To who? There are ~300 million people in the United States. He could give each one a $500 check (assuming he didn't want to keep any of his $150bn). Or should he give it to the U.S. treasury? It's $38 trillion in debt, so he could give up all of his money to pay off 0.004% of it.
Please let me put a data center in your back yard. Please just one more I promise the chat bots will help you email faster please bro AGI is just around the corner I promise it wont be an exponential multiplier on wealth concentration.
We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.
We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money.
He is not causally connecting "AI" with industry and manufacturing here. Building data centers isn't manufacturing. He says in this piece that energy production needs to come first, and manufacturing later and not the other way around. Is he saying that AI will require building out energy production and the increased energy production will be used for... manufacturing? But it'll be used for the data centers.
What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems? It's weapons isn't it[1].
That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization, because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from before.
Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get it.
Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's "entirely there".
My grandfather worked in the aleganey forge running the tempering ovens for very large metal forgings.
Raised a family,4 kids, kept the farm, retired and lived 30years more, and there was some money left for everybody.
He bemoned the selling off?, out, of american manufacturing that began in the 1970's.
He was the kind of american who was comfortably unaware of the rest of the world, perhaps ever so slightly embarassed by his unworldlyness, only having a high school educatiin, but also completly untroubled by anything, anywhere, ever bieng a real concern.He had worked on the 16" guns
that are still to be seen on the decks of WWII battleships.
But instead of an enduring world peace and prosperity he got to see the errosion of the american dream, and the desruction of americas strength from within.
As a further illustration, granpa and grandma, used to go visit "uncle kieth"in
NYC, St.marks place, 6th st, between 2nd and 3rd ave, manhatten, in the 70's ,80's and early 90's, stayed in the truck camper, parked on the street,an unspoken,unwritten imunity convieghed by that little bit of mud in the fender wells.
People love the abundance of cheap affordable stuff more than they love their neighbors having work.
It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain moral purity, of course).
Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and towards spending more money for less goods.
Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to land lines.
There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.
For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?
The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine.
The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
Manufacturing jobs were only "good jobs" in comparison to the alternatives available at the time. The other options in the US have gotten better in the last 50 years. As much as people hate on service industry jobs, they're much less physically dangerous than working in a mid-20th century manufacturing plant.
A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.
I think with the advancement of manufacturing techniques the future is in small run manufacturing. Manufacturing won’t return with a few companies employing thousands of people. My thinking is that manufacturing will return with thousands of companies employing around 10 people. The future will be more customized solving detailed problems with unique specification.
Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this, and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.
Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done.
If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it.
If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.
To some extent, the pay rate for a lot of jobs comes down the available candidate pool for those jobs. The easier/simpler a job is for anyone to step into, the more likely it is to have a lower pay associated with it. As an addition, regarding service jobs, a lot of the times, you get what you put in... at this point, most customer service interactions I've generally seen have been poor at best.
Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up.
Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether.
Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well.
I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch.
Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work.
Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws.
Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in.
So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible.
We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.
I think you should read up on comparative advantage and the roy model of labor. Forced onshoring is likely to hurt US productivity and large wage gaps arise because of self-selection driven by correlations in productivity across jobs.
Jobs aren’t good or not because they government declares it so by fiat, there’s substantive differences between different kinds of jobs. “Service jobs” are bad because they typically require little skill, just a human body physically present in the U.S.
In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
Onshoring manufacturing and bringing back the US manufacturing base is a critical issue. This is from a social and security pov. Having millions of young men wallowing around playing video games and drugs all day and not working, raising families, is disgusting and a sign of collapse. We need manufacturing back in a big way, unfortunately I don't think that Trump, despite also thinking that, has the vision or ability to make it happen.
> In a recent speech, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined his plan for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America: force companies to build AI infrastructure in America.
Not self-serving at all.
> Since founding Nvidia in 1993, he has overseen its transformation into a central supplier of computing platforms for AI, data centers, and high-performance systems. That position provides direct exposure to the industrial requirements behind digital innovation, including power generation, fabrication capacity, and workforce availability. From this vantage point, energy is the basis of the economy from which everything is built.
This reads just like AI slop: I am applying for a government advisor position. Can you please write me a short paragraph linking the work experience listed in my resume with the position?
This doesn't make sense. Nvidia literally has offices all over the world including India (a country that gets the most flak for offshoring). So why now ? Suddenly, "offshoring bad" ? I don't buy it. I think it is more about AI data centers. I could be wrong.
Either political posturing, or he sees the United States beginning to rapidly accelerate ($$$) certain sectors or companies as part of a strategic development effort, much like China often does. Possibly a mix of both.
That's all well and good, but he is literally at this moment attempting to export industrial capacity to China at a direct tradeoff to it's availability to the US, even when he could sell it at the same price.
"Corporate welfare recipients that got free money to build data centers, testing the water on asking for more free money to hire employees."
The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.
90 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 82.3 ms ] threadTo who? There are ~300 million people in the United States. He could give each one a $500 check (assuming he didn't want to keep any of his $150bn). Or should he give it to the U.S. treasury? It's $38 trillion in debt, so he could give up all of his money to pay off 0.004% of it.
All the talk of energy and no mention of solar, wind, batteries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4
We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.
We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money.
There will be a giant sucking sound going south.
Why does it seem like it is getting pushed down relative to other posts that have less upvotes and with longer times?
Here are some posts that are currently higher ranked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445412 currently 8 hours and 82 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465493 currently 4 hours and 29 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497589 currently 5 hours and 82 points
It does not make sense unless some force is pushing the Jensen post down, or the other posts up?
What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems? It's weapons isn't it[1].
That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization, because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from before.
Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get it.
Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's "entirely there".
[1]: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/se...
It's also a positive feedback loop, where the less money people have from a lack of good jobs, the more they will choose cheap foreign goods to buy. Never mind that if you are in an economically productive sector, this whole cheap shit bonanza is just pure upside for you (with a touch of dissonance to maintain moral purity, of course).
Bringing jobs "back" probably isn't going to do much. We need a cultural shift away from Temu, Shine, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and towards spending more money for less goods.
Which is going to be about as popular as proposing we go back to land lines.
For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?
The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine.
The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.
There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.
We've also decided that labor needs to be taxed more heavily than capital, which is fucking stupid.
Taxing the lower end of society who actually works at a higher rate than wealthy people is just so shortsighted.
Every jobs post: "this doesn't fix X" 'this isn't the biggest issue'.
And the republicans keep dog walking straight to their goals while we talk about the best arrangement for deck chairs.
If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.
This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.
There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it.
If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.
Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up.
Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether.
Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well.
I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.
There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch.
Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work.
Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in.
So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible.
We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.
In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
"AI" is going to coincidentally collapse the same time this tyrannical presidency ends
what drugs are you doing where you truly believe eliminating millions of jobs is going to bring "prosperity"
it's going to "silo" wealth even further and make everything more unaffordable
next generation won't even be able to own a car forget a home
Not self-serving at all.
> Since founding Nvidia in 1993, he has overseen its transformation into a central supplier of computing platforms for AI, data centers, and high-performance systems. That position provides direct exposure to the industrial requirements behind digital innovation, including power generation, fabrication capacity, and workforce availability. From this vantage point, energy is the basis of the economy from which everything is built.
This reads just like AI slop: I am applying for a government advisor position. Can you please write me a short paragraph linking the work experience listed in my resume with the position?
Don’t worry, soon they’ll earn as much as those without PhDs and college degrees thanks to LLM overlords. What an absolute clown.
The cycle repeats: send jobs somewhere else, hold those jobs hostage until the government pays you to bring them home. It will take the form of tax holiday on bringing foreign cash home, etc.