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842 points putzdown | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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NoTeslaThrow ◴[] No.43706451[source]
We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

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strict9 ◴[] No.43707764[source]
>We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."

Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.

I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.

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chii ◴[] No.43715154[source]
> Business culture is eating its own young

it's not eating its own young. It's externalizing the costs.

And it's understandable, because the cost of employees are perhaps the largest line item in the budget.

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ozmodiar ◴[] No.43715926{3}[source]
Perhaps it's more accurate to say capitalist culture is eating its own young, due to its fixation on business culture. And I'm saying that as basically a capitalist. Not sure where we go from here.
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sorcerer-mar ◴[] No.43724373{4}[source]
Shareholder supremacy is the problem.

We can go back to stakeholder capitalism.

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1. chii ◴[] No.43725291{5}[source]
What's the difference?

Unless a stakeholder can become a stakeholder without putting in risk capital of course.

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2. sorcerer-mar ◴[] No.43727480[source]
Do you have a stake in whether your water supply is full of arsenic?

Yup!

Do you have a stake in whether the people in your community work unsafe jobs for poverty wages?

Yup!

From Claude:

"Stakeholder capitalism is a model where businesses focus on serving the interests of all parties affected by the company's operations - including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. The core belief is that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just investors.

Shareholder supremacy, on the other hand, is a model where a company's primary or sole purpose is to maximize returns for its shareholders. This view, popularized by economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s, holds that businesses have no social responsibility beyond making profits for their owners while following the law."

Shareholder supremacy is a recent meme and it's wildly, obviously antisocial.