Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers.
What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful.
The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.
> tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”
Its at least the largest industry manufacturing here, I'd expect.
I have friends that work in manufacturing in the US though, it does happen.
One, for example, runs a family business making steel buildings and storm shelters. They use American made steel if I'm not mistaken, I'm less certain about other inputs like the paint or equipment used (certainly the welders, heavy equipment, etc are foreign).
Another works in the automotive industry. Parts come in from overseas and we largely just assemble vehicles here today, but I'm not so sure how different that is from software.
I write code on foreign hardware that runs in someone else's server farm also running foreign hardware.
Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured. US employees designed the software, but for tax purposes the manufacturing technically happened offshore.
Software is a huge industry, but it is still heavily dependent on globalization.
> Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured.
I don't recall this at all. What software was it?
Going through my box of ancient software, they all either say made in the US either on the CD/DVD or on the packaging, except for a copy of Office 97 and Office 2007 which says made in Puerto Rico (which is the US).
They certainly had CDs pressed in other countries for foreign markets. I imagine some foreign made laptops might have come with CD/DVDs pressed in those countries.
Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers.
What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful.
The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.