, what is described here is not a “robot” or even “robotic”. On the other hand, this is a battle I’ve been waging for decades and it appears thoroughly lost. At least with the general public and media.
Back in the 90s I was a big fan of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). I still am. It was going to change the way we shopped by doing what they are now doing with vision technology as described above. WalMart even had a corporate VP in charge of implementing the technology down to the item level. Wheel your cart in, load up and wheel out. As you exit through a portal, the cart is scanned and your card is debited or you can pay cash.
There were 2 problems:
First was that they could never get it 100% reliable. They got very close, 98-99% but nver got to 100%. There are some technical reasons for that having to do with antennas in the tag. A tag on a bottle of cooking oil works just fine. put the same tag on a bottle of water and it is unreadable because the water attenuates the signal
The other problem was cost of the tag and cost of applying it. They were eventually down to about a nickle and probably much cheaper now. That would be fine on 1 $10 t-shirt. Not so good on a 50 cent can of beans. If widely adopted, price would have come down. But it would not be widely adopted until the price came down so typical chicken and egg problem. (We see this with battery cars and charging stations)
A related problem to that, probably not insurmountable, was that there needed to be a single standard for RFID. It would have been cost prohibitive for Goya to have to make 7 different cans of beans with RFID for Walmart, another for Target, Another for Kroger etc.
I am a huge fan of machine vision technology, mostly in manufacturing and frequently with robots. It is incredibly cheap these days. Under $1,000 for a system that can detect position and orientation of a part and direct a robot to pick it up and place it somewhere. This store system is just a logical extension of that. I’ve not had a chance to try it yet. I was going to visit the Amazon store in Chicago a couple years ago but it closed too early for me to get there.
I am really looking forward to trying it out.
Speaking of costs, when 2D codes (like QR but many different formats) first became available in the late 90s, a scanner would cost up to $10,000.
Now they are under $100. And every camera has one.
Meant to say every phone has one.
One trend I like is QR codes on business cards. Scan the code and it creates a card in outlook. I don’t even need the card itself. And I don’t need the thousands that I have cluttering my office.
Some of my largest manufacturers are using RFID to load and unload their trucks – I’ve seen a few demonstrations at plant tours. When you are talking products like refrigeration units and furnaces the tag cost is negligible.
RFID, bar code for the 21st century, ;)
I wonder what would have happened if I’d taken one of those bananas I bought and put it somewhere other than where it was supposed to go….and then some other person, a couple of hours later, had picked it up. Would they have been properly charged?
Sounds like a somewhat harder image-processing problem than just dealing with items that are picked up & possibly replaced during one shopper’s trip through the store.
In England they have self checkout everywhere. But there are problems. One outfit discovered that had sold 5 times as many Carrots as they had ever ordered, and finally figured out people were buying Avocados and calling them Carrots in the self checkout. ;)
Brian: “Hard to make that argument for the past 50-60 years…Easy for a timescale of centuries, but something appears to have gone horribly wrong…”
You are right — productivity improvement from new tools/computers/automation do not seem to have delivered much in the way of improved standards of living. Thinking about that — compare the situation in the Industrial Revolution with the last half century:
Industrial Revolution destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and whole ways of life as (e.g.) home spinners & weavers were replaced with the dark satanic mills. But eventually those lost jobs in cloth-making were replaced by new jobs in metal shops manufacturing the automated looms, and in foundries making the iron & steel, and in mines producing the required coal & iron ore. The process was not easy or pleasant, and probably was mainly generational rather than retraining unemployed weavers. Still, the end result was that everyone was working productively — more productively than before, making the pie bigger.
Since the 1970s, we have offshored manufacturing & pollution — but we have failed to develop higher productivity jobs for the individuals left unemployed. Worse, the jobs we have created are disproportionately anti-productive — lawyers, bureaucrats, academics who put obstacles in the way of those who are trying to be productive. The net effect has been to lower the overall productivity of the total population.
In a hundred years time, life will be much better. Eventually, the sand-in-the-gears bureaucrats and their destructive regulation will get swept away. But in the hundred years between 1900 and 2000 the world had to go through two World Wars and a Great Depression on the way to a better world.
@David Foster – I’m impressed that the tech knows that you would have one banana or two when you walk out. And at most stores currently, bananas are sold by weight.
I wonder if the markups are higher in places like this to account for missed items – and missed items would make inventory a nightmare when that time comes around and also for ordering/replenishment.
How does the bagging work? You bag as you go, when you leave, etc?
Any idea if the carts themselves have sensors like cameras, weight sensors, etc.?
Dan from Madison…”missed items would make inventory a nightmare when that time comes around and also for ordering/replenishment.”
Aren’t there a fair number of errors, though, with both traditional human checkout and with self-checkout?
Zeynep Ton, in her book The Good Jobs Strategy, offered some examples of bad sales data being entered by overwhelmed cashiers.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60771.html
Brian,
Under Walmart’s RFID scheme, the cart itself had an ID tag and was weighed when it passed the portal into the store. As you checked out, passing the cart through a portal, it weighed the entire cart, deducted the tared weight and verified the net weight against the calculated weight of all the recorded items. I’d be surprised if the Amazon stores didn’t have something similar.
In Walmarts, Costcos and HoDes with self-checkout using scanners, they ask you to place the products in the bagging area. This is actually a scale that weighs what was scanned to be sure it matches the weight from the database. Not sure how it does this reliably and maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe it figures that +/-10% of actual vs theoretical weight is close enough to keep losses at a minimum.
Question for someone who has used this: Do you have to present the product to the camera? Or do you just sweep it off the shelf into the cart? If I hold a banana in front of the camera, recognizing it as a banana is not a big deal. Recognizing it as a bunch of 5 bananas is a bit bigger deal but not that hard. I’m curious how they get the camera to see the bananas well enough to recognize and count them.
Another thing that makes this a lot simpler is the processing time. It probably has 15-30 seconds between scanning one item and another. I work with high speed machine vision where we may be looking for cracks or or a dozen other potential issues in glass vials at 600/minute. Or finding and orienting the vertical seam on a beer bottle at 2,500 bottles a minute. Heineken does this so the labels are not placed over the seams. I have trouble even seeing the seam when I have the bottle in my hand.
It is common to equate US manufacturing with US manufacturing jobs. Even here in the comments I am seeing this.
US manufacturing output has been increasing pretty steadily since the end of WWII. Not just in absolute terms but in constant dollars and per capita. In other words, not just because of increased population and inflation.
Manufacturing jobs, OTOH, have not. This is a trend going back 100 and more years. More and more machinery is used and the machinery is smarter and smarter. Search “typing pool” and see pictures of huge rooms with hundreds of women typing away. All those jobs were replaced starting in the 70s with Wang and other word processors to the point where there are very few people at any level who do not do their own typing.
Or a client of mine that makes bone screws. This used to be done by thousands of machinists turning out screws by hand (on lathes, of course. But requiring a machinist to operate) It would take about 10 minutes to make one screw. Now these screws are turned out in about 90 seconds on fully automated multi-head Swiss lathes with 1 machinist per 4 lathes. The machinist’s main function is setup, placing barstock in the hopper and just making sure it runs smoothly. As well as doing quality checks on finished screws.
Or as I mentioned ina previous comment about Fort Payne AL. It used to have over 100 sockmaking factories. The sock making was highly automated with rotary knitting machines. The toe sewing was manual. The industry decamped to Central America because of low labor costs. They have figured out how to automate the toes and the industry is coming back to the US. But very few of the jobs. They are unnecessary.
McDonalds used to be the go to HS job. I worked in one in the 60s. It used to require dozens of people. Now it is highly automated, including the counter, and can run with just a few people.
Manufacturing is following the example of farming. Farming and agriculture used to occupy a majority of all people in the US. Now we grow many times more food with something like 2% of the labor force. Much of this is due to automation, especially tractors. (Also better crops, fertilizers, irrigation, practices of course)
And I see this as a good thing. I spend too much time in manufacturing plants and see too many shitty jobs that don’t pay all that well. (I’m speaking of unskilled jobs that can be learned in less than a week). I think that given a choice, I would prefer to work in a WalMart than most manufacturing. More interesting work, less physically debilitating and pays about as well.
A trade deficit occurs when one country imports more from another country than it exports to that country. (somewhat simplified)
So if we import a million toasters from China and China imports nothing from us, we say there is a trade deficit. Everyone says this is a problem. Nobody ever explains why it is a problem.
Seems like we just got a million free toasters from China and seems like free toasters are a good thing.
Yes, we did move some numbers around in some computers but there is close to zero cost to doing that.
So why are free toasters a bad thing? Seems like we should love us some trade deficit and if China is stupid enough to play along well, Shhh… Don’t tell them.
Industrial Revolution destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and whole ways of life as (e.g.) home spinners & weavers were replaced with the dark satanic mills.
And yet during that period life spans, caloric intake, height and weight, population, living space and other quality of life measures increased dramatically.
As bad as the “satanic mills” and city life were, they were usually better than the alternatives.
John Henry…”Question for someone who has used this: Do you have to present the product to the camera? Or do you just sweep it off the shelf into the cart?”
I didn’t make any particular effort to present it to the camera…cameras plural, because there are a lot of them…just put it into the basket.
All the bananas I saw were loose/individual….I should have looked for bunches, and will next time I’m there, to see how the system handles that situation. Will also look for something that requires weighing.
Human impacts of the Industrial Revolution…there’s a very interesting book on the individual and social impacts of the IR, published in 1836. The author, I think, was an honest man, reporting and analyzing as fairly as he could. I reviewed & excerpted the book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56406.html
John Henry wrote: “Seems like we just got a million free toasters from China and seems like free toasters are a good thing.”
System boundaries — often the key to understanding … or to fooling ourselves.
If we set the system boundaries too tightly and look only at part of the transaction, then it looks like the US is coming out ahead. We print Bidenbucks and send them to China in exchange for Real Goods. Those Chinese must be really dumb! That is like buying Manhattan Island for a handful of beads.
But expand the system boundaries. What else did China get, besides Bidenbucks they can’t use to buy anything worthwhile? First, they got technology, training, and industrial expertise … and probably some IP too — the most rapid industrialization in world history, taking China to the top of the league in many areas. Second, they defanged the former Arsenal of Democracy, which gave away key parts of its industrial base and now is very restricted in its war-fighting ability because it needs Chinese imports to build almost anything. Further, taking the long view, China successfully deskilled the US workforce since new entrants can no longer get the jobs at which they would develop those skills. And China probably guessed (correctly) that de-industrialization would in the long term lead to social tensions within the US, further weakening their opponent.
Deep in the Forbidden Palace, there are probably Chinese officials smiling about the deal: Who cares about giving away those toasters in exchange for worthless Bidenbucks? — China got everything it wanted. And the US will someday pay very dearly for those “free” toasters.
More directly, the Chinese got those dollars, which they can use to buy food, energy, technology, and many other things (not to mention some American politicians) They don’t necessarily have to buy these things from American sources (except for the politicians); dollars are readily convertible into Pounds, Euros, or whatever.
Alternatively, they can use the dollars to buy equity or debt interest in US corporations, which creates a long-term stream of payment obligations to them. Or they can buy US farmland, as is now happening.
It’s like a discussion from the 90s. Where’s Ross Perot at?
Fewer working males equals social dysfunction and decline. Heck, fewer working men doing physical labor does as well.
If you think that the past 50 years are an overall economic success for the USA, I have no idea what conversation we can have. Blah blah blah GDP, and I’ll stack a thousand abandoned downtowns on the other side and be pretty confident my side wins.
Brian…”How does the bagging work? You bag as you go, when you leave, etc?”
I just put stuff in the cart as I got it, and located a bag to carry it after I’d walked through the exit scanner.
“Any idea if the carts themselves have sensors like cameras, weight sensors, etc.?”
99% sure they don’t, the carts and baskets looked to me like the same old Whole Foods carts & baskets.
Nobody ever explains why it is a problem.
No, everyone explains why it is a problem, including several people in this comment thread right here.
Free traders are just pathologically incapable of understanding the arguments.
I suspect this is a case similar to the famous example of someone not being able to understand something because their living depends upon them not understanding it.
The people who mainly benefit from free trade tend to be the people most able to do something about it- that is, the wealthy and politically connected, of course including elected officials.
But forced to live in the bitter free trade sea, the public isn’t on board. What to do, what to do…I know! An endless stream of puff pieces, propaganda, paid advocacy, even entire think tanks devoted to lecturing the public about the sheer awesomeness of globalism in general and free trade in particular.
Anecdote- I still remember reading many years ago a book arguing in favor of free trade. It made the claim that it didn’t matter if we lost jobs in such sectors as primary metals or chemical manufacturing because we gained jobs in such fields as arena league football and nail salons. I’m pretty sure I would have completely forgotten about this book, except at some point years later I heard that arena league football went bankrupt. I have no doubt that the author is still quite happy to shill for globalism, without a trace of embarrassment, because that’s just how these folks roll.
Seems like we just got a million free toasters from China and seems like free toasters are a good thing.
In other words, free traders are quite happy to steal from foreigners by trading them worthless pieces of paper in exchange for real goods.
Pssst- maybe you guys shouldn’t write that sort of thing on the internet where these foreigners might see it and get angered by your plans to rob them. Just sayin’.
But anyway, I still recall the first time the swarm of free traders attacked me, at a certain website. I made what I thought was a perfectly banal comment quoting Abraham Lincoln about how if he bought a coat from an American, he would have a coat and an American would have the money, but if he bought a coat from a foreigner he would still have a coat but the foreigner would have the money. Much hilarity ensued, especially for me.
I note that because these worthless pieces of paper of free trader imaginations or computer ledger entries or whatever are what Abraham Lincoln called “money,” because he imagined it to also be a store of value.
In other words, we aren’t getting free toasters. We’re trading a store of value to get them. I suppose that if you had a US-based toaster factory it was awesome to send it out of the country, pure awesome. You could charge what you used to charge, with your US-based workforce- but pay your new employees far less. Profit! Whee!! The stock price went up, bigger executive bonuses, etc, etc.
I’ve long had the thought that a key reason why stock market valuations are so high is because Wall Street has essentially been able to turn the United States into what is essentially a continent-sized latifundia. If a job can’t be sent outside the country, a foreigner will be brought in to fill it, at well below the prevailing American wage.
This is not a sustainable situation, for roughly as many reasons as there are working Americans.
I think that given a choice, I would prefer to work in a WalMart than most manufacturing. More interesting work, less physically debilitating and pays about as well.
You said you worked in a McDonalds in the 1960s, so I’m going to feel comfortable asserting that you have no fscking idea what the blazes you’re talking about re retail or grunt manufacturing since then, especially since NAFTA.
I worked in a hypermart- if you don’t know what that is, then it’s yet another reason you shouldn’t be opining on the specifics of this topic- and then in a manufacturing establishment. I found the factory much more interesting than the hypermart, because it paid significantly more. Mo money, mo interest. I’ll refrain from discussing my steel mill experience.
It used to require dozens of people. Now it is highly automated, including the counter, and can run with just a few people.
I’m old. I remember going to McDonalds in the last century. There weren’t dozens of people swarming about in the back- there were roughly same number as there are now, except back then they weren’t foreigners. Does no one ever call you on these sort of bs assertions?
And I see this as a good thing.
Of course you do. You strike me as exactly the sort of person who has made a fancy living figuring out how to best send the American economy overseas- and it would never occur to you to think you’ve made a mistake.
Look at the stock market!! Bonuses!!!
Yeah. Well, I’m pretty sure no one has any reason to care about my personal biography but I do. I have never forgotten how I had to hold up pants with my hands because I had lost so much weight, courtesy of the glories of free trade, circa 1979. I was quite literally starving to death, you free trade ************.
Deep fry in ****
Xennady, easy on the personal attacks.
David F: Alternatively, they [Chinese] can use the dollars to buy equity or debt interest in US corporations, which creates a long-term stream of payment obligations to them. Or they can buy US farmland, as is now happening.”
But those payment obligations are given to China in … more Bidenbucks. That does not seem like a great deal for a country which is already receiving more Bidenbucks than it can use in exchange for its exports of Real Goods.
At the current stage of this “Free Trade” experiment, China holds about $1,000,000,000,000 of US government debt — money that all of us owe to China for prior goods we have imported without sufficient offsetting US exports. Remind me how “free” those free toasters were! It may be that China’s plan for their immense financial assets in the US is to use them to crash the exchange value of the US Dollar … at a time of their choosing.
China additionally has used their Bidenbucks to buy physical plant and land in the US — but that seems unnecessarily risky, after the West seized (stole?) Russian assets. Perhaps that is why China now mainly seems interested in US farmland close to US military installations?
Given that most of us would conclude that China has used its export success to buy US politicians, why is Nancy Pelosi planning a provocative trip to Taiwan? Have those devious Chinese rulers ordered her to do this, to give them a casus belli at a time when the US is already distracted with our proxy war in the Ukraine? Historians are going to have fun times analyzing the foolishness of our Betters!
Speaking of machine vision and artificial intelligence, I am currently writing a brief article on how X-Ray inspection machines work on a packaging line. I find these especially fascinating.
The basic concept is the same as any other camera system. Take picture and analyze the image checking to make sure that everything that is supposed to be there is and nothing that isn’t, isn’t.
It is the analysis that seems magic to me. Take a small pouch of chicken noodle soup mix. It will have soup powder, noodles, chicken bits, perhaps some vegetable pieces.
The camera will take a picture and the computer will then say OK, there are 5 chicken bits, there are supposed to be 4-7 so it is OK. A half ounce of powder and so on. It will also look to see if there are any bone fragments, metal chips or anything else. And, as an added kicker, it will calculate the total weight of the contents.
If all is not as it should be, it will then kick the pouch off the line to be discarded.
And it does this in a tenth of a second, 600 pouches per minute.
As I say, it seems like magic to me.
The dollar is the currency of record. Its not unlikely that will change in the not so distant future,
Then everything will change, and not to your benefit.
Gavin, you are quite right about how the system boundries are defined. I defined them tightly in my example to make a point.
I suspect that everyone would agree that in my example of the toasters for accounting entries, the trade deficit would be a good thing because Hey, free toasters!
But, as you point out, they spend the money we send buying things from the US. (Even when they use the dollars to buy Mercedes from Germany, the Germans now have to spend the dollars in the US. So for simplicity, let’s ignore 3rd countries. They don’t change anything)
In reality, no trade deficit will ever exist. When we buy the toasters from China, China has to buy something from us. If we ship them an equivalent value of microwaves, there is no trade deficit. But if they use the dollars to buy and reopen a shut down glass plant in Ohio (excellent Netflix movie but I don’t remember the name) we say there is a trade deficit.
If we import steel from Korea and send them 2X4s in exchange, no deficit. If Korea uses the 2X4s to build an office in the US, it is a trade deficit but is it?
Or perhaps China uses the money from the toasters to buy US govt debt. That is called a trade deficit but is it? I’m not saying it is a good thing, it is not. I am just saying that it is not a trade imbalance.
I also don’t blame China. It is a perfectly rational decision on their part. I do blame USG for running a deficit and we need to stop it.
And a bunch of other stuff I could talk about but won’t.
My point is that there can be no trade deficit, except definitionally. Trade always balances.
If it ever really doesn’t balance, as in my example, it is not a problem because Free toasters!
Another thing that bothers me in discussions about hypothetical trade deficits is how some CEOs expect to be able to export like for like. Lee Iaccoca in the 80s made a huge fuss about not being able to sell Chrysler cars in Japan. My first thought was always “Well Lee, if Americans prefer Japanese cars and won’t buy your shitty product, why do you expect Japanese to?” One problem was that the cars were just physically too big for Japanese streets. But I remember seeing him on the TV complaining that they Japanese insisted that he make cars with the steering wheel on the right hand side and him complaining that he didn’t want to.
Another example was Galvin, of Motorola, complaining that they could not sell cell phones in Japan. The Japanese insisted that all phones had to use the same cell protocol or wavelength and Motorola insisted that they should be able to use Motorola’s prorietary technology. So yeah, he wanted to make an incompatible product and complained the Japanese would not buy it.
100 years later the Japanese still have 2 incompatible power grids. 50hz supplied by Siemens in half the country and 60hz from GE. They, more than most, would be shy of letting incompatible systems in.
Expecting like for like is just silly. If China was going to export toasters to us and we exported toasters to them, what would be the point? We buy what they are good at. In exchange for what we are good at.
Fewer working males equals social dysfunction and decline. Heck, fewer working men doing physical labor does as well.
Have you got any source for this? All the data I see shows more people working than ever. In a steady upward trend since 1950 or so.
And why in the world would you want people doing physical work when it is not necessary? Perhaps you think it would be morally strengthening to ban nail guns, skilsaws and backhoes from construction sites?
It certainly would be a giant leap backward economically.
Xennady,
And yet we are manufacturing more, in the US, per capita population, than anytime ever in history.
How do you explain that?
As I said before, too many people confuse manufacturing jobs, which have declined mainly due to automation, with manufacturing output. One person with a machine can do the work of several without and they work a lot less hard at doing it.
In other words, free traders are quite happy to steal from foreigners by trading them worthless pieces of paper in exchange for real goods.
If it is a voluntary exchange on both sides, how is it stealing? The Chinese know exactly what they are doing. They are getting dollars for toasters so they can buy things that are worth more to them than toasters. Glass plants in Ohio, for example. Interest bearing US debt (their $1 trillion is about 3.5% of the total US debt)
“All the data I see shows more people working than ever. In a steady upward trend since 1950 or so.”
I said males. Employment for males has been crashing for decades.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/lfp/lfp-sex-race-hispanic
From nearly 90% in 1950 to less than 70% now.
“why in the world would you want people doing physical work when it is not necessary?”
Because in general men feel more satisfied and happy when they’re making real things. That’s not universally true, of course, but a system that doesn’t provide serious opportunities to the majority of men for whom it is true, and instead caters to the minority for whom it’s not, results in lots of drug use, broken families, etc. Look around you, man.
“It certainly would be a giant leap backward economically.”
Again, look around you. There’s no way to deny we’ve taken “a giant leap backward economically” in the past 50 years, unless you’re just looking at national-level spreadsheets.
Xennady,
You are right, I’ve not worked in a McDs or anywhere else in a long time. So what I know is from observation, not first hand.
On the other hand, I’ve been working in manufacturing since 1976. First as manager facility operations of a pharmaceutical campus (starting as Maintenance supervisor), for 8 years. Then selling capital manufacturing machinery for 22 years, since 1992 or so consulting in manufacturing productivity. I’ve worked in a wide variety of industries across the US and internationally.
I love manufacturing and, if I ever had to get a job, would want to be in manufacturing. My daughter is a manufacturing plant manager, my granddaughter is starting industrial engineering school next month.
I’ve seen pretty much every manufacturing job there is.
In my comments I specifically mentioned unskilled manufacturing work. I would define that as work that anyone can be 75% or more effective with a week or less of OJT. That seems to be what most people mean when they talk about factory jobs.
I’ve seen lots of people spending 8 hours a day stacking boxes on pallets, feeding parts to a machine or just watching a machine and a lot of other really crappy jobs. Crappy in the sense of being boring and physically demanding. Good jobs in the sense of providing value adding employment, of course. My inlaws put 5 kids through college making a bit more than minimum wage at a GE plant for 35 years.
But, as I say, know what is involved in those jobs and I would not want to do them. Given a choice, WalMart or McDonalds look like they would be preferable. My daughter finds the same thing. WalMart pays a dollar less but keeps poaching her employees. And her plant is a pretty good plant to work in as manufacturing jobs go around the US.
I can assure you that the McDonalds here in Fajardo, 10-15 years ago, had a dozen employees during the day. Just a normal size McDonalds. A lot fewer now, of course.
@John Henry – “In Walmarts, Costcos and HoDes with self-checkout using scanners, they ask you to place the products in the bagging area. This is actually a scale that weighs what was scanned to be sure it matches the weight from the database. Not sure how it does this reliably and maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe it figures that +/-10% of actual vs theoretical weight is close enough to keep losses at a minimum.”
I am a frequent user of self checkout at a local grocery store (Kroger chain). The weighing of the goods upon bagging has been eliminated I would say around 6 months to a year ago. I always thought it was weird because since I had already scanned the item, why does it also need to be weighed upon bagging? It was also totally clumsy for something like a big package of paper towels or something heavy/large. I suppose it was to catch errors/theft but it has been dismantled. I imagine that it slowed everyone down to the point that the store/management felt that quicker transactions were worth the errors/theft that might be happening. Another thought was that possibly packaging info/weight and other info changed too rapidly to be uploaded to the system in a timely manner.
And the shoplifters? Are they met at the door by the authorities?
Xennady, easy on the personal attacks.
You were right to call me out on that. My apologies to everyone, especially John Henry.
John H: “My point is that there can be no trade deficit, except definitionally. Trade always balances.”
You may be kidding yourself with word games. Yes, trade balances in the sense that the US gets a toaster (or something more high-tech, like a cell phone or a laptop which we cannot make for ourselves) and China gets a Bidenbuck. So, trade has “balanced”. Or has it?
In international trade, a Bidenbuck is an IOU. Today, the US has nothing to offer China in exchange for the toaster, but China is prepared to give us a toaster today in return for a promise that the US will give something of equivalent value to China at some future date. Trade is “postponed” rather than “balanced”.
China needs some Dollar funds to provide liquidity for its trading activity, but there is no commercial reason for the Chinese Communist Party to hold a Trillion Dollars of US Government IOUs — especially in a world where, post-Ukraine, the US Government has proved it is ready to steal such funds. So we can safely assume that the CCP has a non-commercial reason for holding US Government Debt … at least until they choose not to hold it any longer.
30+ years ago when I first noticed the prevalence of imported parts on domestic vehicles, I said to myself; “If Ford buys an alternator from an American, there’s a fair chance that the person that built it would buy a Ford. There is no chance that the, at the time, Japanese builder would.”
The Japanese economy has been closed to foreign imports forever, for everything except raw materials that weren’t available domestically. Even a cursory glance in that direction would show that hasn’t worked so well for them. I can remember Japanese self satisfied warnings about the dilatory ways of lazy Americans right up to the edge of the cliff they rode over. I remember them buying, for insane prices, real estate including most of the private golf courses in Hawaii and Rockefeller Center, all now sold on, at a huge loss.
If a measly trillion will crater our economy (down from 3-4 trillion a few years ago), Brandon has done it already.
I don’t know what China, or more accurately, the CCP has planed. Just about every one of their major programs is failing. They loaned big money to Sri Lanka to modernize their port and some of that money actually did that while the rest made its way into the bank accounts of various locals. Sri Lanka predictably defaulted and the Chinese now own a fairly modern port in a bankrupt country that doesn’t have the ability to produce food for themselves and not in much need of a port. They’ve made huge investments in Pakistan, the same Pakistan that’s coming unglued on its way to being the next Sri Lanka. Guess where the main part of the “Belt and Road” was supposed to end up. Hint: there’s a war going on there right now. What will be carried on this road when all their export customers are done going “Anywhere but China”?
This is winning?
We’ve got an obviously drug addled dementia patient whose family is the most brazenly crooked in American history, a media with a fetish for gaslighting no matter how transparent the lies that are required, and cities all across the country that look like a neutron bomb, and the “elites” are focused on legalizing drugs, importing a new electorate, calling men women, jailing political dissidents, and destroying the energy economy.
This is winning?
Dan,
I was in HoDe this afternoon. They did not have weighing at checkout. This is a newer store and maybe they never did. I thought they had it in other stores but I could be wrong.
When Aldis first opened, they didn’t have scales. All the produce and everything else was pre-packaged. They have since installed scales at checkout. Most places, it’s legal to sell things like un-packaged fruit by each rather than by weight.
They still have checkout clerks. They also seem to emphasize efficiency, an Aldis clerk will have a cart full of groceries rung up while a Wal Mart clerk is still fiddling with the bags on the carousel.
This is winning? Yup. They just want to get it built.
And yet we are manufacturing more, in the US, per capita population, than anytime ever in history.
Source? No, don’t bother. Past experience has taught me that the most likely response will be from a US government report- and few are things are tortured as thoroughly to produce the desired headlines as claims made by the US government. In other words, I wouldn’t believe it.
How do you explain that?
Well, at the risk of repeating myself, I suspect it’s one the endless lies and non sequiturs churned out by the regime to justify the disastrous policies that enrich the politically connected.
I further suspect the actual lie is that the manufactured output being discussed isn’t anything like more widgets or whatever, it’s more dollars worth of “manufactured goods” being produced. So when the price of gasoline or electricity goes up, manufacturing output will also increase, even if less gasoline or electricity is actually being made.
I would define that as work that anyone can be 75% or more effective with a week or less of OJT. That seems to be what most people mean when they talk about factory jobs.
I get that sense too- people who know nothing about manufacturing imagine that it’s all the skill equivalent of ditch digging. I have no idea why I should care about the opinions of astonishingly ignorant people, or why anyone else should either.
I’ve seen lots of people spending 8 hours a day stacking boxes on pallets, feeding parts to a machine or just watching a machine and a lot of other really crappy jobs.
Ok. Me too.
First as manager facility operations of a pharmaceutical campus (starting as Maintenance supervisor), for 8 years. Then selling capital manufacturing machinery for 22 years, since 1992 or so consulting in manufacturing productivity. I’ve worked in a wide variety of industries across the US and internationally.
From this, it follows that you’ve also seen a lot of people doing higher skilled jobs etc.
Pharmaceutical campus- I’ve read that essentially no medications are produced in the US anymore. I’ll guess your facility moved out of the country or simply closed. Capital manufacturing machinery for 22 years- I’ll also guess that closed too. Industries across the US and internationally.
I’ve had relatives involved in this game, so let me make another guess. An American company has a plant or plants in the US. Noticing that they could make more money with a plant in another country, they make their higher-skilled workers travel and train various foreigners how to do the jobs done by Americans. Eventually, the US site or sites close, and the American workers get a lecture about the glories of free trade.
Lots of guesses buried in all that, but I’ve had personal experience with all of them, which may or may not actually apply to you.
My inlaws put 5 kids through college making a bit more than minimum wage at a GE plant for 35 years.
You don’t say. How many kids could they put through college if there was no GE plant and the effective wage was significantly lower, which is the situation today?
And her plant is a pretty good plant to work in as manufacturing jobs go around the US.
I suspect not, if this plant is losing workers to Walmart, which infamously helps its employees sign up for food stamps.
But of course I don’t know the specifics.
Here is US manufacturing real value added, 2005-2022. ‘Real’ meaning that the numbers are inflation-adjusted; ‘value added” meaning that the cost of inputs is subtracted from the value of product sold.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RVAMA
Here is US manufacturing real value added, 2005-2022.
Thank you. This is all I could have hoped for and more.
We start off with an assertion by FRED- ???- that it is our trusted data source since 1991. Well, nope. This is apparently data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which for some reason calls itself “FRED.” I don’t care and I have no interest in attempting to figure out why. But the site helpfully tells us that some aspect of it will shut down soon. I still don’t care.
The meat of it all is this- “real value added by industry: manufacturing”- measured in “billions of chained 2012 dollars.”
I can smell the bovine excrement from hundreds of miles away. That’s exactly the sort of nonsense I was thinking of when I said I had no interest in hearing from any source from the regime. They carefully construct measurements that they can tout as proving everything is awesome- and here’s one of those phonied up measurements, in real time.
It doesn’t matter how many thousands of factories have closed, causing the further closure of myriad other businesses. Nope, nowhere to be seen in the data.
We get a positive headline produced by the government professionals who can never be fired- and that’s all that matters.
For now.
The St Louis Fed definition of “Value Added”: “Value added represents the sum of the costs-incurred and the incomes-earned in production, and consists of compensation of employees, taxes on production and imports, less subsidies, and gross operating surplus.”
I bet we could ask 100 people for the definition of “Value Added in Manufacturing” and not have a single one of them come up with that!
Manufacturing value-added isn’t a metric of employment…manufacturing employment data is tracked and available. Neither is it a metric of general social impact of manufacturing. It is simply an attempt to quantify how much manufacturing work is being done in the US, whether by humans or by machines, as measured by the financial value of that work to customers.
It is simply false to say that the US doesn’t make anything anymore. It is *true* to say that we should be making a lot more…and the main obstacles to this are political and cultural.
“It is simply false to say that the US doesn’t make anything anymore. It is *true* to say that we should be making a lot more…and the main obstacles to this are political and cultural.”
I don’t think anyone in this thread says the US doesn’t make anything anymore.
The obstacles are clearly pretty profound. The one guy who pretended to care about this got impeached twice and had the head of the joint chiefs calling China to say don’t worry we’re going to take him out. Basically the entire ruling class is quite happy the way things are, and why wouldn’t they be, it’s gotten them in charge, why would they want to change anything?
How do you give small towns and small businesses power? Politicians respond to incentives, and the power is all with big cities and big businesses, who have zero interest in reforming anything.
You might think that unions would be stronger in favor of policies to bring jobs back, but they have been completely co-opted by leftists who aren’t concerned with class anymore, and they’re in symbiosis with big businesses anyway, they certainly don’t want a world where there’s 100k people divided among 1000 busineses, it’s much harder to unionize them compared to if they’re all at one company.
how much of our industrial base, is still extant, light fixtures, airplane parts, hand tools, try to find any part in a hardware store made in this country, and we’ve been stripmining our agriculture as well,
The obstacles are clearly pretty profound. The one guy who pretended to care about this got impeached twice and had the head of the joint chiefs calling China to say don’t worry we’re going to take him out. Basically the entire ruling class is quite happy the way things are, and why wouldn’t they be, it’s gotten them in charge, why would they want to change anything?
Yes and the situation is getting worse. Much of the reason our manufacturing went to China was cost but also regulation. I remember a single example of fiberglas boat building in southern California. The state passed environmental regulations on emissions of vapors from curing resin. The entire industry moved to Florida with a single exception that I don’t know if it still exists. Still exists but at
7200 Bryan Dairy Rd
Largo, FL. 33777
Enough said.
Until things started going bad about 2015 and then came to an abrupt stop two years ago, having something produced in China was almost ridiculously easy or seemed so at the time. You could take your plans and drawings and find a partner that would take them and run. Suppose you need some parts plated, he knew somebody that would bid it the same day and they were really cheap. The same for molds and tools. I personally know someone that went to China for some large injection molds for less than 1/3 of what it would have cost here and 1/2 or better the delivery time. Since they were always going to produce from these molds here, it worked out fine.
But there were some problems and you heard stories of people visiting some place and finding that their product was for sale there except that they had never distributed outside the U.S. They found out they needed to hire someone to really ride herd on quality or they’d end up with huge return and warranty costs. Some of these auditors met with unfortunate accidents and others seemed to get oddly prosperous. If you decided to change producers, you found the molds and tools you thought were yours were claimed by your present contractor and your only recourse was to either pay a ransom or start all over. The Chinese courts weren’t much use. That cheap plater suddenly disappeared with a big stack of your very expensive parts when the local government (probably from lack of a bribe to the proper person) suddenly took notice of the thousands of gallons of toxic waste that had been flowing into the city sewers for years from this plating works. The whole management takes a powder with anything portable of value, leaving unpaid workers behind. If you were lucky, you’d get an offer to buy your parts back. But still, until covid, things usually worked well enough to make money.
What China has done is to sell the West their breathable air and drinkable water just as cheaply as they sold their labor and we bought it all. The money we did pay them has disappeared into uninhabitable apartment blocks and flashy high speed rail that can’t pay their electric bills. What China most resembles now is a played out mine. There are the barest hints that the non CCP Chinese may start to notice all this and may react in other than the time honored endurance mode that has seen millions of them dead in the name of the “people”. As with so many things, time will tell.
As you say, MCS, time will tell. Maybe you are right that China’s economy will implode — although I tend to think that a lot of the problems are overstated. Westerners who are looking mostly at near-term financial measures may miss the long-term importance of China’s possession of the actual productive capacity — the physical plant and trained workers.
The one thing we know for sure is that if China goes pear-shaped, there are going to be a lot of empty shelves in US stores, and a lot of US factories at a standstill because of the lack of Chinese parts.
We in the West should not sit back and pin our hopes for redemption on something bad happening to China. We should be focusing our efforts on fixing the obvious problems with our own economy and our own society. Rolling back excessive counter-productive industry-destroying regulations would be a good place to start.
There isn’t any redemption for anyone from this. The only less negative aspect is that this has been unwinding for the last 5-7 years here. We have that much progress towards finding cover from the collapse.
Manufacturing value-added isn’t a metric of employment… It is simply an attempt to quantify how much manufacturing work is being done in the US, whether by humans or by machines, as measured by the financial value of that work to customers.
I’m going to stand by my assertion that it’s more accurate to say that it’s bovine excrement intended to give the usual suspects of the regime a talking point to use against people who have noticed something has gone wrong with American governance and public policy.
At this point, I simply don’t believe anything these people claim, courtesy of long experience. I note how they long ago changed how the inflation rate is calculated- multiple times, in fact- and just days ago they’ve started claiming two consecutive quarters of economic contraction suddenly don’t indicate a recession.
It is simply false to say that the US doesn’t make anything anymore.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claim nothing was made in the US anymore- but I will say that it often seems that the nothing-is-wrong crowd will assume that claim has been made. For example, years ago I was discussing the sad state of the US shipbuilding industry, which is almost extinct. Some guy in that thread started posting pictures of US-built yachts, ferries, and other minor seagoing objects.
I recall what I take to be a nasty joke about Jesuits, which may well be centuries old. I have no idea what inspired the hostility against Jesuits nor do I know much about them, for that matter. But yet I still recall the joke- if you accuse a Jesuit of killing a man and a dog, he will triumphantly produce the dog.
Arguing with free traders was often like that. When I pointed out that shipbuilding was an industry that had all but vanished from the US, I was rewarded with pictures of river ferries. Not container ships, oil tankers, LNG carriers, seagoing drilling rigs, etc. Tiny river ferries.
It is *true* to say that we should be making a lot more…and the main obstacles to this are political and cultural.
I have no real disagreement here- but I’d describe the problem a bit differently: The main obstacle to producing more inside the United States is a greedy, ignorant political class who somehow imagine that they are ruling the world, hate their domestic political opponents, and despise anyone works with their hands in any capacity.
They don’t care if the United States produces anything, because they think any sort of manufacturing job is socially beneath them and anyone they could ever care about.
we’re dismantling our industrial base, one of the things that yamamoto, noted would eventually halt the Japanese advance, the other being our steely determination, do you see any of that in the commanding heights of the political class, now this colonization is not unique to the US, take any Western European country as an example,
What China most resembles now is a played out mine.
That’s certainly an interesting way to put it and you seem much more familiar with the actual China than I am.
Yet I am reminded of a certain Gordon Chang, who has predicted approximately 100 of the last 0 Chinese collapses. I also note Peter Zeihan, who appears to think China will collapse sometime this summer, at the latest.
My own impression has always been that China is roughly like the US, circa 1950. Sure, they dump toxic waste straight into every river, but eventually they’ll figure it out and stop. Meanwhile, they have advanced technology, a smart, highly trained workforce, an industrial base sans pareil, and good friends who will sell them all the oil they need at a price they can easily afford.
But I can always manage to be wrong.
more like 19th Century with the Robber barons, after the Cultural Revolution, Deng looked around and thought we need another way to accomplish the goal of national revival and revenge, the difference is well we had a small force compared to China, even in terms of population, Mahan’s Naval Theory was to make up for that, and their armed forces are more linked to their corporate structure, now we’ve seen how they can lay a pterodactyl size egg with Evergrande for instance, that KPMG helped paper over, now areas that are now in rebellion like Shenzhen province, or Hubei, which was the base of the epidemic, have been counter weights to the regime, in a long historical continuity,
Xennady: “My own impression has always been that China is roughly like the US, circa 1950.”
That is a great observation! I would push it beyond the industrial to the social. Today’s Chinese cities appear to be livable in ways that the residents of San Francisco or New York City can only dream about — safe clean streets; children can play outside; women can walk through parks without fear of being harassed. Strangely, for a nominally Communist country, people with problems seem to turn to family for support, not the government. All in all, rather like the US in the 1950s — at least for many people.
Let’s hope the Chinese people don’t screw up their society the way we have allowed our society to degenerate. And in the meantime, let’s try to focus on how we can change direction for our own society and get onto a better track.
“Today’s Chinese cities appear to be livable in ways that the residents of San Francisco or New York City can only dream about — safe clean streets; children can play outside; women can walk through parks without fear of being harassed.”
You must not get out much, or pay much attention to what’s actually going on there. As of a couple of days ago, about 287 million are under covid lockdown and aren’t walking anywhere. Not eating much either. Banks have defaulted and one of the big four government banks is limiting withdrawals to about $150 a day. Hundreds of thousands of home buyers of apartments “under construction” are withholding mortgage payments until construction re-starts. Roughly 1/3 of the steel production has disappeared in the last year. I could go on.
Start here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBnQmRcRI4
Xi is struggling with the need for a unifying philosophy, the mandate of heaven, was enough in Imperial times, aften Sun Yatsen’s revolution, which elegant touches on, rapidly descended to warlordism, with Chiang the top dog, in part because of his alliance with the Green Gang, the war weakened the alliance between the warlords, and Mao won the big prize, and proceeded with a zeal that would have impressed Hong Quing, except he would have recognized the devil, but that had limits as he Cultural Revolution proved,
MCS — personal view: surprisingly slickly produced You-Tube videos are about the least reliable source of information. It is easy for someone with an agenda to misrepresent the situation. But others may have a different assessment.
“Roughly 1/3 of the steel production has disappeared in the last year.”
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/steel-production
China’s steel production did indeed drop sharply in 2021 (during Covid shut-downs) from 100 Million tonnes per month to about 69 Million tonnes per month — approx 30% reduction. It has since recovered as the Covid shut-downs ended and was back to almost 91 Million tonnes in June of this year.
For comparison, US steel production also dropped in 2021 due to the Covid shut-downs, from about 7.5 Million tonnes per month to about 4.6 Million tonnes per month — approx 40% reduction. US steel production has since also recovered and was 6.9 Million tonnes in June of this year.
Yes, that does mean that China — on its last legs, You-Tube says — is still currently producing more than 13 times as much steel as the US. But China is the workshop of the world, and presumably a lot of that Chinese steel production is being exported, including to the USA.
This kind of information makes me very unhappy. The USA is supposed to be the Shining City of the Hill; we are supposed to be the Good Guys. But our Political Class, bought & paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, has sold us out.
“Xi is struggling with the need for a unifying philosophy”
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-06/24/c_1310024904.htm
like I said Mao learned the limitations of this approach, after 60 million lives, you can add the bulk of the death in the Civil War, to his blood price,
as to this country, the devouring being conducted by the political academic corporate syzgy is rather staggering as they tear down every foundation of civilization, the family the church the energy grid,
” surprisingly slickly produced You-Tube videos are about the least reliable source of information”
Your definition of slick doesn’t match mine, I’d find a less robotic narration more credible. In any event, where the YouTube excels is that what they say isn’t as important as what they show. The crowds of protestors, sitting quietly with their banners, some in English in front of the banks is hard to fake. The thugs moving in to break them up speaks for itself as well. The ques in front of other banks for hours only to be told that all the “numbers” for that day are exhausted and no more customers will be admitted is a testament to customer service. The very widely reported bank IT outages for “maintenance” that are stretching into weeks which coincidentally coincide with closing off all physical access to the banks and prevent any and all transactions aren’t some figment of imagination or slick editing. I doubt you would, under the same circumstances, have quite so detached of an attitude.
Look around, there are lots of others, often with actual people as narrators, This was just the first one I that came to hand. I’ve never been there and sure don’t have any claim to special knowledge. You might want to give this two a look, real people that lived there for many years, married Chinese wives and are thoroughly pro Chinese and anti-CCP.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ADVChina/videos
This has something of the sickly sweet feel of slowly approaching a major accident where you anticipate seeing something that you’ll regret. We were given fair warning just what kind of devil we were making a bargain with at Tiananmen Square and went ahead and did it anyway. Faust as an instruction manual. Chinese history is largely of one convulsion after another, something that seems to be continuing.
“This has something of the sickly sweet feel of slowly approaching a major accident where you anticipate seeing something that you’ll regret.”
I feel that way, I think many people feel that way, but not about China, about the entire global system.
Europe looks headed over the cliff this winter. How resilient are their societies? Does it not seem odd (suspicious?) that Draghi has now been removed from his unelected perch, and the populists look likely to sweep into power, just as things are about to go completely pear shaped? The “Build Back Better” crew (isn’t it bizarre how those three words are used all across the globe, like some sort of bizarre mantra with hypnotic power) looks determined to completely raze everything to the ground, for what purpose exactly?
Like I said before, saying China is weak to me is like late-stage Romans saying the Goths are weak, and can’t possibly match the glories of Rome. So what? China doesn’t have to compete with America from 1945 or 1990, they only have to deal with 2022 America.
MCS (12:50pm):
“Faust as an instruction manual.” Apparently that is quite literally true: Xi is said to have memorized Faust, and impressed Merkel by rattling off whole memorized passages (in German, I presume).
I can’t find the page on which I read it, but an eminent and elderly American immigrant political thinker recently talked about this, and added that the only languages in which you can buy and read everything Goethe ever wrote, no matter how trivial or ephemeral, in ~100 thick volumes, are German (of course) and Chinese. I think he said that Xi authorized and paid for the Chinese edition of the Collected Works.
I’d feel a lot better about a world leader who memorized Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, in which the man who sells his soul to Satan’s minion to acquire vast magical powers goes on to waste his powers on trivialities and then goes straight to Hell. Goethe’s, in which he gets into Heaven, seems wrong – magnificently wrong, but still wrong.
MCS: “where the YouTube excels is that what they say isn’t as important as what they show.”
A picture can be worth a thousand words — but how representative is the picture? Yes, those events shown in China were real. But consider that a Chinese citizen looking at You-Tube could see a video showing FBI tanks driving into a building filled with children and setting it on fire; or a video showing rioting Anitfa goons smashing store fronts and setting fire to a police station with police officers inside; or FBI goons doing a dawn raid on a respected former Trump official. All of those videos would be real and accurate, but does that give the picture of the US?
There is no doubt that China is facing problems. We in the West are facing problems too, problems which could bring our societies down. What are we doing to resolve our problems? That is where our focus should be.
MCS: “Look around, there are lots of others, often with actual people as narrators”
MCS, I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but this video popped up unrequested on my recommended list. Given the video’s title and this discussion, I had to watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OgmIshbjJw
Slums in China, the lives of the poor near Chongqing West Railway Station，city slums
It is actually a re-development area, about to be demolished to make way for an expansion of the High Speed Rail station. It is an old area, and rents are cheap. Poor Chinese people live there. The subtitles describe this as “The lowest level in China”.
Definitely a poor part of the city, but the person who put this video together has obviously never seen the scuzzy parts of London or Paris. What the video shows is hardly a “slum” by European or North American standards — no graffiti, no litter, no anti-social behavior, greenery, functioning market. If this really is the “lowest level in China”, then we may have to adjust our views on life there.
The crowds of protestors, sitting quietly with their banners, some in English in front of the banks is hard to fake. The thugs moving in to break them up speaks for itself as well.
This incident reminds me of the bank runs in the US during the Great Depression. The US did not deal with those by clubbing depositors or pretending savings accounts were “investments” that could not be withdrawn, with the intent of saving insolvent banks from their fate. FDR instituted a bank holiday to force insolvent banks to close and eventually created the FDIC.
Now I know FDR is today widely regarded as having prolonged the depression by years with his actions- but he also was quite popular with the voting public and was elected to four terms as president. I’d say the American people were behind Roosevelt and had bought in to his program. That gave him the power to turn a depression into the Great Depression and yet still survive politically.
Does Xi have that sort of backing from the people of China?
I dunno, but I’ve long thought that the only thing that saved the CCP from obliteration during the immediate post-Soviet period was that the regime was plainly very interested in raising living standards of the Chinese people and raising the status of China internationally, thus obviously causing the public to regard the regime as successful. Mandate of Heaven, etc.
So what happens to the CCP when they get something roughly similar to the set of circumstances the US faced in circa 1929?
Don’t know- but when I see stories about bank depositors getting clubbed by minions of the regime because they want their money back, I don’t get a warm fuzzy about the future of China.
The true test of any regime is how it deals with adversity. The United States under FDR passed that test and went on to become the dominant power of the 20th Century. I think a lot of that had to do with such things as that the public believed the government sided with them over insolvent banks, for example.
The CCP has had a good run, decades worth. It now seems to be stumbling into a patch of adversity. Xi seems to be failing the test Roosevelt passed. Maybe it’s better for an economy for the government to club depositors to save failed banks- but I doubt it.
I think the Chinese regime- because it sprang from the murderous brutality of communists- is reverting to what it knows best. That is, murderous brutality. The American regime of FDR did not spring from such a source and hence did not even imagine that it was an option, quite sensibly because for them, it wasn’t.
China may well have figured out a new way to fail. That is, they can have all the advantages of the US circa 1950 yet still manage to blow it all up, because the regime is pathologically incapable of granting the mass of the populace anything vaguely resembling any sort of civil rights or any say in the governance of their own country.
Xennady: “the regime is pathologically incapable of granting the mass of the populace anything vaguely resembling any sort of civil rights or any say in the governance of their own country.”
After a very questionable Presidential election which denied us a say in the governance of this country and after keeping people who protested that dubious election in solitary confinement without trial for about a year & a half (in complete contravention of their nominal civil rights) — your statement unfortunately seems to apply with equal force to the current US.
As Brian noted, China is not facing the US of 1945 or even 1990 — which is unfortunate for those of us living in the US and trying to keep out the way of our intrusive government.
Undoubtedly China has serious problems. And so do we. Let’s leave China to sort out its problems, while we finally start to get serious about fixing the declining conditions in our own country.
Seems to me that it’s becoming undeniably clear that our threat isn’t from China, or Russia, it’s from the WEF and the idiots/communists at the top of the Western world who agree with that Klaus guy, whoever the heck he is. That’s the great mystery of our time to me–who is really behind the Davos gang? It’s inexplicable to me that this guy could just start throwing his conference and it so quickly become so influential.
…your statement unfortunately seems to apply with equal force to the current US.
I quite deliberately kept my mention of the US to events from decades ago, during the last century.
The present day regime is nothing like that of 1930. It infamously chose to bail out Wall Street in 2008, to the detriment of the public and public finances, and I have no doubt it will eventually get to the point where it will club depositors and shoot dissidents, once it loses the ability to simply conjure new money into existence to give to its friends.
That is, if it survives. I suspect it won’t- but time will tell.
“I have no doubt it will eventually get to the point where it will club depositors and shoot dissidents”
Nah. Look at what Canada did to the truckers. This is the 21st century, not the 20th. You can destroy dissidents so much easier when everything is electronic. Freeze their assets, shut them off the internet, arrest a few of the leaders, and poof, protesters go bye bye.
That’s the great mystery of our time to me–who is really behind the Davos gang?
I don’t think it’s such a mystery. The Davos gang is simply the wealthiest people of the Western World. Of course these folks are open to joining with an ideology touted by by the WEF, because it give them a rationalization to do what they wanted to do anyway.
They are bitterly resentful that they have to pretend to care about the interests and the fate of the swarms of peasants who infect the world and- at long last- they have simply decided that they will not.
Hence, the insane plans to stop using fertilizer to grow food, along with the murderous demands that everyone get injected with a dangerous pretend vaccine to stop an illness that kills about as often as the flu.
They hate us and want us dead or enslaved. Never forget that.
Nah. Look at what Canada did to the truckers. This is the 21st century, not the 20th. You can destroy dissidents so much easier when everything is electronic. Freeze their assets, shut them off the internet, arrest a few of the leaders, and poof, protesters go bye bye.
Except this is an iterative process that has not run to completion.
The Canadian truckers protested they way they did because they thought they had rights and they had noticed that the left won great success by their protests.
By forcing the Canadian regime to cancel those protesters, I think the truckers won a notable victory, even if they suffered because of it.
They ripped the mask down and exposed the true nature of the Canadian regime.
There isn’t any going back for them, ever. I will posit that no one will believe the pious nonsense about rights and protests ever again, no matter how many times Justin Castro spouts off about it.
The hapless opposition in Canada, led by no one worth remembering, has already replaced its… uhm, “leader,” with someone who at least notices that the WEF isn’t his friend.
Well Canada is now going to take everyone’s guns, and we saw how much the Aussies, who were disarmed years ago, rolled over for their police state, so I’m not optimistic that the truckers “won” anything, but I guess we’ll see how the future goes. As far as I can tell Canada is basically like our blue states that have big cities, where the urban population decides everything, and they’re now on course to completely demolish their rural areas. Which will destroy their country, but they don’t care any more, of course.
I was actually born in Canada and I know from personal experience that the picture painted by Americans including myself doesn’t quite match the real. I’ve also read from far away that Australia is far less disarmed than the media says.
I’ve said it before- which I remember even if no one else does- that we are living the collapse as envisioned in The Fourth Turning.
A key feature of the failing regimes that are destroying the entire Western World is that they imagine that the headlines their media friends write for them are depictions of the real.
They aren’t. Any seeming victory by these vermin is shrieked to the ends of the Earth, any defeat is never spoken of. They infamously pushed “vaccine” mandates upon an unwilling populace, in my area LOUDLY firing any nurses who declined- then later called them back to work with no mention at all in the so-called media. I only heard about that because I work with someone who knew some of the people involved. I also note that in my industry there was so much pushback on these mandates that they were dropped entirely before any court decision against them was even issued. I’m pretty sure the opposition was serious, because people at my job simply stopped showing up for work when they thought they’d be fired for refusing the shots.
It amazes me just a bit that the folks who’ve spent my entire life attacking the Rule of Law, ignoring laws they don’t like, refusing enforce any law at all against the criminals they love and admire- somehow they think that if they can just pass a law banning “assault weapons” they’ll disarm their opponents and then rule with impunity forever.
Nope. I’ll hazard a guess that Justin Castro and his pets aren’t going to disarm that many Canadians at all, especially those that aren’t fans of idiotic tyranny.
Time will tell, of course…
Anyone else a bit confused about what’s going on with this Pelosi Taiwan trip? She’s a crook and has been hopelessly in bed with the ChiComs, and now we’re supposed to believe she’s standing up to Beijing as a hero? Are we supposed to be stupid? (Don’t answer that please.)
Now I see stories that there are trips from UK MOPs to Taiwan upcoming as well, and I’m just getting very uneasy about what’s going on, and why now.
(And I used to say that we should no doubt recognize Taiwan as independent, and make the ChiComs deal with it, but after kowtowing to Beijing forever, I’m uneasy about what the cretins in “our” government are up to now.)
Like for example, this:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/british-businesses-turning-away-china-industry-group-says-2022-07-30/
British businesses turning away from China, industry group says
ONDON, July 30 (Reuters) – British businesses are cutting ties with China due to concerns about political tensions, a shift that is likely to stoke inflationary pressures, the head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said in an interview published on Saturday.
So basically the “elites” sell us out to China, then blow up the system, cause monetary meltdown, then say that now they’re going to start to “decouple”, which oh the way will cause inflation.
Again, I don’t like being treated like an idiot.
“Anyone else a bit confused about what’s going on with this Pelosi Taiwan trip?”
You are not alone in your confusion. So many obvious questions — “General” Milley was quite happy to call up China’s military and assure them that he, Milley, would let them know if President Trump ordered him to take action against China. Now the same “General” Milley can’t arrange for the pilot of Nancy’s plane to be required to attend mandatory racial sensitivity training for the next few weeks? Sorry Nancy, no-one else is qualified to fly you.
The starting assumption here has to be that Nancy is staying bought and is doing exactly what the Chinese Communist Party is telling her to do. But why the CCP would order her to create an incident at this time seems totally obscure.
Wanna hear something else odd?
Why is Dem mouthpiece Tom Friedman saying that the White House doesn’t trust Zelensky and “there is funny business going on in Kiev”?
https://twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1554295873059840000
Poor Volodymyr. All the Vogue photo shoots aren’t going to matter when those in charge decree that he is and has always been a crook. He should have thrown in with Trump, sure the CIA would probably have offed him immediately, but it really was his only possible chance in the long run…
What about non-business organizations?…religions, military organizations, non-profits, etc…any other thoughts on this area?
I think you meant to post that in the other thread David…
Well, a US plane full of masked people has just landed in Taipei. What happens next?
Perhaps the CCP will declare a No Fly zone over Taiwan and keep Nancy there. (Please!).
Or, if they really want to screw with us, Chinese ships at the head of the line for unloading at US ports will simply up anchor and sail away.
Just another random thought on how to explain the confusing situation where Nancy Pelosi, presumably wholly-owned by the Chinese, has apparently caused Chairman Xi to lose face, impotently firing missiles into the sea. Maybe Xi has the same problem that President Trump faced — a disloyal Deep State?
From the beginning, China could just have laughed off a visit to Taiwan by an octogenarian lush who has little respect in the US. Instead, Xi chose to make a big deal out of it. And now, unless something changes radically, he has lost serious face in front of the Chinese people and the CCP. Why would Xi allow Pelosi to put him in this position?
Perhaps the answer is that the CCP is not monolithic, solely doing Xi’s bidding. There are other guys in the CCP who want his job, and some of them may have manipulated Pelosi & Xi into this position where Xi looks weak. Consequently, Xi may lose his bid for an unprecedented third term when the Communist Party Congress comes along later this year. Bad news for us is that whoever beats Xi for the top job is likely to get it by promising to be much more aggressive towards us capitalist running dogs.
What we hear from China here rarely, if ever, bears any relation to what is on Chinese media in China. I expect if you know where to look in a couple of days as information leaks out, it will be played as Xi’s great forbearance in the face of extreme provocation in the interest of peace inside China. No face lost, at least where it counts. So far I’m hearing that hackers are attacking the Taiwanese Presidential network which probably isn’t that different from any other day.
Whatever plans China had for Taiwan, Ukraine has probably caused some reassessment. China really doesn’t have any amphibious capability and the air assault on the Antonov Airport showed just how vulnerable such endeavors are to ground resistance. Taiwan has been preparing for an attack for 70 years and would make it very expensive for little gain.
My guess is you’re overthinking this, Gavin. Nancy just tried to make a ton of money off an investment in NVIDIA, but it got publicized so she took a bath instead. Now she goes to Taiwan to meet with their leaders and get a nice tour of some chip plants, you can bet her conversations involved how to make up those losses and make a ton of money. I think it’s all about her pocketbook.
The CCP has plenty of internal struggles. The Shanghai faction and the Beijing faction have always been at odds but the former seems to have been crushed pretty effectively. Xi will get his coronation, don’t have any doubts about that.
China’s never going to invade Taiwan. That they were about to do so was a joke decades ago. The PLA is for internal dissent suppression, not for external invasion. The CCP plan is to continue to wage economic war on the West, and before too long Taiwan will be so in bed with them economically, and the distant West will be much more relatively weak, and they’ll just decide to unify rather than fight it out, no invasion needed.
The taliban said you have the watches we have the time xi feels the same way
Brian: “… they’ll just decide to unify rather than fight it out, no invasion needed.”
We are in complete agreement on that. My guess is the CCP has had such success buying US politicians that they simply will do (are doing) the same thing with Taiwanese politicians.
But China made threatening noises against America because of Nancy’s visit — and has done nothing against the US, at least up till now. Cliff Notes version is old woman calls China’s bluff; Xi threatens and then backs down. Not a good look for Xi.
As always, time will tell.
Meanwhile
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2022/08/02/breitbart-business-digest-manchins-tax-hike-does-not-touch-amazons-biggest-tax-break/