Your salary information is out of date. Average Annual Salary for a Chinese working in an auto factory: ¥102,173 CNY (approx. $14,000–$15,000 USD based on projected exchange rates).
Also, Chinese auto factories are heavily automated now, even when compared to American auto factories.
Around 9? years ago, Chinese salaries without qualification in coastal city industries were between 600 and 800€/month + lodging (that caused issues in the countryside and less affluent areas that can't offer salaries as competitive), so at worst 7k, at best 10k. Auto workers should be somewhat qualified, so it should be a bit higher. Also the salaries might have grown since
China buys and deploys more robotics for manufacturing than any other country in the world. Automate or die as a business [1] [2]. It's not "cheap China labor" vs "expensive union labor"; it's labor vs automation.
And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected.
This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice.
This is one half of it that's correct, but the other half is the US is in a late stage capitalism death spiral.
On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future).
Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more.
A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example.
Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
I’m not sure dems are willing to go out on a limb for EVs. Other environmental things sure, but EV has become kind of toxic over the last 5 years. Which is a shame.
They pushed it hard during the Biden years. Thats partly why GM went so hard into it. If they manage to really elect an AOC type candidate next time, they will definitely go back to it. Maybe if they get a Fetterman like candidate, they will back off but I dont think thats going to happen given everything that has transpired election wise over the last year or so.
Example for me: I am primarily a web dev today. I needed some kuberntes stuff setup. Usually that’s 4 hours of google and guess and check. Claude did it better in 15 minutes.
Even if all it does is speed up the stuff i suck at, that’s plenty. Oh boy docker builds, saves my bacon there too.
And you learned nothing and have no clue if what it spit out is good or not.
How can you even assume what it did is "better" if you have no knowledge of kubernetes in the first place? It's mere hope.
Sure it gets you somewhere but you learned nothing in the way and now depend on the LLM to maintain it forever given you don't want to learn the skill.
I use LLMs to help verify my work and it can sometimes spot something I missed (more often it doesn't but it's at least something). I also automate some boring stuff like creating more variations of some tests, but even then I almost always have to read its output line by line to make sure the tests aren't completely bogus. Thinking about it now it's likely better if I just ask for what scenarios could be missing, because when they write it, they screw it up in subtle ways.
It does save me some time in certain tasks like writing some Ansible, but I have to know/understand Ansible to be confident in any of it.
These "speedups" are mostly short term gains in sacrifice for long term gains. Maybe you don't care about the long term and that's fine. But if you do, you'll regret it sooner or later.
My theory is that AI is so popular because mediocrity is good enough to make money. You see the kind of crap that's built these days (even before LLMs) and it's mostly shit anyways, so whether it's shit built by people or machines, who cares, right?
Unfortunately I do, and I rather we improve the world we live in instead of making it worse for a quick buck.
IDK how or why learning and growing became so unpopular.
> Sure it gets you somewhere but you learned nothing in the way and now depend on the LLM to maintain it forever given you don't want to learn the skill.
The kind of person who would vibe code a bunch of stuff and push it with zero understanding of what it does or how it does it is the kind of person who’s going to ruin the project with garbage and technical debt anyway.
Using an LLM doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the results it produces. You should still check it results. You should correct it when it doesn’t meet your standards. You still need to understand it well enough to say “that seems right”. This isn’t about LLMs. This is just about basic care for quality.
But also, I personally don’t care about being an expert at every single thing. I think that is an unachievable dream, and a poor use of individual time and effort. I also pay people to do stuff like maintenance on my car and installing HVAC systems. I want things done well. That doesn’t mean I have to do them or even necessarily be an expert in them.
I think it is more accurate to say some skills are declining (or not developing) while a different set of skills are improving (the skill of getting an LLM to produce functional output).
Similar to if someone started writing a lot of C, their assembly coding skills may decline (or at least not develop). I think all higher levels of abstraction will create this effect.
I agree with both of your points since I use LLMs for things I am not good at and dont give a single poop about. The only things i did with LLMs are three examples from the last two years:
- Some "temporary" tool I built years ago as a pareto-style workaround broke. (As temporary tools do after some years). Its basically a wrapper that calls a bunch of XSLs on a bmecat.xml every 3-6 months. I did not care to learn XSL back then and I dont care to do it now. Its arcane and non-universal - some stuff only works with certain XSL processors. I asked the LLM to fix stuff 20 times and eventually it got it. Probably got that stuff off my back another couple years.
- Some third party tool we use has a timer feature that has a bug where it sets a cookie everytime you see the timer once per timer (for whatever reason... the timers are set to end a certain time and there is no reason to attach it to a user). The cookies have a life time of one year. We run time limited promotions twice a week so that means two cookies a week for no reason. Eventually our WAF got triggered because it has a rule to block requests when headers are crazy long - which they were because cookies. I asked an LLM to give me a script that clears the cookie when its older than 7 days because I remember the last time i hacked together cookie stuff it also felt very "wtf" in a javascript kinda way and I did not care to relive that pain. This was in place until the third party tool fixed the cookie lifetime for some weeks.
- We list products on a marketplace. The marketplace has their own category system. We have our own category system. Frankly theirs kinda suck for our use case because it lumps a lot of stuff together, but we needed to "translate" the categories anyway. So I exported all unique "breadcrumbs" we have and gave that + the categories from the marketplace to an LLM one by one by looping through the list. I then had an apprentice from another dept. that has vastly more product knowledge than me look over that list in a day. Alternative would have been to have said apprentice do that stuff by hand, which is a task I would have personally HATED so I tried to lessen the burden for them.
All these examples are free tier in whatever I used.
We also use a vector search at work. 300,000 Products with weekly updates of the vector db.
We pay 250€ / mo for all of the qdrant instances across all environments and like 5-10 € in openai tokens. And we can easily switch whatever embedding model we use at anytime. We can even selfhost a model.
But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.
If the carpenter took 1/3 of the project quote, built half a table, and decided to quit and join the circus, would he keep the fee? For a carpenter it would be a small claims court, for this it’s a gift. Which is weird.
You are right—if the carpenter just ran away, he would usually be sued.
But in this specific case, the client (publisher) agreed to let him go.
It’s more like: The carpenter said "I'm quitting to join the circus," and the client said, "Fine, keep the deposit, just leave."
In finance, we call this a "Write-off" to maintain relationships or avoid legal costs. It seems the publisher decided it wasn't worth fighting over.
Ah yes, because the US has been sooooo fucking supportive recently. Give me a fucking break. Your GDP is bigger than ours, and you claim to give more aid to Ukraine, but you haven't even remotely matched it. The sheer fucking arrogance of you.
> Can you help Ukraine enough so it can win?
Can you (the American executive) stop collaborating with Russia[1]?
> If not you can’t defend your own countries alone.
Are we talking about the EU or Europe here? Because only one is relevant to the Euro here. It's important to get this right, because it does tend to get confused by bystanders from the far side of the Atlantic.
The Baltics are in the Eurozone. If Russia invaded the Baltics tomorrow, Europe would be dependent on America to stay intact. That isn’t really a risk one wants to take with a reserve asset.
Do central banks really asses the risk of total collapse of the Euro (only) in response to Russia's currently frazzled military launching an invasion against NATO borderlands which NATO fails to mount any effective defence as higher than than the risk the current US administration freezes assets for arbitrary and capricious[1] reasons?
In practice, of course, most countries are willing to accept both risks.
[1]a lot of states that can be reasonably confident that they won't provoke the US in the manner Saddam Hussein or Putin did whether they're friendly or not can be rather less confident the current president won't take extreme measures in response to something completely innocuous like jailing someone for domestic corruption, being a source of emigrants to the United States or maintaining a trade surplus...
It's worth emphasizing this: without the US Navy, the remaining European powers don't have the naval force to stop Russia from blockading the Baltics. And without the ability to break such a blockade, there's little hope in aiding the Baltics against a land invasion from Russia and Belarus. Russia wants a land route to Kaliningrad, and they'll take it at this rate.
My understanding is that European Air and Ground forces have been able to deter or destroy Soviet/Russian Naval operations in the North and Baltic Seas since the start of the cold war. Land based anti-ship missiles have more than enough range to cover the entire water way on their own.
This was a major reason the Soviet Union and now Russia never invested in a large navy outside of Submarines.
Where would this blockade be? In the NATO sea (baltic sea)? Covered by European Nato countries at every direction, and then whole entry passes through Denmark.
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