[HN Gopher] America underestimates the difficulty of bringing ma...
___________________________________________________________________
America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing
back
Author : putzdown
Score : 713 points
Date : 2025-04-15 13:50 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.molsonhart.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.molsonhart.com)
| ysofunny wrote:
| it's like they believe building is as quick as destroying. almost
| like they think delete can be ctrl+z'ed back into undeleted very
| quickly
|
| a generation of kids that never lost all their work because they
| didn't hit ctrl+s at the correct moment is now trying to run
| things
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Weird take, since most of the people still in charge are old
| boomers who've barely even learned to use a computer.
| drittich wrote:
| I think the main point stands, though, which is that you
| can't undo to the previous state. E.g., rolling back all
| tariffs/deportations/firings/budget cuts would not undo the
| damage done.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Some very old kids, yeah. With a almost baby-like
| understanding of the world.
| shin_lao wrote:
| Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Well, sure, but perhaps some kind of _plan_ is warranted?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Isn't the point of capitalism to _not_ have a plan and let
| the market figure it out?
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Capitalism as such went out the window with tariffs.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| No, purely free markets (which weren't free to start off
| with) went out the window.
| Scarblac wrote:
| That's what we did, and it moved everything to China.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| China, who do have an industrial strategy. It worked for
| them.
| goku12 wrote:
| I'm sure that the capitalists would disagree in this
| instance.
| davidw wrote:
| How are markets going to figure anything out with tariffs
| changing every day, depending on the mood of dear leader?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That's a problem for the markets to suss out.
| fullshark wrote:
| They've sussed out that if you suck up to him he'll give
| you an exemption. Of course if you are a medium sized
| business you are screwed and have to wait in line, but
| you'll get your chance as long as you can hold on through
| the summer.
|
| In two years of course it won't matter.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| sounds about right.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > They've sussed out that if you suck up to him he'll
| give you an exemption
|
| It's a very thinly veiled protection racket. People do
| tend to repeat the plays that they know.
| forinti wrote:
| Countries that believe that are dominated by those who
| plan.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Citation needed. How did those five year plans go?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Seem to be doing OK, actually
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China
| singron wrote:
| It's a principle of capitalism, but taken to the extreme,
| it's just a strawman. At this point, I think we are pretty
| sure that some interventions make capitalism better.
|
| This post is specifically about Industrial Policy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
|
| But other effective interventions are anti-trust and
| demand-inducing regulation (e.g. people want to fly because
| they know it's safe).
| InkCanon wrote:
| The free market (which I think people also include in
| capitalism) would correctly predict labour intensive jobs
| would be outsourced. This is very much a feature
| (comparative advantage), not a bug. I realized a lot of
| supposedly free market people don't even know the basics of
| it. Politically the free market has become an identity
| associated with national greatness and a sense of control
| of ones destiny. The dominant feeling seems to be if you
| have a free market, you will win everything (which is
| actually opposite from the truth).
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| No, of course not. That's oversimplifying to the point of
| idiocy.
|
| Markets do not mean that an Industrial strategy /
| Industrial policy is not needed.
|
| Markets respond to incentives created by such a strategy.
| bluGill wrote:
| The point of Capitalism is Marx needed a straw man to tear
| down. The world has never seen what he envisioned.
|
| What you might call capitalists very much plan. They don't
| believe in central planning where one "guy" makes a plans
| and everyone else implements them, but they do plan.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > they do plan.
|
| I've just sat through a long meeting with lots of Jiras
| and Q2 objectives. Trust me, there's planning. Lots of
| planning.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Marx never said that capitalists didn't plan. In fact,
| the possibility of the transition from late stage
| capitalism/imperialism to socialism is based on that very
| fact, capital got concentrated in very big companies with
| internal planification. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
| postalrat wrote:
| Who is going to commit the resources to make serious money
| losing plans vs manufacturing overseas?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| IIRC correctly, the previous administration did try to do
| some of the slow, steady imperfect work of planning to
| gradually bring back key industries.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act and
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24195811/biden-ev-
| factory...
|
| Of course, the voters wanted something else.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Which is why things that bring back manufacturing to the US is
| something we were doing. It's just unfortunate that instead of
| continuing that, the current administration is trying undermine
| the effective efforts of the previous administration's actions
| that helped bring manufacturing back into the US.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| No, it doesn't. There is a presumption that manufacturing is
| Better, a more ideal way of organizing the economy, based on a
| false nostalgia of America past.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| sure, but it will take longer than 4 or 8 years and everyone in
| power wants their own thing, not continuity. it cannot happen
| without a long term plan and long term plans cannot happen if
| have, maybe, a year to do things and the rest is election time.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| It's easy to bring manufacturing back, just give it a decade or
| two, but impossible to make it internationally competitive
| without large-scale market regulation such as tariffs or handing
| out government subsidies.
| firejake308 wrote:
| My problem with large-scale market regulation is that it also
| increases the price of inputs for companies who would otherwise
| be interested in building a factory in the US. Do you have a
| solution for that?
| js8 wrote:
| Why would you incentivize foreign companies to do that, when
| you want American companies to build factories in US?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Inputs are cheaper (and thus have lower tariffs in an
| absolute sense) than outputs. I think the author
| underestimates the ability of the market to adapt to
| incentives.
|
| They're still correct though that there are plenty of good
| reasons why we don't do manufacturing in the US right now,
| and tariffs do absolutely nothing to change that reality,
| they just artificially make the alternative worse at
| significant expense to consumers.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I feel misunderstood. I'm definitely not advocating for
| tariffs. The point is that even if this strategy worked for
| bringing manufacturing back (it won't in general and
| widespread because of labor shortage), it would result in
| products that are not going to be internationally
| competitive.
| viraptor wrote:
| This view is too trivial. You could also stimulate
| manufacturing by promising tariffs increasing over the next X
| years, while not taxing the imported building materials and
| machines for longer. Or you could use tariffs to both break
| trade and make the environment too expensive and uncertain to
| invest in large construction - and delay the process by a few
| extra years.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I don't see how this is a reply to my point. Building up
| manufacturing takes a decade or longer (putting the problem
| aside that there aren't going to be enough workers). Tariffs
| are heavy market regulation. Even if manufacturing was
| brought back successfully, the production costs would be too
| high without such heavy market regulation.
|
| You seem to assume that once manufacturing has been brought
| back it would somehow be internationally competitive. I don't
| see how that's possible.
|
| Maybe I didn't get your point.
| vFunct wrote:
| Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories.
| We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach
| each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and
| physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform
| manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or
| cleaning toilets.
|
| Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by
| a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?
|
| Economics works when the people do the things they are most
| efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper
| than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them
| instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.
|
| Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as
| third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.
| rizpanjwani wrote:
| And yet A&W campaign for 1/3 pounder failed against MacDonald
| quarter pounder because Americans believed 1/4 > 1/3.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The Quarter Pounder plus
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But aren't China's learning outcomes higher in calculus,
| physics, etc?
|
| Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the
| world.
| vFunct wrote:
| There's a lot more to our education than that. Additionally,
| our REAL competitive advantage are our universities. We have
| the best universities in the world, by far, and that's what
| drives our economy over all others as we create the most
| valuable intellectual property.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That doesnt really address how the leading manufacturer is
| also leading in the metrics you said are opposed to leading
| in manufacturing.
| fullshark wrote:
| At its root I think this is driven by anxiety over how America
| would perform in a hot war, rose colored glasses culturally
| regarding the post WW2 era, and acknowledging that there's no
| real economic growth opportunity in America for unskilled
| labor, it's merely a way to tread water now.
| lesbolasinc wrote:
| going to have to give you kudos and steal that last part of
| "unskilled factory labour being a way to just tread water"
|
| i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware
| system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual
| labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on
| and its asinine to pretend it is.
|
| I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has
| picked up the steam it has
| cpursley wrote:
| Typical coastalist ivory tower thinking. No wonder we're in a
| pickle...
| bluedino wrote:
| Yet, 40% of our students can't read at a basic level.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I think its more complicated than this. People don't want to
| work in factories _per se,_ but what a world where labor has
| actual power. The big thing that offshoring did was strip the
| power of local labor to enforce certain reasonable conditions
| on employers and this allowed normal people to live stable,
| even comfortable lives.
|
| Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets
| but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little
| to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet.
| What Americans really want is _more control_ over their lives
| and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for
| that ideal.
|
| I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the
| end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more
| power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest
| that power back from a system which has leaned ever more
| towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and
| labor.
| api wrote:
| The problem with an exclusively intellectual economy is that it
| easily loses touch with reality entirely. You end up with
| generations of people who have no idea how anything works or
| how to actually make anything or do things in the real world.
|
| Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not
| all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent
| pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in
| the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality
| that cannot be learned from books or computers.
| lesbolasinc wrote:
| this is what i've been saying - critical manufacturing should
| of course be brought on shore but I don't understand the idea
| of bringing back "the assembly of hyper niche part that country
| Y can produce extremely cheaply but America can't even
| reasonably produce in quality" to American shores.
|
| It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that
| hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg,
| let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality
| as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.
|
| I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying
| American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans
| can do it better. That's free market economics, either get
| better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do
| better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially
| defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with
| shittier subpar products.
|
| Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.
| gowings97 wrote:
| Because you cannot hide the imbalance of disconnecting yourself
| from the material reality that's involved with making your
| lifestyle possible by outsourcing to other human beings, over
| multiple decades, without it coming back to bite you in one
| form or another.
|
| See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died
| from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically
| those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow
| collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the
| Soviet Union.
|
| A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly
| source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made
| possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely
| disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs
| because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside
| the country, it will come back to bite you.
|
| "Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an
| appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment
| essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should
| be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.
| vFunct wrote:
| You didn't explain exactly why we need that physical
| connection. You just broadly complained. Every one of your
| statements could be refuted by globalists saying its
| perfectly fine for foreigners to perform our manual labor for
| us instead.
| gowings97 wrote:
| Because in the absence of that physical connection you
| begin to accumulate a social and economic debt that will
| eventually come due, because sooner or later that 80%
| working in the service economy will come for the remaining
| 15-20%. Domestic manufacturing made possible by some degree
| of anti-dumping/tariffs would at least create a more
| balanced distribution of this wealth.
|
| Globalist trade promoters are just short-term wishful /
| magical thinkers. It's magical thinking that you can create
| this social and economic imbalance via outsourcing it to
| the other side of the globe, without consequences over the
| long run. It's wishful thinking that there are enough upper
| middle class jobs / lifestyle for everyone that took
| Calculus.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| Americans fantasize about factory work because, at that time in
| America, you could afford a home without a two-income family.
| Life was "easier" for many people.
|
| Personally, I think we need to focus on making things like
| homes more affordable. This would go a long way toward
| alleviating people's feeling of being trapped.
| ipdashc wrote:
| > Life was "easier" for many people.
|
| It's definitely less of a factor compared to money, but I
| can't help wonder if in addition to being able to afford
| stuff, it's the idea that there used to be a "default" path
| that carried some sort of dignity. Dirty jobs have never been
| outright glamorous, but there's still a kind of respect that
| American society confers upon "traditional" industrial work -
| think the classic image of the humble American coal miner,
| factory worker, or farmer. "It ain't much, but it's honest
| work." I think the thought is that however you did in school
| and in the upper-class-employment rat race, anyone could find
| a stable, respectable, long-term job - probably even get
| trained on the job - in an industry that really _matters_ ,
| that does useful stuff for the country.
|
| Now? If you fail to jump through all the office-job hoops of
| picking a fancy field, getting a degree, finding internships,
| dressing up nice, keeping a clean record, acing job
| interviews, etc. Or if those fancy jobs just aren't hiring
| near you. What are the "default" job options most people are
| left with? Working retail at Walmart? Putting fries in the
| bag at McDonalds? Janitorial? Driving a truck? Doordashing
| burritos?
|
| Obviously the main thing the lack of stability and decent pay
| in these jobs, but when it comes to public perception and
| fantasizing, like you said, I wonder if a part of it is just
| that these service sector jobs feel... shittier. Less
| important for society.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| Manufacturing doesn't have to involve large amounts of low-
| skill manual labor. It can be highly automated and serve as a
| source of jobs for engineers.
| gedy wrote:
| > our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like
| we were oxen.
|
| Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to
| fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the
| dole.
| abcde777 wrote:
| The idea that everyone can just do knowledge work is pretty
| unrealistic, to put it mildly.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| And that is not working out...
|
| What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and
| useless degrees. While the counties like China do "theirs
| world" work produce smarter and more capable workforce all
| while doing the mundane work too.
|
| I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not
| so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on
| them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a
| society where the average person they interact with has a far
| above average IQ. So for those who don't balance red/black
| trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need
| jobs too.
|
| On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled
| many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It's
| not good for any nation to be completely void of entire
| industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate
| the thinking minds with new problems to solve.
|
| But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and
| they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a
| strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.
| jballer wrote:
| To the contrary, they think of manual and "low-skill" labor as
| an essential undertaking that no person or society is above.
|
| You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it
| should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it
| someone else's problem.
| vFunct wrote:
| Everyone wants to think they're the most valuable thing in
| the world, but economics doesn't care about how much people
| value themselves. It only cares about when both buyer and
| seller agrees to the value of their work.
|
| You may think a farm worker deserves $500,000,000 a year, but
| that won't matter until someone else decides to pay them
| that.
|
| Ultimately, it's OK to say some things are more valuable than
| others, including the value of your labor.
| cogs wrote:
| But how many citizens know calculus, literature and physics?
| Certainly not enough know history - or US democracy wouldn't be
| facing the threat it does now.
|
| The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is
| healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must
| be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who
| got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.
|
| Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to
| college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and
| doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as
| about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or
| kingpin drug dealer.
| charlie90 wrote:
| >Economics works when the people do the things they are most
| efficient at.
|
| If you believe this statement, then you must be supportive of
| open borders.
|
| People in China might be more efficient at doing local US
| service jobs. Whose to say we dont let them do it?
| vFunct wrote:
| Yes. Now people understand why open borders are a good thing.
|
| Imagine how bad the US economy would be if we had tariffs and
| border controls between states.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire
| industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible. It processes
| all the raw materials and the recycling/reuse of off cuts through
| every possible way to turn those raw materials into components
| and then into goods with very little need for import from other
| countries. Its the complete system for a huge variety of goods.
|
| To compete with that the entire pipeline from raw materials
| through components and final product needs to be reproduced and
| its taken China 40+ years to build up to this capacity and
| capability.
|
| I think its something more countries should consider and do for
| certain pipelines but we are in a world with vast international
| trade and the winner(cheapest) takes most of the trade so
| whatever it is needs to be worth while within country.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Absolutely. Canada for example should not be shipping lumber
| and oil to the United States for further refinement. It should
| be processed domestically.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Why would that be better? Comparative advantage is real.
| digianarchist wrote:
| 1. Jobs.
|
| 2. Profits.
|
| 3. Refined products can be exported to countries that don't
| have refinement capabilities. Not just the US and China.
| This gives Canada better trade leverage.
|
| 4. Security. A big one that's emerged in the last few
| weeks.
|
| I don't see either Poilievre or Carney talking about this
| which is disappointing but not unexpected.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Canada and the US are long time allies and should be able to
| benefit from eachother without much hesitation. China is an
| adversary, big difference in posture.
| krapp wrote:
| Canada and the US are no longer allies.
| ben_w wrote:
| Unfortunately it's impossible to tell if they are de
| facto allies, because on the one hand they very much
| still are de jure still allies, and on the other all the
| stuff Trump is saying and doing.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Security allies? Sure. Economic allies? I don't think that
| has been the case for a long time. Even before Trump's
| second term.
|
| Canada and the US have been to court multiple times over
| NAFTA violations (sometimes Canada is at fault admittedly).
|
| https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-
| com...
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And if China invades Taiwan, which they have said for decades
| they will do (we just don't like to believe them), what then?
|
| Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar? If not, is our
| economy annihilated? We have no credible alternative to
| reshoring for this reason alone.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The relations between Taiwan and the US have nothing to do
| with "democracy". First it was about anti-communism, when the
| Chinese government fled there and the mainland was taken over
| by the communists. Now it is about anti-communism and "China
| containment". The fact that Taiwan transitioned to democracy
| in the 1980s is just convenient to feed the public that this
| is indeed about "democracy", "freedom", the usual.
|
| As a historical point, the US never had a problem with Taiwan
| being handed back to China at the end of WWII, since it is
| what happened. Again, this is all just a tool against the
| communists and then against China's increasing power as a
| whole.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Even if you are correct, we are in a situation where we
| risk having built our economy on the cheap labor of a
| Russia equivalent.
|
| If that Russia equivalent invades an Ukraine equivalent,
| despite both instances being considered unthinkably crazy,
| what are we going to do? Or, what will China do, to us?
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar?
|
| What democracy? Whose democracy?
|
| Trump _just_ blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine again.
| The entire administration keeps saying they will make Canada
| the 51st state and "destroy canada economically". They want
| to take Greenland by force. I don't think America cares much
| about democracy anymore, only dollars. China will take Taiwan
| and US will will keep buying chips like they always did.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And when a Democrat is back in power in 2029, and China
| invades in 2030, what will she do? Protect Taiwan and
| destroy the US economy as we endure the equivalent of an
| infinite tariff; or appear weak by saying "that's a shame",
| even if China is doing a Great Leap Forward on the
| population?
| gambiting wrote:
| I don't know and I wouldn't even hazard a guess. My
| entire observation right now as a non American is that
| America doesn't care about democracy anymore.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > cares much about democracy anymore
|
| Anymore? Arguably, the US never did. Ask, for example, the
| people living in Caribbean or Latin American countries what
| happened when they elected leaders that the US disliked.
|
| Or Iran. Or Italy. Or Congo. And so on.
|
| Or ask the Indonesians about the mass killings in their
| country in 1965-1966, supported by the US. Around 500,000
| people died, though some estimates put the number of deaths
| at 1,000,000. Ask the Filipinos about how the US propped up
| their military dictatorship back in the 1970s-1980s.
|
| I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The US
| has never been sincerely interested in democracy -- only
| strategically. The illusion that the US cared about
| democracy was a primarily Western luxury.
| danaris wrote:
| > I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore,
| only dollars.
|
| I don't think it's a good idea to assign Trump's beliefs,
| or those of his administration, to _America_ as a whole.
| Any more, frankly, than it 's a good idea to assign those
| of his opposition to the country as a whole.
| gambiting wrote:
| Well of course, but _right now_ they represent the
| country.
| danaris wrote:
| The country contains all of us, all the time.
|
| The leadership is not the country.
| gambiting wrote:
| And yet, the ruling government are the representatives of
| the country.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar?
|
| I've got some bad news for you.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire
| industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible.
|
| The incredible part is USA exported that entire sector to
| China.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| It wasn't just the USA, the entire west collectively.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| They saw extra profit $ and didn't consider the consequences.
| I suspect there was a bit of racism involved where they
| thought the Chinese would never learn to go from manufacturer
| to designing products nor master the entire pipeline and end
| up competing with them in the domestic market. China
| obviously did because they funded engineering education
| heavily and learnt all they needed to and surpassed the
| companies they built for some time ago.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I suspect there was a bit of racism involved
|
| Or they wanted access to sell to the Chinese market and
| they did whatever it took to get it.
| mclau157 wrote:
| Even getting workers to the factory is a concerted effort of
| trains and public transport, Americans would quickly clog the
| highways with millions of single occupant large vehicles
| without first investing in more efficient ways to move people
| cratermoon wrote:
| Scenario: someone builds a factory complex employing
| thousands of workers. Government builds and improves
| infrastructure and roads leading to and from that factory to
| get the workers in and out, as well as getting raw materials
| in and finished goods out. Someone properly points to the
| roads and says "you didn't build that", pundits freak out.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| This is true, and at the same time, this article is absolutely
| rife with unsourced, unserious points. However insane Trumps
| plans, the fundamental "facts" presented here are largely a
| joke.
|
| > Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they're
| physically faster with their hands; they can do things that
| American labor can't. It's years of accumulated skill, but it's
| also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education
| that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no
| people who are too fat to work. The workers don't storm off
| midshift, never to return to their job. You don't have people
| who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their
| disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory
| floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
|
| It's an actual joke to present something with such a derogatory
| view of the median American worker with no data to back it up.
| Most of America's "labor class" is in fact Mexican, the country
| with the highest annual hours worked per year. Secondly hours
| worked does not relate directly to productivity. American
| workers are the most productive in the world. [1]
|
| More importantly, _we don't manufacture like this anymore, even
| in China_. Doing "acrobatics" on the factory floor is now
| obsolete. Much of what's said here fails to acknowledge that we
| would _not_ build our supply chains the same way as China does.
| China had a surplus of human labor (one that's facing an
| impending demographic crisis) and so used human labor in ways
| modern western countries would not and do not.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/01/the-countries-
| where-... [2] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-
| robotics-race...
|
| Reproducing these supply chains is more possible than this
| article states. Doing it via destroying our economy however
| will not work.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| scrolled too far to see criticism about all that
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Molson has a Chinese spouse, directly benefitted from Chinese
| manufacturing for a long time, and often spouts direct propaganda
| from his X account so while he's likely to be right about a lot
| of things he had/has a strong incentive to not imagine
| alternatives to the status quo.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Try attacking the points he made in the article instead of him.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| What attacks? Fwiw: "he's likely to be right about a lot of
| things". Perhaps I should have been more specific: I think
| his analyses are mostly correct, his predictions are not.
|
| Subscribe to ground news so that you know what historically a
| news sources biases are.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| For example: "you can't imagine the cheap Chinese robots
| coming online"... Then what's stopping an American
| manufacturer from buying a Chinese robot, taking the tariff
| hit once, then manufacturing domestically with no tariff?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I don't really see what he said as an attack. It's good to
| have some "small print" sprinkles with the meal.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| No kidding!
|
| Beyond the obvious skilled labor there's supply chain network,
| maintenance, townships and supporting system around them.
|
| And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere
| else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the
| problem won't solve it either. Because more often than not it'll
| attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and
| move away.
| jmclnx wrote:
| And do not forget NIMBY :)
|
| Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House
| approved and built.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired.
|
| And then what happens when a new administration comes along
| 4-8 years down the line and decides to abandon some of those
| initiatives?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired._
|
| That has its own issues.
|
| Not sure if it's still the case, but the Yangtze River used
| to be one of the most polluted water bodies on earth.
| franktankbank wrote:
| St. Paul drinking water has suffered under 3m
| mismanagement.
| bluGill wrote:
| We can go too far into deregulation, but we are currently
| too far in regulation. Push for the correct middle
| ground.
|
| I'm not sure exactly what the correct middle ground looks
| like. I do know that there are signs of a good system.
|
| There can be no bribes in the system. All permits must
| have a clearly defined fee that is small and clearly
| covers the inspectors salary and no more. The vast
| majority of cases when you want to build it should be 30
| minutes from applying for the permit to it being granted.
| The rules are clearly written up and so it isn't hard to
| look up the law and write up a permit that cannot be
| refused.
|
| There are only rarely hearings. You have the right to do
| what you want on your property. If your neighbor doesn't
| like it for the most part they should have bought your
| property so you couldn't. You don't however have the
| right to let pollution escape your property - pollution
| isn't just things like chemicals, but also noise. In
| rural areas, or around airports we also give you rights
| to sun, wind, and airspace - in cities though you don't
| get to demand your garden isn't shaded. You don't get to
| tell someone what color to paint to use. You don't get to
| force any amount of parking (either minimum of maximum).
| You can't enforce building space (square foot, height).
| You don't get to tell someone not to run a business. You
| do get to require fire code such that any fire will not
| spread to your building, and if you want fire protection
| (which if you don't have you need to ensure smoke from an
| accidental fire won't affect the neighbors) the fire
| department can demand some additional features.
|
| There is probably a lot more, and the above isn't quite
| correct either, but it at least gives a place to state
| the debate from.
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| Americans have a very 1980s idea of manufacturing (and China in
| general) in that there aren't actually that many humans being
| used in Chinese factories let alone the American ones some of
| them want to build here. There's even a concept of, "Dark
| Factories" in China which are 100% automated factories that
| operate in the dark. The only jobs that will come from bringing
| manufacturing back to the states will be in automation,
| robotics, AI, and roles to support those things.
| mikevm wrote:
| Well, even a better argument to bring those factories to the
| US. Why not develop the know-how on manufacturing and improve
| automation in the US rather have China lead there.
| bluGill wrote:
| Because automation is expensive. It pays off in volume. A
| skilled human can often build a single widget faster than
| an engineer can write the automation for the robots
| (because a skilled human will see parts that don't fit and
| "file to fit" while the robot demands more effort to double
| check all that). When you only need 10, the program is
| faster to write, but you still need to pay for the robots
| and they are expensive (often $million each, while the
| human is only a few thousand for his time)
|
| Of course there are a lot variables in the above. As time
| goes one automation gets better. You can buy cheap robots
| for some common operations, and a good engineer with good
| CAD can run various automated analysis to ensure fit and
| then export to the robot and build even a single part
| cheaper than the human - amortizing the cost of the robot
| over thousands of different single parts made this way.
| However as the widget gets more complex you reach the point
| where humans are needed. In some cases you just have humans
| to take the parts off of one machine and put them into the
| next, but it is still humans. We can automate even that,
| but often the robot to do that would cost more than a human
| for 10 years.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> The only jobs that will come from bringing manufacturing
| back to the states will be in automation, robotics, AI, and
| roles to support those things._
|
| You're saying it like it's a bad thing.
|
| Wouldn't it be better we have automation in the west, instead
| of sweat shops in the east?
| bavell wrote:
| A business I work with has a factory in China that produces
| their devices. They absolutely do most of the assembly
| manually, as many of their sister factories do.
|
| Robotics automation is a tradeoff to gain efficiency at the
| expense of flexibility, with a large upfront cost.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Given the all the minimum wage staffing at most distribution
| centers these days despite all this off the shelf robotics
| technology seemingly available on order and already proven,
| makes me thing the american worker is cheaper than we might
| suspect compared to building out these dark amazon
| warehouses.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Where are those AI experts on this one? Why isn't AI commanding
| our manufacturing boom? Isn't manufacturing all just software and
| logistics?
| mppm wrote:
| Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1]
| makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build
| EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless
| steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting
| for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that
| is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2]
| and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled
| workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled
| back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of
| persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :)
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk
|
| 2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-
| surprising-...
| imbusy111 wrote:
| But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be
| doing something more valuable instead?
| rayiner wrote:
| Define "more valuable."
| esafak wrote:
| Leading to higher profits, jobs people want, and security,
| for starters.
| mantas wrote:
| Security needs taxes which lower profits and salaries (=
| jobs people want). On top of that, security needs a lot
| of not-so-profitable capabilities.
|
| High profits and jobs people want also don't exactly go
| hand-in-hand.
| mantas wrote:
| Depends on how evaluate what is valuable. E.g. here in europe
| a lot of people think subsidising local agriculture is not
| valuable and we should just import cheaper food. On the other
| hand, a lot of people agree that food security is kinda
| valuable by itself. And want similar security in more fields.
| In that sense yes, doing ,,low tech" is valuable in the long
| run.
| franktankbank wrote:
| I've been thinking lately that we don't properly account
| for things like security. I've also been thinking lately
| that a lot of people have terrible ethics and are more than
| happy to engage in nepotism and or fraud. Don't know what
| to do about it personally, I just try to keep my needs
| small and be happy with what I've got while trying to
| prepare my own children to have some level of a good life.
| mantas wrote:
| More like common man does not think long term (and I'd
| say rightfully so). While democratic regime embraces
| populist hedonistic solutions.
|
| Who cares about defense capabilities 10 or 50 years down
| the line? Lots of people in West had a good run
| outsourcing everything. But once there's nothing else to
| outsource and IP to sell... It's not gonna be pretty.
|
| Next generations in West will have to work very hard to
| recover from this mess.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Hate to agree.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| @agriculture.
|
| Have you ever heard any concrete strategies and plans
| regarding food security?
|
| Wouldn't there be policies about how many calories should
| be produced in what form, how long can it be stored, what
| would a local ramp up look like if there was a global
| catastrophe?
|
| What percentage of agriculture is really relevant to food
| security?
|
| Those are just empty words so farmers can get their
| subsidies and go on to produce more industrial rapeseed
| oil.
| mantas wrote:
| As long as you have whole supply chain locally, you don't
| need to store too much.
|
| The problem with agriculture is you can't really ,,ramp
| up" it on a whim. That's why you need to keep it going
| and you can't just kick start your food production when
| outside suppliers start to blackmail you.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > In that sense yes, doing ,,low tech" is valuable in the
| long run.
|
| Sure. But how much tax money do you want to throw at entire
| industries to hide the basic fact that wages are lower
| elsewhere? Where do you want to take the labor away from?
| And where do you draw the essential/wasted subsidies
| boundary line?
|
| Because in my view, Trump tariffs just ignore those very
| basic questions and don't even attempt to answer them.
|
| It's perfectly reasonable IMO to throw 20 billion a year to
| agriculture, because that is a very essential sector. But
| doing the same for the textile industry? Ore/Oil refining?
| Steelworks? Chemical plants?
|
| I don't wanna subsidies 20 non-essential industries just so
| that some former fast-food worker can assemble overpriced
| shoes inside the US (and labor demand from all those
| industries would drive up wages/costs in the fast-food
| sector, too, thanks to the Baumol effect).
|
| I'm not against nurturing some important local industries,
| but Trump tariffs are a complete failure at achieving that
| IMO.
| mantas wrote:
| Don't want to make hypothetical shoes? Fine. One day
| soldiers may end up marching barefooted and loosing a
| battle though.
|
| IMO the global economy eventually self-levels. Either you
| go up the chain so far that you eventually go off the
| rails by being unable to make basic stuff. And eventually
| being eaten by more hungry people with the basic skills.
| Or you keep yourself down by forcing yourself to not
| loose basic skills. Former gives you a short moment of
| glory with a high price for future generations. Later
| forces people to be more ascetic if that's the right
| word.
| myrmidon wrote:
| You misunderstand me. The US _is_ making shoes-- just not
| as many as it imports from Vietnam or China. In fact
| enough shoes get made locally to export about 1$ billion
| worth of them (while ~$20 billion are spent on imports).
|
| But I don't see the point in throwing billions of dollars
| from taxes at this industry just to make all those shoes
| here-- that is stupid (because the jobs that would create
| are not gonna be very desirable, they are gonna drive up
| costs all over by competing for labor, and that kind of
| protectionism is gonna invite retaliation).
|
| The situation is very similar for a lot of industries.
|
| I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an
| industry long-term by isolating it from competition like
| this.
|
| I'd be totally on board if there was like 20%
| unemployment in the US, and this was a short term plan to
| give those people work/income.
|
| But that's not it. This is in my view really bad policy
| driven by emotional arguments, and actual numbers,
| expected outcomes and historical precedent (for "I know
| better than market economies what ought to be produced")
| all _heavily_ weight against this.
|
| I'm very confident right now that the whole "20%ish
| tariffs for everyone to balance trade deficit with
| everyone" approach is gonna be walked back _or_ lead to
| abysmal outcomes, and people should have realized that
| from the start.
| susisjzbsbs wrote:
| > In fact enough shoes get made locally to export about
| 1$ billion worth of them
|
| We have far more shoes than we need.
|
| > the jobs that would create are not gonna be very
| desirable, they are gonna drive up costs all over
|
| Only because our government is run by billionaires. Elect
| politicians that care about the median American and this
| problem can be resolved quickly.
|
| > I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an
| industry long-term by isolating it from competition like
| this.
|
| This "babying" you mention results in decent working
| conditions and guaranteed jobs for Americans. It's a
| trade off I think is worth it, as your proposal
| disproportionately benefits the 1%.
|
| > I know better than market economies what ought to be
| produced
|
| Have you looked at the astronomical surplus of useless
| goods we have here? Those come at the cost of labor that
| could be put towards jobs that benefit all Americans
| (building more homes, cheaper childcare, cheaper food,
| etc). Again you're arguing for a status quo that is
| designed to grow the wealth gap and make billionaires
| richer. Essentially trickle down economics.
| itake wrote:
| IMHO, with the Big Tech boom winding down, what is more
| valuable for us to do? Manufacturing could prepare us for the
| next wave, whatever that might be.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > IMHO, with the Big Tech boom winding down, what is more
| valuable for us to do?
|
| Tech isn't winding down; tech, as the sector that draws the
| most investment based on long-term development, had the
| biggest response to tight monetary policy _designed_ to
| slow the entire economy down, but that response
| demonstrates that tech is where most of the marginal dollar
| goes.
|
| > Manufacturing could prepare us for the next wave,
| whatever that might be.
|
| Trying to work our way down the raw materials ->
| manufacturing -> finance/services ladder that countries
| usually try to work their way up for maximum prosperity in
| globalized trade isn't going to prepare us for anything
| other than lasting economic decline. And why would
| "manufacturing"--which you can't build generically, but
| only by specific, usually impossible to reallocate to a
| different use that isn't closely similar without
| sacrificing most of the value, major capital investments in
| particular subareas of manufacturing, prepare us for
| _anything_ else even ignoring that we'd have to regress to
| do it?
| notact wrote:
| > And why would "manufacturing"....prepare us for
| anything else even ignoring that we'd have to regress to
| do it?
|
| The American production machine (aka manufacturing) is a
| major component of what won WWII.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| The big tech boom is winding down?
|
| Just because we ended the era of cheap money to try and
| stop runaway inflation doesn't mean the tech boom is
| winding down.
|
| Look at everything that's happening with gene editing, in
| physics, with the jwst, with LLMs and robotics and computer
| vision, with alt energy sources, batteries, in material
| sciences, etc.
|
| I mean this is such a myopic take. We are in just now in an
| era where people are now capable of finding needles in
| needlestacks.
|
| You are confusing easily manipulated economic vibes that
| feel bad right now with the rapid approach of a complete
| overhaul of the human experience.
|
| The U.S. has basically supported the strip mining of our
| economy by value sucking predatory investment firms. There
| is a reason why China have more robotics per capita in
| their factories than we do and it has to do with a complete
| failure in strategic thinking, long term planning and
| ultimately a hatred for our youth.
| itake wrote:
| > gene editing, in physics, with the jwst, with LLMs and
| robotics and computer vision, with alt energy sources,
| batteries, in material sciences, etc.
|
| These are tidal waves compared to the tech boom tsunami
| we experienced in the last 25+ years: enabling rapid
| communication of every human on the planet and
| democratizing access (anyone can create a app/website/etc
| to enable other people to communicate/make money/etc).
|
| > where people are now capable of finding needles in
| needlestacks
|
| Yes, exactly. all that is left is going after hard
| problems that impact the long tail.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we
| be doing something more valuable instead?
|
| It's hard to quantify. E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic
| thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable
| is insurance? How much useful work (and skill) do you ship
| overseas in exchange for promissory notes[0]?
|
| [0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-
| invest...
| pjc50 wrote:
| People seem to want jobs with the macho kudos of manual
| labour, but with the physical comfort and salaries of email
| jobs, and I have some very bad news about that combination.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Those people need to watch a few episodes of Mike Rowe's
| "Dirty Jobs". Also people need to stop saying "unskilled
| labor". There is no such thing as labor without skills,
| outside a category in an archaic way of justifying low
| wages.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| This is a pet peeve of mine: yes there are unskilled
| jobs. Lots of them. The term is maybe slightly
| misleading, but there absolutely is a class of jobs that
| any able-bodied person could perform given at most a few
| hours or a few days of training, and they are
| qualitatively distinct from jobs that require education,
| specialized training, and/or months or years of
| experience to be considered proficient and productive in
| them.
|
| That doesn't mean people who work jobs in the former
| category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the
| distinction is important because finding workers to fill
| an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-
| bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of
| system of education, training and/or apprenticeship
| (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and
| functioning to even have an industry that depends on
| those jobs.
|
| Not everything is some silly game of political fighting
| through language. Some things we actually need terms
| distinguishing "this" from "that" so we can have real
| world conversations about them.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I think it is pretty useful to be able to distinguish
| between jobs that don't require much education/training,
| and jobs that do. "Unskilled" and "skilled" are how we do
| that. Do you have alternative words you'd use?
| LunaSea wrote:
| Working at McDonald's takes 1 day of training.
|
| Working as a doctor takes 10 years of higher education on
| top of secondary school.
|
| Calling McDonald's "unskilled labor" seems quite fair to
| me.
| e40 wrote:
| Behind the Bastards podcast on Mike Rowe opened my eyes
| to him.
| sct202 wrote:
| I've seen this brought up with board games that are now
| primarily made in China, because injection molding is cheaper
| there especially for small quantities. The US could make the
| board game minis, but everyone who is capable of it in the US
| is producing high value high quality aerospace, industrial,
| medical parts. It's a waste of their time to produce small
| runs of toy parts.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| This seems like the kind of thing where 3d printing is
| probably good enough quality wise.
|
| Of course, the 3d printers themselves are probably being
| made in China.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 3D printing absolutely sucks for production runs of more
| than a few dozen, and it produces finishes nowhere near
| as good as injection moulding.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Is that still the case? Even for a simple (presumably)
| board game piece?
| tstrimple wrote:
| Finishes are getting much better, especially with the
| high resolution resin based printers. But they are still
| slow and labor intensive compared to a "real" factory.
| lasermatts wrote:
| mold making is also pretty complicated -- anything in the
| 1,000-1M parts produced will _probably_ be an aluminum mold
| (cheaper than steel) but they're still heavy and large to
| keep around.
|
| I haven't met any injection molding shops in the US that do
| a huge amount of specialty parts like toys. The industry
| tries to get as many medical device jobs as possible.
| nilkn wrote:
| That's a crazy statement. It is clearly not true that every
| single person in the US capable of making board games now
| or in the future is instead already making high-grade
| aerospace and medical components.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I've thought about this and love board games. I don't want
| cheap plastic anymore. I want a reusable modular gaming
| system that let's me use more imagination.
| shaboinkin wrote:
| It is if war is in the future. And I'm not saying this as
| hyperbole but based on statements made by NATO secretary
| general (both Rutte, previously Stoltenberg and former
| General Bauer) about Russia's military production
| outproducing NATO, or Finish President Stubb speaking on the
| powers of the world shifting and the need to ramp production
| which were echo'd recently by Macron, or the Arctic region
| soon to become a contested region with China and Russia
| attempting to stake their influence in the area which is
| obviously at conflict with the personal interests of the
| other countries in the region. It seems obvious to me that
| the world is a bit hotter than before 2022, with the
| likelihood of some conflict between powers of the world
| coming to pass being greater. If production of raw materials
| to usable materials is all contained within countries that
| are deemed to be unfriendly by the one lacking this
| production capability, it's a clearly in their vested
| interested to not be in that situation. Only problem is there
| is a seemingly idiotic US administration attempting to
| address these deficiencies, unless there's some weird 4D
| chess play going on, but I'm not convinced it's that.
| nilkn wrote:
| Depends -- do you want the US to become a vassal state of
| China? That's the trajectory we were on. China is going to
| catch up rapidly on technology, AI, and services, and before
| a few months ago the US was going to continue falling behind
| in every other conceivable area.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| That's a hilarious thing to say considering our behavior
| towards trade lately. We've burned bridges with our closest
| trading partners and made everyone else uncomfortable to
| trade with us because they don't know what the eventual
| tariff rate will be, or if it will change tomorrow. We're
| retreating from the world stage, and guess who's sitting
| there ready to take the reins. It's genuinely the opposite
| of what you seem to want.
| e40 wrote:
| Want? Parent was predicting not saying what they wanted.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| >do you want the US to become a vassal state of china?
|
| Parent was making it clear what they do not want, for the
| US to become a vassal state of China.
| digikata wrote:
| I think large scale modeling and allocation for "more
| valuable" has been overly narrow - insufficiently diversified
| for uncertainty/unknowns, and subtly incorrect for western
| nations for decades now
| beeflet wrote:
| yes it's worth it, no we should not be doing something more
| valuable
| saati wrote:
| The US can't even make EUV machines, just parts of it.
| mcv wrote:
| "Can't even". I think there's only one country that can, so
| the US is not alone.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > China generates over twice as much electricity per person today
| as the United States. Why?
|
| This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say
| that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of
| China.
|
| Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the
| overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
|
| > If you're building a new factory in the United States, your
| investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and
| catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind
| blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is
| renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these
| tariffs will last
|
| Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.
|
| > 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated
|
| Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the
| wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's
| chicken tax trucks all over again.
|
| > This is probably the worst economic policy I've ever seen
|
| Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen _so
| far_. The budget is yet to come.
|
| > If American companies want to sell in China, they must
| incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a
| legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for
| their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For
| Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this
| is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.
|
| This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying
| for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and
| even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day
| it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.
|
| (also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers,
| crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly
| do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal
| migration control of hukou combined with media control?)
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Once again, want to point out how this is simply American
| leadership not wanting to accept their loss and move on. For
| the first time in the history they're not being perceived as
| the "global leader", and that's not acceptable from their POV.
| Now it's just freaking out and hoping that some extreme policy
| changes will change the course. From my personal experience,
| most people act this way when they're in distress and can't
| think ahead because of all the externalities.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)#Burst
| Teever wrote:
| This isn't just ego. This is an impending existential issue.
|
| America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants
| to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
|
| China will soon have the ability to take Taiwan and Korea and
| Japan. If that happens it's game over for any American
| interests and perhaps democracy as a whole.
|
| Wargames[0] paint a grim picture of an upcoming conflict
| between China and America over Taiwan with the US barely
| winning at a great cost including the loss of many ships,
| aircraft, and the depletion of missile stocks.
|
| The Chinese have a naval production of 260 times that of
| America and account for an ungodly amount of global steel
| production so they'll be able to bounce back faster than the
| US can. With a lead time for producing American missiles
| measured in months and years it will be just a matter of time
| before they take the countries in the region that are
| critical to American manufacturing if they're so inclined.
|
| [0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-
| subsites...
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| Hello slippery slope how are you doing?
| esafak wrote:
| That is not an existential issue; many former hegemons,
| such as the United Kingdom, continue to exist. Coalitions
| exist to ward off hegemons.
| Clubber wrote:
| >such as the United Kingdom, continue to exist
|
| They were really close to not existing. France stopped
| existing, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark,
| Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France,
| Yugoslavia, Greece, all stopped existing. China,
| Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Cambodia,
| Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore,
| Myanmar, New Guinea, Guam, East Timor, and Nauru all
| stopped existing.
| ta1243 wrote:
| That was in a pre-nuclear weapon world.
| Clubber wrote:
| It certainly was. You think nuclear weapons are less or
| more likely to have countries not exist anymore? If you
| believe MAD works, then countries can easily not exist
| the conventional warfare way. If you think MAD won't
| work, countries can easily not exist the nuclear war way.
| The only difference is speed.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Of your list I've been to France, Austria, Denmark,
| Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France (you
| seem to have it twice for some reason), Hong Kong, the
| Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
|
| They all _most definitely_ did not stop existing.
|
| Also I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
| when you say the United Kingdom came really close to not
| existing.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when
| you say the United Kingdom came really close to not
| existing.
|
| Battle of Britain, Battle of France?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France
|
| >They all most definitely did not stop existing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territories_acquire
| d_b...
|
| You didn't study WW2 in high school? It monumentally
| shaped the current world order.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I did. Austria, Belgium, France etc all existed during
| WW2. They were occupied, but they existed. Also lots of
| countries you listed definitely don't meet any sort of
| reasonable definition of "hegemon".
|
| To pick another example, Singapore was a crown colony
| before the war, then they were occupied by Japan during
| WW2, then they were a single nation with what is now
| Malaysia, then in the 1960s they two countries became
| independent from each other. They didn't under any
| reasonable reading of the situation cease to exist and
| they also have never been a hegemon of any kind.
| Clubber wrote:
| >They were occupied, but they existed.
|
| So what's your criteria for existing, dirt in the same
| place? Their governments were dissolved. That means they
| don't exist anymore. Does the confederacy exist since the
| boarders are the same and the dirt is in the same place?
| I would argue not.
|
| >Also lots of countries you listed definitely don't meet
| any sort of reasonable definition of "hegemon".
|
| I agree, just pointing out countries that no longer
| existed.
| Teever wrote:
| The UK continues to exist because it was replaced by a
| democratic American hegemony.
|
| If an authoritarian country like China achieves hegemony
| the continued existence of democracy is at risk.
|
| I want to live in a democratic world, not an
| authoritarian one.
|
| America's democracy is a flawed one but of the two
| choices -- American hegemony or Chinese hegemony it is
| the best path to a flourishing global liberal democracy.
|
| Can you foresee Chinese hegemony leading to increased
| democracy, individual property rights, due process, and
| rule of law?
| dv_dt wrote:
| France and Spain continue to exist and they were former
| hegemons. China has stably existed with long periods of
| turning inwards after more regional hedgemony.
| Teever wrote:
| It's really straight forward -- Do you consider things
| like liberal democracy, property rights, freedom of
| expression, freedom of thought, freedom of association,
| due process, and the rule of law to be essential features
| of society?
|
| If you don't -- Chinese hegemony and the path it will
| lead the world down is the one for you.
|
| If you do -- Then American hegemony with all its flaws is
| something worth fighting for.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Being ideals, all of those ideals in reality are
| implemented with different tradeoffs in different nations
| with different risks going forward. Discussing in more
| detail how one arrives at that particular choice of
| options is more interesting than an end presentation of
| what looks like a fallacy of false dichotomy.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| People value freedom in different ways. Personally, I
| would ally myself with tomorrow's bully, rather than
| today's. I understand the implications, but it looks like
| most of nations are shifting in the same manner.
|
| One note, some of the things you've listed has been
| proven as "mostly on paper, once people get their way,
| mental gymnastics will overcome the reason" in the past
| month. For a bastion of "freedom and democracy", it's
| really not looking like one from outside.
| Teever wrote:
| It's easier to fix a broken democracy than to turn an
| authoritarian state into a democratic one.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| China hasn't threatened to annex my country.
| Teever wrote:
| I'm Canadian as well.
|
| Stop and think about this for a moment -- do you think
| that China doesn't spread authoritarianism across the
| globe because they don't want to or simply because they
| can't do it yet?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| One is _actively threatening_ , and one _may threaten in
| the future_.
|
| Also, I am Canadian, but I could also be Panamanian, or
| Danish. Maybe it would be different if I were Taiwanese
| or Vietnamese or Japanese, but, China is far away and
| playing nice, and America is close and not.
| Teever wrote:
| It sounds like you agree with the premise that we need to
| see a return to democratic ideals and a rules based order
| in the United States?
| maxglute wrote:
| Authorian to democracy transition happens more often than
| democracies come back from severe backslides, which... is
| basically never. I struggle to think of an example.
| dboreham wrote:
| Recent events have showed that all that good American
| stuff doesn't really exist.
| esafak wrote:
| No, I do not, but I also do not much stock in America's
| policy of spreading democracy. I believe that America
| will do best by setting a good example at home, and it is
| failing in this regard. China is obviously not a
| democracy.
|
| My fear is that people will look at China's might and
| economic success and conclude that democracy is
| overrated.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Do you think that global hegemony by force is long-term
| (centuries) sustainable at all?
|
| What makes you confident that this could ever work on a
| longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I
| would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over
| the years unless there is a monumental, continuous
| difference in spending (like what the US military did since
| WW2).
|
| But I see no indication that you can keep that situation
| stable over the long term, and I honestly think that
| attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one
| bit in the long run while having massive harmful side
| effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft
| power/productivity).
| ben_w wrote:
| I think "centuries", plural, is too long for anything
| much to last since the industrial era. I'm not
| comfortable guessing past 2032 even without any questions
| about AI.
|
| The United Kingdom of England and Scotland didn't exist
| until 1707, and even that was sans-Ireland until 1800.
|
| And yet, even with the biggest empire the world had ever
| known, WW1 could only be won with the support of another
| huge empire (France) _and_ the subsequent arrival of the
| USA; shortly after this, most of Ireland became semi-
| independent.
|
| WW2 was "won", again with huge support, but a pyrrhic
| victory from the UK's point of view, and India soon after
| became independent. The Suez Crisis was 1956, and showed
| that the old empires of the UK (and France, _Union
| francaise_ ) were no longer economically hegemonic --
| even when working together -- and the US had replaced
| them in this role.
|
| Looking into the future, there's no way to guess. The
| more tech advances, the easier it becomes for a single
| person to cause enormous, world-altering impacts: hackers
| are already relevant on the geopolitical stage; there's
| good reason to think that quality of life is directly
| related to how much energy a person can process, but once
| you have sufficient energy per-capita, it's not hard to
| use a cyclotron to brute-force the purification of
| weapons grade uranium, or to transmute depleted uranium
| into plutonium; simple genetic manipulation has been a
| standard technique for first year biology students for at
| least two decades, and can be done in a home lab, and at
| some point we will have risks from someone trying to use
| this for evil rather than decorative bioluminescence. All
| these things can topple a hegemon that spends its
| tomorrows looking at yesterday's battlefield.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Global hegemony of the US is based not on 5% of people,
| rather the US sphere of influence. US, Canada, EU, Japan,
| Australia, South Korea, etc. The combination is immensely
| rich, powerful and advanced. Even more so when you keep
| India on board as well.
|
| It at least stands a fighting chance if it wasn't the
| case that this alliance is being destroyed before our
| eyes.
|
| I will admit that even an integrated alliance cannot push
| around China in the way it could decades ago.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Yeah, but look at what GP is responding to:
| > America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it
| wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
|
| That does not make sense.
|
| Low value manufacturing has been disappearing from the US
| for decades and arguably the US -- up until the recent
| turmoil -- has continued to maintain its hegemony.
| Teever wrote:
| Yes America needs to do this because the manufacturing
| capacity of allies in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan is under
| threat by China.
|
| America is the only country with the military capacity to
| take on China, and Europe isn't going to get up to speed
| in time to defend Taiwan.
|
| It must be America out of necessity not preference.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Great, but as I said, it does not make sense for the US
| to chase _low value_ manufacturing.
|
| Apparel, shoes, things you might find in a big box store
| -- zero sense. Low value manufacturing - leave it to
| China, Vietnam, India.
|
| Jet engines? Advanced polymer materials? Batteries? All
| make sense! CHIPS act was intended to accelerate US IC
| R&D and manufacturing...which was cancelled.
| Teever wrote:
| In an impending war with China who will manufacture the
| ammunition needed to win the war?
|
| And the boots, the uniforms, the helmets?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| You're assuming that China is manufacturing the ammo
| being used by the US armed forces? Gonna need some
| receipts.
| Teever wrote:
| You misunderstand.
|
| I am concerned that the United States does not have the
| industrial capacity or institutional knowledge to make
| relatively simple but essential things for war.
|
| In a protracted conflict with China will the US have the
| industrial capacity to produce enough ammunition? Does
| the US have a sufficient stockpile of ammunition to buy
| enough time to scale up the industrial capacity to
| manufacture more ammunition? Are there enough skilled
| people in the US who can teach more people to become
| skilled in this endeavour in time?
|
| Does the US even have enough industrial capacity to
| produce enough iron, aluminum, nickel, copper and other
| such things to do this?
| myrmidon wrote:
| I can see your point, but I disagree on this.
|
| It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western
| democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily
| powerful in economy and military.
|
| Interests/culture with other democracies aligns well
| enough (and the power differential is large enough!) that
| US leadership is tolerated/supported.
|
| But Canada, EU, Australia, Japan are _NOT_ vasall states:
| If interests would clash and /or the US lose a lot of its
| relative power, those would cease being majority
| supporters and push for domestic interests instead.
|
| Calling them "fairweather friends" might be too cynical
| but I think it's much more accurate than considering them
| integral parts of the US hegemony.
| newuser94303 wrote:
| I don't know why people keep thinking that China will
| attack Taiwan. It took HK and Macao without a shot. I think
| China is following Sun Tzu.
|
| "subduing the enemy without fighting," is the epitome of
| strategic thinking in his book, The Art of War. This means
| achieving victory through cunning, deception, and
| maneuvering, rather than through direct confrontation and
| bloodshed"
|
| They are increasing their military knowing that US military
| costs 4+x as much. It might be 4x better so don't fight.
| Just bankrupt the US. Trump wants a $1T military budget
| next year.
|
| Why would China want to conquer the West? Buying what it
| wants is cheaper than an uncertain military battle fought
| with Nukes.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| What I still don't get is what could China possibly want
| with Taiwan?
|
| Naval routes? Just negotiate and use money instead; it'll
| be cheaper than war.
|
| Brainpower? Just offer higher salaries to come work in
| China.
|
| Taiwan is a tiny island smaller than Florida with only
| 20m people.
| andsoitis wrote:
| 1) Historical claims - the CCP views Taiwan as a
| breakaway province and considers unification important.
| After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1948, the defeated
| Republic of China (ROC) government fled to Taiwan while
| the CCP took control of China.
|
| 2) Political legitimacy - successful unification would be
| a nationalist victory for the CCP
|
| 3) Strategic importance - key geographic asset. It lies
| in the first island chain, a line of US-aligned
| territories that can potentially restrict China's naval
| access to the Pacific. Control over Taiwan gives China
| more leverage over sea lanes critical to global trade and
| security influence in East Asia
|
| 4) Economic, technology bonus points - Taiwan is a global
| tech powerhouse, especially in semiconductors. TSMC is
| the world's leading chipmaker.
|
| 5) Global power dynamics - unification would weaken US
| influence in the region
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| 1-2 really just do not matter; I can't imagine anyone in
| the CCP views that as more important than their own
| internal matters.
|
| 3 as I said, they can just negotiate and throw money at
| the problem; it's cheaper than fighting a war.
|
| 4 they can already buy hardware from them and was doing
| so just fine before US stepped in. DeepSeek seemed to do
| fine and China may likely surpass Western AI development
| in the near future
|
| 5 I don't see how that's the case when the US has very
| little presence in TW compared to SK or JP. Taiwan is a
| hair on a gorilla's right knee.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Just answering your question "What I still don't get is
| what could China possibly want with Taiwan?".
|
| If you don't believe the rational I sketched, informed by
| analyses such as that by the Council of Foreign
| Relations[1], you can also learn more by reading directly
| from China's Mission in the EU about the China One
| principle: http://eu.china-
| mission.gov.cn/eng/more/20220812Taiwan/20220...
|
| [1] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-
| relations-tens...
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| They can say and write whatever they want, it just
| doesn't make any logical sense like the US getting all
| worked up over Cuba.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Nationalism makes it very easy to make it seem like (1)
| and (2) matter even if they don't.
|
| If you want a semi-serious example, check the "Taiwan #1"
| gaming video on YouTube for a taste of Chinese
| nationalism.
|
| Read certain declarations by Chinese ambassadors in
| Europe for more serious nationalistic takes.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Regardless of the reasons (mostly political rather than
| rational, as my sibling comment laid out), the beach
| invasion barges we've been seeing are IMO a dead giveaway
| of intent and resolve to take Taiwan. Between that and
| American fecklessness, if I was Taiwanese I would be
| shitting my pants.
| watwut wrote:
| Genuinely, USA as of now is threat to both peace and
| democracy - both at home and abroad. Whether it manages to
| bring back manufacturing is irrelevant to that.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it
| wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
|
| This argument is based on experiences in WWII, i.e. the
| previous war. You need to be cautious about basing military
| doctrine on the previous war. I'm not sure the next war
| will be won by churning out aircraft carriers.
| Teever wrote:
| Regardless of what economies will be churning out to
| fight war, it will more than likely be the side that
| churns out more stuff that wins.
|
| If not aircraft carriers then what sort of physical
| objects do you think will critical in winning the next
| major war?
| xnorswap wrote:
| > For the first time in the history
|
| I'll charitably assume you meant first time in post-war
| history.
|
| USA as "The Global leader" didn't emerge until after Europe
| was ravaged first by The Great War and then WWII.
|
| No-one was looking toward the USA for leadership during The
| Great Game. Even by the time of the outbreak of WW1, the size
| of the USA's army was very small, half the size of the
| British army, which was itself considered small compared to
| the French and German armies.
|
| US foreign policy was still inward looking, protectionist and
| isolationist until it could no longer ignore the case for
| war.
|
| The foreign power projection really didn't kick into gear
| until 1945 onward and the determination not to let too much
| of the world fall to communist ideas.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I was a few drinks in on a sunny Tokyo day when I wrote it,
| my bad. But yeah, sorry, that's what I meant. Basically
| since gaining the "leadership", which you're completely
| right about.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > China generates over twice as much electricity per person
| today as the United States. Why? >> This appears to be
| completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has
| about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.
|
| I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per
| person. Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x
| the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is
| producing 8x the energy of the US. In reality it seems to be
| roughly 2x (although both sources are a bit outdated):
|
| US 2023: 4.18 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from
| utility-scale generators. Additionally, small-scale solar
| photovoltaic systems contributed around 73.62 billion kWh 1.
|
| China 2021: 8.53 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
|
| --
|
| But the staggering difference is how much of the electricity is
| attributed to the Industrial sector:
|
| China: 70% (~6 trillion kWh)
|
| US: 26% (~1 trillion kWh)
|
| So overall China allocates 6x the electricity to production
| compared to US...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| China is also more electrified generally than the US. They
| only just pulled ahead but the rate of change is startling.
|
| Since 2000 they've gone from 10% of final energy being
| electricity to nearly 26% while the US has been basically
| flat around 23% and they are both predicted to grow (or not
| grow) at roughly the same in the next few years.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| China electricity consumption is growing by 6-8% a year and
| is likely to hit 10500 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2025. Which
| at $0.10/kwh the avg is a $1 trillion dollars. Though from
| what I understand in China home users are charged about $0.07
| and industry $0.08 so $7-800 billion a year on electricity
| alone.
|
| They are rapidly moving to renewable with grid scale BESS
| auctions avg $66-68/kw they are likely to have electricity
| prices at $0.01-0.02 over the next few years. I think it will
| be extremely tough to compete with China in manufacturing
| unless there is huge investment in renewable and storage
| systems to keep electricity prices competitive with China who
| are going to move on from coal over the next decade.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Not only that. Renewable tech is also a major export sector
| for China. Most batteries and solar panels bought elsewhere
| are Chinese. And they are dominating EV manufacturing and
| manufacturing of pretty much everything else. China has
| invested and is now getting enormous returns on investment.
| The rest of the world has divested and is now missing out.
| Not investing enough was a mistake that needs to be
| corrected.
|
| It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just
| cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy
| and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start
| with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there
| is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy
| intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.
|
| The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the
| medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh.
| Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little
| marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the
| depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per
| person
|
| Original article definitely said "per person".
|
| China allocates much more to industry and/because it
| allocates much less to personal consumption. Especially
| things like air conditioning. US per person consumption is
| still 2x that of EU average.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Original article definitely said "per person".
|
| Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare
| absolute production.
|
| > China allocates much more to industry and/because it
| allocates much less to personal consumption
|
| Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US
| residential is more than 2x of China's residential power
| use, but that's relative to the much larger production use.
| In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not
| that different actually:
|
| CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)
|
| US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)
|
| Now, on a _per-capita_ basis the difference is staggering,
| as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Well, they _are_ making all the stuff for the rest of the
| world!
| mr_toad wrote:
| Despite all the hand wringing, heavy industry uses a lot more
| power than data centres.
| xpe wrote:
| I did some quick research on this. McKinsey has a pretty
| slick-looking web-facing report titled "Global Energy
| Perspective 2024" report [1] has a table [2] showing
| breakdowns by industry.
|
| [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-
| materials/our...
|
| [2] SVG...! https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/indus
| tries/energy%...
| looseyesterday wrote:
| On crime they most centrically do, watch the China Show (not
| the bloomberg one) on youtube. One example given on the show is
| that Once you go into northern villages and small towns you
| start seeing propganda posters on why you shouldn't take drugs.
| Homelessness is widespread and present too but you just wont
| see it in city centers more on the outstkirts.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Police in cities will beat homeless people and get them back
| on buses to where their hukou is, so the homeless that remain
| are very good at hiding. Hostile architecture is also very
| common in China. But there is a lot of sub quality housing
| (eg in sub-basements that lack windows or good ventilation)
| that allow much of the working poor to at least be
| technically housed even in expensive cities (many restaurants
| also provide housing for their staff in the dining area after
| closing, or did at least 20 years ago). The outskirts used to
| have more slums than they had today in Beijing, most of the
| slums have moved into sub-basements as far as I can tell
| (called the "ant tribe").
|
| Crime really is much lower than it was a decade ago. People
| have more money, societal trust is higher. Drug use in clubs
| has always been a thing, but China differs from the USA in
| that their is no social support at all for addicts (so they
| either get clean with help from their family or they die).
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially
| the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
|
| It's annoying Americans were given only two choices -
| offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say,
| the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing
| overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion
| of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so
| successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent
| as even a talking point.
| zasz wrote:
| That IS what Biden was trying to do though with the CHIPS
| Incentive Act. He was trying to onshore production of
| semiconductors in a partnership with TSMC. Didn't do him any
| favors, and Harris lost the state of Arizona anyway.
| Americans had the choice between a party that was serious
| about trying to onshore some manufacturing and a party that
| wasn't, and it made the wrong choice because vibes,
| basically.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > because vibes, basically
|
| This may be more accurate than you realize. Both Democrat
| and old Republican party rhetoric and policies were pro-
| globalization/offshoring, with the occasional exception
| such as CHIPS (and corn subsidies). It's not surprising
| nobody believed they were changing direction, if for every
| "we're bringing semiconductors back", they heard ten "your
| car is German your phone is Chinese your tacos are Mexican,
| how dare you interfere with glorious Free Trade!"
| jghn wrote:
| Also one can't ignore that the GOP managed to remarked
| the CHIPS act as a key source of inflation, which they
| also managed to pin on "Bidenomics". Which was another
| source of "vibes, basically"
| kelipso wrote:
| Weren't we hearing for years about how it went to waste
| because Intel did stock buybacks or whatever using the
| CHIPS money. Now we are supposed to believe it's
| critical?
| rsfern wrote:
| CHIPS incentive funding is way bigger than just Intel, so
| it's a bit disingenuous to write off the whole program
| just because of one (or even several) high profile bad
| actor. We should have a nuanced discussion and fix the
| shortcomings of our programs, but at least assess things
| in a balanced way.
|
| If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing
| for the current Commerce secretary, practically every
| Senator brags about their state's CHIPS funded R&D hub.
| Lots of growth in small and medium businesses there. And
| CHIPS incentive funding played a huge role in bringing
| the new TSMC fab in Arizona
|
| https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/jobs/2024/
| 04/...
| imchillyb wrote:
| R&D is a cost center that can no longer be written off of
| a company's taxes.
|
| I don't believe that cost centers are a good example of
| returning manufacturing onshore. Or an example of a state
| using federal funding well.
|
| Cost centers are not a good investment for federal
| funding, without a clear path to paying back our taxed
| dollars.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > R&D is a cost center that can no longer be written off
| of a company's taxes.
|
| Can you elaborate on this? It was my understanding a
| company only pays taxes on profit. So isn't the revenue
| that goes into R&D effectively taxed at 0%, since at that
| point it's not yet profit? I.e. only dividend payouts get
| taxed.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made it less beneficial to use
| R&D for tax credits because they had to be amortized over
| five years. Not good when you're an MBA looking to
| financially engineer your way into a fat bonus.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| This entire post is so wrong, it is difficult to know
| where to start. The first sentence about taxes is wrong.
| The second statement is an entirely unsupported opinion.
| The final statement miscategorized "cost centers" as some
| sort of federal investment? As for "clear path", the road
| US exceptionalism is paved with the gold derived from
| sensible investments in R&D and tech advancement. There
| was no clear path to paying back our investment in the
| federal highway system, but it did pay back indeed. There
| was no clear path to paying back our investments in basic
| physics, chemistry, and biology, but it did pay back
| indeed.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of
| home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so
| successfully used to grow their economies was completely
| absent as even a talking point_
|
| The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did
| needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between
| industry and government, which is incompatible with
| democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years
| where the new administration begins to tear down everything
| the previous administration did because they serve different
| voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
|
| It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of
| corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it
| every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly
| US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they
| break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half
| the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making
| tchotchkes.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| They were brought from Taiwan due to their expertise and
| familiarity with TSMC processes. America doesn't have a
| glut of people with EUV fab experience -- they all already
| work for Intel.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Sure, but it's not like they're paying them super
| competitive wages. Some people on HN said the Taiwanese
| TSMC Arizona workers already started applying at Intel.
|
| If you want to kick-start manufacturing, you're gonna
| have to attract people somehow initially, either through
| more money, or free education/training, etc
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There's various forms of democracy and many are not as
| chaotic as the US kind in regards to long term plans.
|
| A good example is the general global approach to Net Zero.
| It's slow, methodical, science based, negotiated.
|
| But if anyone brings up planning for 2050 it's usually in
| the context of "It's all bullshit, politicians are crap,
| they're just lying to you and kicking the can down the road
| till they retire" (and if you scratch the surface you'll
| have even chance that the person saying that has been
| radicalised into not even believing there's a problem to be
| solved).
|
| But only the US is in and out of the Paris agreement etc.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Countries change policies all the time based on the
| whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the
| US. People focusing exclusively on what Trump is doing
| are myopic or arguing in bad faith.
|
| And the global approach to net zero is not global, nor is
| it binding, it's more of a gentlemen's agreement bet
| which is basically worthless. Ideologically it sounds
| good, the issues are always when the tires hit the road,
| and then some spanners get thrown in on top: wars,
| pandemics, revolutions, natural disasters, political
| feuds, etc.
|
| So yeah, outside of bubbles of privileged mid-upper class
| people in safe rich countries, nobody gives a crap about
| what's gonna happen in 2050 when they can't pay next
| month's rent/mortgage or their car doesn't start and
| their bank balance is red.
|
| Capitalism got us chasing next quarter returns at the
| expense of what's gonna happen in 2050, so we'll be
| kicking the can down the road until everything falls
| apart, first very slowly, and then very suddenly.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Countries change policies all the time based on the
| whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the
| US.
|
| It is irrelevant what other countries do.
|
| What matters is whether or not other countries and
| industries trust that a country has sufficient stability
| to do business in and with. If there are actual or
| perceived signals that suggest chaos, rational people
| will not be interested to be tethered to that
| dispensation.
| soco wrote:
| What makes the US more chaotic (and UK to some extent and
| probably more) is the political system first-past-the-
| post which does nothing to promote collaboration. Quite
| the contrary the winner does its best to crush every
| sprout of the loser to make his future win more likely.
| Now if you had a few parties which would be forced to
| forge alliances to govern, they would probably govern in
| alliances in the following terms as well so some of the
| politics for sure get carried over. But, such ideas help
| now nobody, the current system is how it is.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did
| needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan
| between industry and government, which is incompatible with
| democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years
| where the new administration begins to tear down everything
| the previous administration did because they serve
| different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
|
| The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of
| the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy
| industry back to work" has been included in one way or
| another in every presidential candidates platform at least
| as far back as Obama's first term.
|
| The specifics change from party to party and candidate to
| candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has
| been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo
| for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently
| that the situation has become such a priority that
| elections are won or lost on it.
|
| I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will
| continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more
| reasonable way.
|
| >It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of
| corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it
| every way they can since they don't want to deal with
| costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if
| they break a finger at work
|
| The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy
| industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo.
| They only do it because the sum total of other policy
| pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or
| environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable
| option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so
| was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable
| (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they
| can plan around it because investments in those industries
| are made on decades long timelines.
|
| I think we're at the point now where there's the political
| will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the
| factory open.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Well, money talks and it's hard to choose the other option.
| On one hand bring manufacturing back to US and pay them
| higher, because otherwise the pay in McDonald's is better
| with a less demanding physical (cmiiw, don't live in US).
|
| On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for
| cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin.
| It's an easy choice to make.
|
| And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all
| of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes
| people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.
| myrmidon wrote:
| The thing is also that absolutely nothing about the overall
| situation changed meaningfully over the last 50 years or
| so.
|
| People had the exact same concerns and fears when
| electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50
| years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain
| that China did, and they started losing a lot of the
| industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see
| with China => Vietnam/Indonesia/... nowadays.
|
| I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy
| is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local
| wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by
| manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system
| is actually _supposed_ to work from my perspective;
| describing that as "ripping off the American people" is
| completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.
| like_any_other wrote:
| Seeing it as a "rip off" is indeed delusion, but turning
| a blind eye to the dangers of becoming (ever more)
| dependent on a foreign country is an even worse folly.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| _If_ the dependencies go both ways, it 's probably a good
| thing.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I think 90% of the whole political debate about the
| economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic
| local wealth inequality_
|
| When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would
| be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site
| power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing",
| I've come to think that the whole political debate is
| really about: _What the hell are we going to do if WWIII
| happens?_
|
| Manufacturing capability and capacity is an incredibly
| precious resource if you find yourself in a large scale
| war, and there is growing concern (realistic or not) that
| America has given it away/lost it. It makes no difference
| in peaceful times, but there is growing belief that the
| era of peace is coming to an end.
|
| In fact, if you take a higher level view of what is going
| on, like the wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, it
| seems the entire motivation for it all is preparing for
| the possibility of war with Russia (and China).
| myrmidon wrote:
| > When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would
| be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site
| power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing",
| I've come to think that the whole political debate is
| really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII
| happens?
|
| I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this
| looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points
| for the middling plans we already put in
| motion"-exercise.
|
| Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and
| decisionmaking was _mainly_ driven by strategic military
| interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big
| fan of tariffs as a concept?
|
| Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need
| more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to
| identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply
| chains, then you would expect a big focus on military
| relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term
| investments into defense-relevant local industry and a
| glut of defense-spending in general.
|
| Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-
| conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended
| the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent
| guiding focus or much thought _at all_.
|
| Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible
| military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one
| within decades, either. Their land army basically got
| stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly
| donated (and frequently _old_ ) western equipment, and
| the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.
|
| China _is_ a somewhat credible opponent, but what would
| they even go to war over that would actually affect the
| US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking
| Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would
| involve itself in that business too much anyway;
| considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose
| territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect,
| amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of
| intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I
| would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a
| Taiwan invasion...
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Can you honestly argue that current economic policy
| and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic
| military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump
| being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?_
|
| Well, like we established in a discussion here yesterday,
| argument only takes place if you don't know. It is the
| mind's way to explore and learn. So, yes, obviously I
| could as I don't have enough information to know for
| sure. If I did, there would be nothing argue about, now
| would there? I'd already know everything there is to
| know. It would be a pointless endeavour.
|
| But I don't think an argument is what you are actually
| looking for. It seems you're simply looking for someone
| to do free work for you. As great as that may sound to
| you, there is no reason for anyone else to cater to that.
| For the sake of good faith, I'll spare you anything more
| that would be serving to me.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial
| integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to
| some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing
| (no longer even that from what I know?)
|
| Let's not forget that Trump and his clown show are now
| attempting to bully Ukraine into paying the full,
| inflated to the max, US government contractor price for
| the new versions of those hand-me-downs. Partly because
| that was how the accounting was done - very often, $X of
| "military aid to Ukraine" = $X spent on a new weapon for
| US military to replace the decades old weapon to be sent
| to Ukraine.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| The weird part for me is this: While the economy was
| evolving, Production was offshored from US for cost-reasons,
| but also in part to focus on higher-skill labor in US,
| delegating the low-skill mass-production to China.
|
| Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills,
| complemented their low-skill production offering with it and
| now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.
|
| So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-
| population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to
| return to US....?
|
| Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill
| labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-
| skill labor...?
| like_any_other wrote:
| The problem is ecosystem effects. High-tech industries
| evolve from and depend on low-tech ones. There is a limit
| to how much they can be separated.
| digikata wrote:
| I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-
| skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is
| high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and
| high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages
| themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor
| in product costs. By bypassing investment in US
| manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the
| sidelines for the ability to build, staff, and supply
| modern low, medium and high infrastructure factories.
|
| It's not impossible to build back, but it would require
| long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than
| just tariffs.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The solution is to pay everyone a living wage, regardless
| of job, and disconnect healthcare from employment. Lots
| of inertia against those ideas though. So, instead, "good
| manufacturing jobs" is the parroted point. Any job is a
| good job if you can live off of it.
|
| (tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in
| healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based
| sectors, for example)
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| That's a solution of human rights and is orthogonal to
| becoming competitive to China. No question human rights
| needs to be fulfilled and we need to pay people living
| wages.
|
| But the conversation here has he orthogonal goal of being
| competitive with China as well. I can assure you just
| paying everyone living wages is one of the main reasons
| why we are not competitive with China. It's the main
| reason why China is beating us today.
|
| So paying everyone living wages doesn't really do
| anything to solve the problem because the products
| created by people who are paid living wages are by
| definition more expensive due to labor costs.
|
| What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living
| wages and sell expensive products and still be
| competitive because products from China are tariffed to
| be the same price.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > So paying everyone living wages doesn't really do
| anything to solve the problem because the products
| created by people who are paid living wages are by
| definition more expensive due to labor costs.
|
| They aren't though. In America, "Paying living wages"
| always means "pay way more", because America underpays
| labour and overcharges for literally everything
| (products, services, basic cost of living -- every
| product on American soil has a insane profit margin on
| it)
|
| In China, "Paying living wages" doesn't necessarily mean
| "pay labor more", because they have stronger control over
| pricing and margins, so it often actually means "make
| orgs charge way less".
|
| You end up with Chinese folks living in a major city in
| China, with a 2bed apartment that costs $200USD/month,
| and a meal out cost $2USD/each, cars that start at like
| $6k, and they get paid $5USD/hr, but they feel like
| they're living well, despite only making around
| $640USD/month, because they can save 10% of their income
| each month, and have like 40% of their income as
| discretionary spending, and still get to own their
| apartment.
|
| But in the US, a 2bed apartment in a big city like that
| costs _at least_ $2,000 /month or more, a meal out there
| costs _at least_ $20 /each, and a basic starter car
| starts at like $26k, so you can pay someone in a
| ostensibly-"high labor cost" job of $20/hr, and they feel
| like their _constantly underwater_ , and have _zero_
| chance of _ever_ owning a home, because they only have
| like 20% of their income as discretionary spending, and
| they can 't save _anything_ at all. (and that 's before
| we even mention differences like how you don't have to
| worry about being hit with a crazy bill for an ER visit
| or an Ambulance in China, but Americans have to worry
| about that 24/7/365).
|
| _(It 's the same reason many American's dream of getting
| a job in Europe and leaving the US, because despite
| making less money-on-paper, you get to generate more real
| wealth and do so with less life risk and life stress)_
|
| The Factories and the labor pool and the infrastructure
| being absent in the US is hard to solve for, of course --
| but it isn't even the hardest part of any of this. The
| American view of capitalism would have to be completely
| rewritten to be more diverse, more equitable, and more
| inclusive to Americans who do actual labor, before
| Americans could be anywhere close to competitive with
| most of these Chinese industries.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| PPP is the only way to compare expenses between different
| economies. You can't just convert RMB into dollars and
| say "see how cheap they have it".
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| That's right now. For China to even get to the state they
| are in now, workers were heavily, heavily exploited.
|
| In fact exploitation is the reason why they are the way
| they are now.
| Yeul wrote:
| Isn't that the case for every country? My grandfather
| lived in a shack. He was a farmhand. In the winter his
| family almost starved.
|
| Our nation's prosperity is a very recent phenomenon.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Yep. With one difference. The US is regressing and now we
| want to reignite manufacturing without relying on
| exploitation.
|
| My argument is that this isn't possible. Well let me
| rephrase that. It is possible but you need to inflict
| some form of pain to get it going. Tariffs is one way to
| do this.
|
| I don't think the four year presidency is enough to do
| this. You need to do this for at least 2 decades.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > Any job is a good job if you can live off of it.
|
| No, just no.
|
| There is a high variance in job qualities beyond pay.
|
| Work hours, over time, outside vs. office jobs,
| repetitive Vs. varied, physical and psychological impact,
| etc.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you, but isn't the issue that the US
| stopped investing in the skills and infra which made
| mass-production low-skill in the first place?
|
| Instead, the offshore-destinations kept offering more and
| more services in the value-chain, until the entire
| skillset to actually _create_ the low-skill labor
| processes to offshore was replaced with "let the
| offshore company manage".
| digikata wrote:
| Yes climbing the value chain was a necessity for nations
| like China. But in the US popularized in the 90's, was a
| business strategy trend that strongly discounted the
| value of long term capital investments - particularly for
| this discussion, investment in factories. They do require
| extra management attention and they do tie companies to
| strategies in longer time frames at lower margins - but
| they deliver long term value and long term synergistic
| growth benefits (in the vein of go slow to go fast). Many
| US business elected to chase short term growth, and short
| term and higher margins and minimize long term
| investments.
|
| See a list of leading US companies that are off of being
| king of the hill - Boeing, GE, Intel, ... leading
| industrial US companies continually divested from
| manufacturing, or shorted long term investment, not
| because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't
| profitable enough in the moment. It took decades, and
| many dividends and stock growth was taken in the middle,
| but the shortfall manifests in time.
| tharmas wrote:
| Agreed. Well articulated.
|
| >Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and
| short term and higher margins and minimize long term
| investments.
|
| I would like to add that this was due to the influence of
| Milton Friedman. He put the emphasis on shareholder
| returns being the most important, without considering the
| survival of the company itself.
| paganel wrote:
| More generally, the financialization of the US economy
| (and of the Western economy more generally speaking) has
| a big part of the blame in this.
|
| Yes, more evolved financial markets provided easier
| access capital, but, as it so happens in those types of
| situations, access to capital and enjoyment of said
| (liquid/financial) capital became a target in itself, the
| rest of society didn't matter. In fact, the whole
| (Western) society was moulded around (liquid/financial)
| capital, it became its _raison d 'etre_.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If the company doesn't survive, shareholders aren't
| likely to be that happy.
| roenxi wrote:
| You make that sound like it was emanating from the
| business community - the US has had a pretty significant
| period in there of 0% interest rates determined by a
| central committee. Return on capital doesn't really
| matter in a low interest rate environment, the important
| thing is access to the lending markets. Investors making
| sensible investments would have been eaten alive by those
| focusing on companies that were living off credit in ill-
| advised ways.
|
| Uber still hasn't managed to make a net profit over its
| lifetime as a company, by the way.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Uber had EBITDA of $6.5B for full year 2024: https://www.
| sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000154315125...
|
| I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US
| public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging
| the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a
| great historical example.
| digikata wrote:
| Maybe, but 0% interest should have make it easy to invest
| in capital intensive endeavors that would have turned
| into great protective moats when the interest rates
| inevitably bumped up. Did that happen with factories and
| manufacturing?
|
| I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a
| financialized business community demanding 0% interest.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a
| financialized business community demanding 0% interest.
|
| This is the one upside of chaos monkey crashing the
| economy. They aren't going to be able to drive rates back
| to zero in the next four years.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Intel never outsourced its production, and it turned out
| to be the wrong call for it. They just made losing tech
| bets, while they kept investing in manufacturing.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an
| increasingly minor factor in product costs.
|
| Not disagree with your main points, but labor inputs are
| still very much a huge part of product costs, and often
| the biggest driver of where to build a new factory when a
| company is scaling up. Companies aim to build their new
| factories wherever there's a sufficient pool of cheap
| labor with the necessary skills.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Companies aim to build their new factories wherever
| there 's a sufficient pool of cheap labor with the
| necessary skills._
|
| Of course, even where labor cost is truly
| inconsequential, you would still do that as all the
| correlations that come alongside cheap labor are still
| very attractive to manufacturing.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Actually I think it's variation of this. Tariffs can
| protect high skill jobs with high value product output.
| They can also force the Chinese to make cheap stuff even
| cheaper ( back down below $1 goods plus tariffs ).
|
| We don't want the Chinese making high value goods at
| slightly lower prices. We want Americans making high
| value goods and we want to push cheap stuff as cheap as
| possible. Next step is enforcing environmental rules on
| Chinese goods and requiring escrow of the funds to pay
| the Chinese in American accounts until the goods are
| inspected and pass.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Yes, they could make more use of the Uyghurs.
| https://www.state.gov/forced-labor-in-chinas-xinjiang-
| region... not to mention other slaves.
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/countries...
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Your second links puts the number of slaves in China at 4
| per 1000. The USA is at 3.3 per 1000. Why not mention
| that the USA could make more use of their slaves?
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Because patriotism demands that we never look at
| ourselves in the mirror.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| America already makes high value goods in China and takes
| most of the value from them since they did the IP and the
| software for those products. China desperately wants in
| on that, they are no longer happy making the product
| while America takes most of the profit! They would swap
| places with America in a heartbeat if that's what Trump
| is offering.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The distinction is between high- and low- skill
| politicians and managers, not labour.
|
| One of the foundations of conservatism is the priority of
| hierarchy over effectiveness. In a conservative culture
| it doesn't matter how well things work as long as the
| right people in charge.
|
| We're seeing the limit of this now, where it's literally
| more important to maintain hierarchy by denying facts and
| rationality than to "lose face" by admitting that power
| isn't absolute.
|
| You can't run a modern country like this. You can't plan
| for the future, make effective decisions, govern, have a
| working legal system, build housing, create health care -
| anything at all - when all decisions are made according
| to the whims of a despot.
|
| Power and resources - including wealth - _have_ to be
| distributed. Or at least there has to be the illusion
| they 're somewhat distributed. Anything else guarantees
| terminal contraction and decay.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think the mistake here is the model of low-
| skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction.
|
| IMHO it still is. There are tasks, especially in
| assembly, that _for now_ require humans to do because
| robots can 't match our dexterity. Stuff like mounting
| through-hole components like a cable from the battery
| compartment to the main PCB. That's a few seconds worth
| of time, and you need barely more than a few days worth
| of training to get a worker up to speed - a low-skill
| job. China, Thailand, Vietnam and a bunch of other places
| have an ample supply of people coming out of utter
| poverty, which means the pressure on wages is massive - a
| Chinese worker on average earns about 13200 dollars a
| year [1], an American worker is 3x-4x that amount and
| more if the shop is unionized. And on top of that,
| Chinese workers work 996, American or European workers
| have much MUCH more employee rights.
|
| The problem is, low-skill employment opportunities are
| going down and down because automation gets better. For
| now, China can compete because Chinese workers are
| cheaper than machines... but once that changes, it's
| going to get _nasty_.
|
| > The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an
| increasingly minor factor in product costs.
|
| There's soft factors as well. Stuff like workplace
| safety/OSHA regulations, environmental regulations...
| Silicon Valley is a bunch of Superfund sites from decades
| of toxic emissions. China? They barely have regulations
| in place, and other sweatshop countries are even worse.
|
| The core problem we're talking about anyway is that a
| certain percentage of any population is just, plain and
| simple, dumb as rocks. Over half the US population is
| barely literate [2]. No matter how good your education
| systems are, no matter how much money you invest into
| equality in schools, no matter how much you protect them
| from stuff like lead - they are dumb, will remain dumb,
| and probably their children will also remain dumb. In ye
| olde times you put them on farms, meatpacking or in
| factories so they had gainful employment... but that all
| went away, and now we got hordes of utterly dumb people
| with no hope of ever getting smart and, crucially, no
| hope of ever getting a meaningful job.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-
| average-yea...
|
| [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/lit
| eracy-s...
| _bin_ wrote:
| Trump et al. really run a motte-and-bailey argument here.
| They woo reasonable people who agree that critical
| industries: food, energy, defense-adjacent, metals, etc. -
| must have substantial capacity on-shore or at least very
| near. They then flip to what amounts to massive handouts
| for his rust belt base, basically saying we should make
| _everything_ here.
|
| The obvious answer is this:
|
| 1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in
| Bangladesh.
|
| 2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation
| (china).
|
| 3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass
| manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost
| disease.
|
| 4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment
| in automation and manufacturing technology for decades,
| which will be painful to undo.
|
| The sensible outcome of these facts is
|
| 1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap
| countries with reasonable levels of human capital.
|
| 2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.
|
| 3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and
| automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is
| sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
|
| 4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have
| reliable power for this new industrial build.
| deadfoxygrandpa wrote:
| china isnt an enemy nation unless we decide we want to
| fight them
| pixl97 wrote:
| Or, if they decided to take lands belonging to allies.
|
| Though after this administration I'm not sure we'll have
| any allies left.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If Trump's term ends with NATO still intact I'll be
| surprised.
| mr_toad wrote:
| If the US left NATO the remaining members would have even
| more incentive to stick together.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Completely agree with your main point.
|
| I do disagree somewhat with point 4. I think this is
| frequently overstated:
|
| Building and operating automated factories is just as
| wage-dependent as anything else (just the coefficients
| are a bit smaller). You still need engineers,
| construction crews, supervisors, repair crews, etc. (and
| those could all be doing something more profitable as
| well).
|
| You can see this very clearly in the EU, where there is a
| pretty smooth wage-gradient, and even the super highly
| automated automotive manufacturing has moved down that
| gradient towards Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, despite
| language/culture barriers.
|
| > Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is
| sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
|
| I think a decent sized manufacturing industry is a
| realistic goal long term. But longer term US global
| supremacy in it is not even a realistic goal to begin
| with, because not only are you gonna fight against the
| wage gradient _now_ , you are also gonna face the fact
| that the US is only ~5% global population, and
| manufacturing will naturally drift towards the very
| biggest _markets_ for its goods, which the US probably
| won 't be in half a century or so, simply because of
| demographics and economical growth in China/India
| generally.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| So basically, Biden's CHIPS act plus infrastructure
| (energy, roads, etc.) investments (e.g., solar and wind
| and battery part of Biden's IRA plus additional
| baseload). Yeah, we had all that going under the previous
| administration, and the current administration is
| distracting us from their dismantling of these sensible
| investments and incentives by strangling the entire
| global economy. Is it still "fringe" to think Trump is a
| foreign asset?
| Delphiza wrote:
| Moving the low-cost jobs offshore was fine until automation
| filled a lot of those jobs. Now the high skilled automation
| skills and infrastructure (production lines and robots) are
| also offshore. I have done my fair share of western factory
| tours and the number of people on the factory floor is
| soberingly low... they are simply not needed, as they line
| runs like a vast, complicated machine.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Japan led in automation in the 90s before the rise of
| China put a stop to those investments paying off. Now
| China is making those same investments at a time when the
| tech is much better. America could solve its
| manufacturing problem in the future just by importing
| China automation tech.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"America could solve its manufacturing problem in the
| future just by importing China automation tech."
|
| Assuming there is no embargo by then.
| taylodl wrote:
| Thing is, manufacturing in America is up. The 2008 crises
| dealt a blow, but manufacturing has been building-back. I
| don't think people realize how many high-value items are made
| in the United States. Let the East Asians make our mass-
| consumer junk while we focus on the high-value stuff.
|
| Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts
| and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective
| policy.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bou.
| ..
| _bin_ wrote:
| The administration is probably aware of this and doesn't
| care. A huge portion of his base were rust belt voters who
| want what are essentially handouts, which trump intends to
| achieve by forcing the American consumer to pay $30/hour
| for el cheapo goods that could be made elsewhere and have
| no tangible security impact.
|
| You're mistaking the rhetoric he uses to sell this idiocy
| to the rest of the country for a good-faith argument.
| red_admiral wrote:
| > and have no tangible security impact
|
| I would not object to a tariff on shitty IoT devices,
| with the level determined by things like if the default
| password is "admin".
| Yeul wrote:
| And America can't even export any off it because Trump
| managed to start a trade war with the rest of the world.
|
| Apparently the US doesn't need allies anymore against
| China...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The joke is on them. We'll simply buy less stuff and make
| due more with what we have.
| _bin_ wrote:
| Yeah personally I buy very little and live pretty
| minimally so I'm not impacted much either way. I think
| most people's takes, however, are influenced by what is
| best for their pocketbooks short-term rather than for the
| nation long-term. And Trump is influenced by what's best
| for him short-term.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Thing is, manufacturing in America is up.
|
| I'm looking at the first chart, "Manufacturing Sector: Real
| Sectoral Output for All Workers" [1]. It grew until Q2
| 2000, when it was at 97.2. In Q4 2024 it was at 98.6. And
| let's not ignore how almost all leading semiconductor
| manufacturing (which are in and required for nearly
| everything) has moved to East Asia.
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
| cutemonster wrote:
| This one also bad, stagnant last 15 years:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG
|
| Labor Productivity (Output per Hour) for All Workers
| like_any_other wrote:
| I didn't notice it before, but these are not per capita
| numbers. In 2000, the US population was 281 million, and
| in 2024 it was 340 million [1]. So per capita,
| manufacturing went from 97.2 in 2000, to 81.5 in 2024.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Uni
| ted_Sta...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > we focus on the high-value stuff.
|
| agreed but Trump just gutted the CHIPS act for no other
| reason than because it was enacted by Biden (the typical
| "undo everything the last prez did" just like Trump 1.0).
|
| You can argue that Intel is a badly run company, not worth
| saving etc etc, but if want to save US manufacturing, then
| Intel, and its ecosystem, would be the first place to
| start. Otherwise, TSMC, Samsung and China (still playing
| second-fiddle but investing billions to catch up) will
| dominate. Certainly better than trying to keep coal plants
| open.
|
| Ideology aside it's really hard to find _any_ rational
| thought behind these moves.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is the part that is so frustrating to me, and not just
| with regards to tariffs. It's that I see the extremes being
| so laughably bad (though not necessarily equally - I'm not
| "both sides"-ing this), and more ludicrously bad is that I've
| seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being
| derided now as "centrism". E.g. before the administration's
| attack on higher education, I _do_ believe a lot of elite
| universities had completely jumped the shark with their
| ideological purity tests like required DEI statements. And
| importantly, there were thoughtful, measured criticisms of
| these things, e.g.
| https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/10/jon-haidt-goes-
| aft....
|
| But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious
| and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological
| alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment
| feels almost pointless.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > making logical arguments in this environment feels almost
| pointless.
|
| Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a
| controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments.
|
| > ideological purity tests like required DEI statements
|
| Example?
|
| There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst
| examples of student-politics excess in these regards and
| then carefully conflates it with university policy.
|
| As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away
| "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge
| the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients
| from the website, etc.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Example?
|
| _Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic
| Jobs_ -
| https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-
| diversity-...
|
| More examples:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692945
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 20% isn't so bad; the way it's usually portrayed in the
| media it sounds more like 90% of posts require such
| statements
| ImJamal wrote:
| If a college allocated a minimum of 20% of their jobs to
| whites, would you still say it wasn't too bad?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| If we'd enslaved whites and then turned them second class
| citizens with minimal rights and very few economic
| opportunities until fairly recently, putting them in
| conditions that make it very difficult for them to
| achieve equal opportunity, then yeah, I wouldn't have a
| problem with it.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| You don't even have to go that far.
|
| I went to school in south Atlanta, where both student
| body and teaching staff tended to be overwhelmingly
| Black. The school had a policy of hiring a certain
| percentage of non-Black teachers, including white
| teachers, and it had programs designed specifically to
| attract students from white and Hispanic communities.
|
| The goal was not to give non-Black students and teachers
| a leg up; it was to promote diversity and ensure students
| graduated ready to meet all kinds of different people in
| the workplace. These policies were popular and
| uncontroversial, at least while I was there -- though I
| dare say they would be deemed illegal now.
| kenjackson wrote:
| These are statements, not quotas. Basically these are
| statements where you note that you support teaching all
| kids, will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your
| class has an inclusive environment, etc...
|
| There is no requirement on the race of the applicants.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > these are statements where you note that you support
| teaching all kids, will make efforts to be inclusive and
| ensure your class has an inclusive environment
|
| If you look at one example of the actual assessment
| criteria [1], merely teaching without discrimination or
| exclusion earns the _lowest_ possible score.
|
| [1] _Only mentions activities that are already the
| expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and
| involvement (for example, "I always invite and welcome
| students from all backgrounds to participate in my
| research lab, and in fact have mentored several women."_
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20200302212643/https://ofew
| .berk...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| These statements are performative bullshit, and everyone
| who writes one knows it.
|
| > Basically these are statements where you note that you
| support teaching all kids
|
| Do you really feel today's university professors need to
| write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?
|
| > will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class
| has an inclusive environment
|
| Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this
| exactly mean?
|
| It's absolutely makes sense to me that a university has
| policies in place to ensure classrooms are inclusive and
| that discrimination does not occur. But these statements
| are nonsense.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| OK, so what policies do you recommend?
|
| Any policies to "ensure classrooms are inclusive" are
| going to be decried by some people who say that it's
| "unfair" for whatever reason. Because when you have a
| class or classes of people who have been discriminated
| against for centuries, who are at the bottom of the heap,
| they don't just magically gain parity with other classes,
| in terms of being able to take advantage of equal
| opportunity (the promise) simply because they're no
| longer legally discriminated against. It takes active
| policies, not just passive ones, for inclusivity to take
| root. (Once it's taken root, in time those policies may
| no longer be necessary.)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Example?
|
| I literally linked an article in my comment that had an
| overview, but here is a more specific one that addresses
| diversity statements in particular:
|
| https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-
| statement-d...
|
| > As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away
| "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and
| purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor
| recipients from the website, etc.
|
| This is literally my exact point. There absolutely
| _should_ be a rational place that denounces _both_ these
| diversity statement ideological requirements and the
| egregious memory-holing that the current administration
| is implementing.
| moomin wrote:
| So... an incident not involving a university in any way
| is your example of universities jumping the shark?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Fair enough, my bad. Here you go:
|
| https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-
| use-di...
|
| https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/05/07/massachusetts-
| institute...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/us/harvard-diversity-
| stat...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/diversity-
| statements-u...
|
| https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/diversity-statements-
| are-g...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| At UC Berkeley, over 75% of faculty applicants were
| rejected solely based on reviewing their diversity
| statements:
| https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-
| davi... Rather conspicuously, Asians had the highest rate
| of rejection, followed by whites. Latin applicants had
| the second highest pass rate, Black applicants had the
| highest. The diversity statements were not anonymized (as
| in, the reviewers could see the ethnicity of each
| applicant when reviewing their diversity statement).
|
| Diversity statements were widely suspected of being a
| smokescreen for racial preferences. Much like the
| "personality score" Harvard used to curate its desired
| racial makeup in its student admissions.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Doesn't anyone think is utterly appalling? No one
| apparently at +16h.
| skywhopper wrote:
| It's an overhyped exaggeration at best, but very likely a
| complete misrepresentation of the policies and how they
| were used in reality. What you should be outraged by is
| that lazy hacks can make a living by stirring up fake
| controversies over intentionally misinterpreting this
| stuff.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Doesn't anyone think is utterly appalling?
|
| Of course. The point of this kind of propaganda is to
| have you reacting so negatively and emotionally that you
| don't examine the claims calmly and rationally. Emotions
| > facts. If no-one appalled, then it isn't doing its job.
| hylaride wrote:
| For the schools that have them, I consider legacy
| admissions to be more appalling. Those are overwhelmingly
| white.
|
| The other issue is that many of these schools have not
| been expanding enrolment numbers to population growth.
| Less seats per-capita mean more exclusivity over time.
|
| Get rid of them both (DEI and legacy admissions) and the
| government should create a policy that those endowments
| need to be used to expand the size of the schools.
| skywhopper wrote:
| If you're basing your understanding of the subject based
| on one anti-DEI activist's misinterpretation of policies
| he doesn't actually know anything about, who didn't talk
| to anyone at those schools (even critics of the policy),
| and who very likely misread statistics and intentionally
| misrepresented processes, then you are not getting a fair
| picture. This piece you linked to is a mess of
| unsubstantiated statements. Several of the links are
| broken but the one that is still around does not say what
| he says, so I wouldn't trust any of the rest of his
| summarization either.
| yorwba wrote:
| Of course one should not use an opinion piece as the
| source when that opinion piece is just commenting on
| information found elsewhere, but also, in this day and
| age there's no reason to give up when you encounter a
| broken link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200202194620/h
| ttps://ofew.berk...
|
| _A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893
| met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a
| first review and evaluated candidates based solely on
| contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only
| candidates that met a high standard in this area were
| advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to
| 214 for serious consideration._
| habinero wrote:
| Ok, so what exactly is the "high standard" here, and what
| about the standard do you find it objectionable? The fact
| that something exists doesn't count.
|
| If you don't know, you're just spreading urban legends
| and ghost stories.
| yorwba wrote:
| The text in italics is a verbatim quote from the archived
| PDF I linked, wherein UC Berkeley describes their hiring
| process. I encourage you to read it if you want to know
| further details.
| habinero wrote:
| I asked what _you_ find objectionable, not what it says.
| yorwba wrote:
| I found objectionable that some people were unable to
| identify the original source of a claim they were
| discussing, so I decided to help out.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > However, other University of California schools have
| published this information. In one recent search at UC
| Berkeley employing substantially similar evaluation
| techniques to those that UC Davis used, there were 893
| qualified applicants who submitted complete applications
| that met the basic job requirements. Of those applicants,
| 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity
| statements were deemed inadequate.
|
| Do you have any substantial criticism of the factual
| claims made here? Or are you just insisting that this is
| a misinterpretation, without any evidence?
| habinero wrote:
| There's no facts to refute - he just states that this
| conclusion is true without evidence of how he knows that
| or what the criteria he's using is.
|
| That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's
| never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all
| profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There are two very specific facts to refute:
|
| * UC Berkeley received 893 qualified applications
|
| * Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because
| their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.
|
| If someone seeks to disprove the claim that 76% of
| applicants were rejected based on their diversity
| statements, they can find alternate figures for the
| numerator and denominator and offer reasons why their
| numbers are more authoritative.
|
| > That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's
| never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all
| profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
|
| 3 out of the four companies I've worked at engaged in
| explicit discrimination on the basis of gender. As in,
| alternate interview pipelines where women got multiple
| chances to pass coding interviews where men got one. And
| one company even augmented that approach with outright
| withholding a portion of headcount for "diverse"
| applicants (which was defined as women and URM men, and
| in practice women made up over 95% of "diverse"
| applicants).
|
| If you haven't been witnessed to discriminatory DEI
| practices, that's fortunate for you. But that's not been
| the experience of many people. DEI is widely perceived as
| a dogwhistle for discrimination, because it often is used
| to refer to discriminatory hiring practices, and I don't
| think condescension is a way to convince people
| otherwise.
| habinero wrote:
| You don't know what the "diversity criteria" even is.
| Neither does the parent article. You _assume_ you do and
| therefore it is bad because something something woke.
| That 's not being condescending, that's just true.
|
| As I said, the entire DEI thing smacks of hysteria and
| paranoia. Frankly, DEI programs do very little, in
| general.
|
| I _have_ seen a lot of guys overvalue their skills and
| undervalue others and then blame "DEI" instead of their
| own mediocrity.
| sfn42 wrote:
| When I was young I went to school to become a chemical
| process technician. This was a very attractive education
| for women because it allowed them to work in factories
| and oil rigs without getting their hands dirty. It's
| mostly just sitting in control rooms and such, taking
| walks to make sure things are running smoothly.
|
| The companies hiring had gender quotas to meet, so this
| was one field where they filled a lot of their quota. Our
| class was exactly 50% men, 50% women. I worked my ass
| off, we were graded 1-6 where 6 is best and I had all 6es
| except one 5 in one class.
|
| Everyone applied for apprenticeships to Statoil (now
| Equinor) and from our class they hired one guy with
| literally perfect grades, and nearly all the girls. Over
| 80% of the girls were accepted, girls with a grade
| average of 4.2 compared to my 5.9 got the job. I didn't
| and neither did any of the other guys in the class except
| one.
| rurp wrote:
| On top of that even the official guidelines are
| ridiculous. Statements along the lines of saying that
| people should be treated equally regardless of skin color
| are officially grounds for rejection.
| skywhopper wrote:
| You've been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything
| more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American
| universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive
| way? Of course. But it wasn't anything that was going to
| lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks
| who can't just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel
| personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of
| realizing that they themselves probably weren't all that
| special.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Harvard and UNC lost lawsuits about their DEI programs in
| admissions being illegal racism.
| habinero wrote:
| That doesn't counteract the point being made.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Uh, I think it does. A lot of people, myself included,
| have major problems when "overactive DEI" leads to race
| being a primary, if not the primary, factor in hiring and
| admissions decisions. This isn't something one should
| just "roll their eyes over" and move on.
|
| FWIW, that _was_ my original approach, and I thought that
| the worst excesses of "wokeism" were just caricatures
| that the right was using to paint all on the left with a
| broad brush, so I was pretty dismayed when, over time, I
| felt that a lot of this "race first" thinking _had_
| infested many areas of elite universities. Many
| university professors (ones who would not have in any way
| identified with being "on the right") who I deeply
| respect have spoken out about this, sometimes at great
| professional cost.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that
| don't follow these extremes as being derided now as
| "centrism".
|
| You can't stake out a position without getting called some
| name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome
| to modern politics on the internet.
| bananalychee wrote:
| Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers
| reiterating their political affiliation to their posts
| regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to
| justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal
| magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in
| dogmatic bubbles.
| Arkhadia wrote:
| Your rationality here will surely be flagged. Over
| apologizing is the new norm to avoid being canceled for
| dissenting opinions.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| The commenter is right that you shouldn't have to state
| those kinds of beliefs, but pragmatically this is a
| message board that invites all sorts of responses. Those
| additional notes are an attempt to head-off annoying and
| wrongly-based counter-responses built on assumptions that
| _shouldn 't have been made_. But just because they
| shouldn't be doesn't mean they won't be.
|
| Your comment evoking a victim complex on the other hand I
| find a far more annoying element of online discourse.
| justin66 wrote:
| I don't mind getting some extra clarity on where someone
| is coming from.
| rurp wrote:
| I couldn't agree more and worry that even if the country
| makes it out of this period in one piece the well will have
| been poisoned on a lot of these topics. We should have big
| initiatives to make government more efficient, and reduce
| the national debt, and get back to merit-based processes.
| But after so much bloviating and fake initiatives that
| claim to do those things, but actually do the opposite,
| it's going to be a tough sell to make a real push in the
| foreseeable future.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| But Americans were given that choice? The chips act was an
| industrial policy play based on the industrial policy
| playbook of east asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan.
|
| I'm not a fan of industrial policy or the chips act, but it
| seems to be just the choice you are asking for.
| philistine wrote:
| The candidate who opposed Trump during the primaries would
| have done something very similar to what you said. But then
| she was born with ovaries so the Republican Party wanted
| nothing to do with her as the top boss.
| xienze wrote:
| Democrat voters didn't want anything to do with her during
| the 2020 primaries and didn't turn out as much for her in
| 2024 as they did for Biden in 2020, so who are the real
| misogynists here?
| watwut wrote:
| Pretty clearly republicans, to be honest.
| xienze wrote:
| And this is why Democrats lost. Why admit and address
| that perhaps they ran a candidate that was deeply
| unpopular, even within her own party, when they could
| just instead blame the "misogynistic Republican"
| boogeyman.
| stetrain wrote:
| > And this is why Democrats lost.
|
| What do Democrats have to do with Republican candidates
| in a Republican primary?
| xienze wrote:
| Ah my mistake, I missed that this was referencing the
| Republican primaries here. Forgive me, the whole "Harris
| wasn't elected because Americans are misogynists" trope
| has been repeated so often I had that burned into my
| brain.
|
| Addressing the primaries, no one was beating Trump, it
| has nothing to do with his closest but still far distant
| challenger being a woman.
| Jensson wrote:
| Republicans would have voted for a Republican woman, they
| aren't the misogynists. Its more common for conservatives
| to elect women than for progressives to around the world,
| most female national leaders are right wing.
|
| The reason there aren't many women in the Republican
| party isn't the voters, its that not many women likes
| right wing politics no matter where in the world you are.
| stetrain wrote:
| > Democrat voters didn't want anything to do with her
| during the 2020 primaries and didn't turn out as much for
| her in 2024 as they did for Biden in 2020, so who are the
| real misogynists here?
|
| Are you talking about Harris? I'm pretty sure she wasn't
| in the republican primaries so that isn't who the
| previous comment was talking about.
| mjevans wrote:
| NO candidate should get a free pass. They should _all_
| _always_ have to primary. That would have likely sorted out
| Biden earlier in the cycle and we might have had real
| choices other than Harris to replace the incumbent who
| flubbed that debate so badly that it was clear they were
| not going to get elected.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| It turns out good policy takes a long time to play out and
| isn't well suited for the current destabilized US political
| system where nothing good gets done and the rare things that
| do get reversed within four years.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I find it annoying that you think the other choice was
| "offshoring is great." Spending on US factory construction
| surged under Biden. This was largely due to stuff like the
| IRA and the CHIPS Act. If voters had made different choices
| in November 2024, in Congress as well as the Presidency, I
| think we could have had even more aggressive industrial
| policy -- instead of this absolute shitshow that will
| permanently damage the US's economic position.
|
| On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters
| get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Largely due to government welfare, business is great!
| stetrain wrote:
| There are carrots and sticks. The current plan seems to
| be to cut down giant trees at random and hope they don't
| fall on anything important. If they do there will need to
| be government welfare applied anyway to keep businesses
| alive just like during the previous Trump administration.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I've mostly decided to stop arguing about this stuff,
| since it's fairly obvious that Trump is going to ruin the
| economy and discredit his party for a generation.
| stetrain wrote:
| > It's annoying Americans were given only two choices -
| offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say,
| the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing
| overnight.
|
| There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring
| incentives during the Biden administration that would have
| presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly
| around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing
| incentives - which have successfully resulted in new auto,
| battery, and supply chain factories being built mostly in red
| states - and semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden
| administration also maintained and increased tariffs on
| specific types of products coming from China including EVs.
|
| So I don't think your categorization of the two choices
| Americans were given is quite accurate.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| As someone watching EV & battery plants break ground in my
| state (GA), this is absolutely my take.
|
| Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically
| doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely
| aligned with this goal as well.
|
| I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency
| (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster
| response to actually prosecuting criminality in the
| outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are
| markedly too corporatist in general).
|
| But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical
| steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US.
| There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take
| credit for them (incl Trump).
| rtkwe wrote:
| We were getting the slow and steady version at least for chip
| manufacturing with the CHIPS Act but Trump has a major need
| to get credit for everything so that's being torn apart too.
|
| The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards
| to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because
| they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that
| could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population),
| cheap labor (kind of an extension to point 1 but also
| includes their lower COL and wage expectations over all), and
| low environmental barriers.
|
| To bring manufacturing back to the US is a way harder lift;
| we have a lot tighter labor market, if we shift a lot of
| people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they
| leave. We (well I at least don't enjoy the idea of going back
| to when rivers caught fire on the regular) don't want to
| strip environmental protections back to a level to make it
| cheap to dispose of waste. The best targets are low labor,
| high price, high skill goods, like, I don't know, chip
| manufacturing!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in
| regards to bringing manufacturing back.
|
| I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets
| than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the
| US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce
| left in the United States, and will be less of one by the
| time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was
| happy at how many of the young men there had come from
| farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment,
| how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that
| translated right back into mnufacturing there these now
| older men were familiar with "making things". They could do
| actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber
| Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do
| on the assembly line?
|
| >if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs
| to take the jobs they leave.
|
| If we _could_ bring back manufacturing, then we would need
| to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser
| /menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we
| can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others
| on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to
| do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The
| people who set this in motion aren't even just retired,
| they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone
| can do about what's coming.
| mbgerring wrote:
| People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery
| drivers _because_ there aren't other jobs available, and
| people can pick up skills faster than you think.
|
| I know _a lot_ of people in the Bay Area with serious
| fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would
| _love_ to have a stable job using those skills in a
| factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig
| work instead.
|
| There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took
| the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts
| to a second job as a creative producer and art
| fabricator, but it doesn't pay the bills, so I need a day
| job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to
| pay the bills, I'd choose that over a full time job with
| a heavy mental load.
|
| It's easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like,
| seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a
| morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders
| and also tons of people in line. It's an assembly line.
| Different technical skills, but similar structure and
| pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
|
| tl;dr I think we're vastly underestimating the
| capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly
| dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for
| certain kinds of jobs.
| aredox wrote:
| >It's annoying Americans were given only two choices -
| offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say,
| the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing
| overnight.
|
| Excuse me, but I am old enough to remember Biden's program
| such as CHIPS, a slow and steady protection and promotion of
| home-grown industry.
|
| America had the choice. It chose wrong. Are Americans going
| to assume the consequences of their choices or are they going
| to lie to themselves they weren't given the choice? That last
| option would fit more with the "character" of the America
| nowadays, the one who voted Trump: make mistakes and blame
| someone else for it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of
| home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so
| successfully used to grow their economies was completely
| absent as even a talking point.
|
| I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can
| make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the
| US currently does is no place for that, and that's not
| limited to the new administration.
| pphysch wrote:
| Did America stop being a democracy under FDR? Conflating
| specific term limits with autocracy/democracy is a bit
| dramatic.
|
| There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing
| what China is doing. We literally did it first (in
| modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber
| barons and foreign interests retook control.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think what I wrote here covers what you're saying:
|
| > Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently
| does
|
| It's not "robber barons" etc. It's just two very
| different worldviews existing in one place that cause big
| swings in policy when the other one is elected.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Was it absent? The "Green New Deal" was hitting on some of
| that. You can't beat "<Some other country> is going to pay
| for it" and "Coal jobs are going to come back", especially
| when there's no accountability or fact checking.
| bparsons wrote:
| I think they conflated electricity production growth with total
| output.
|
| Output in the US has been flat for some time, while China has
| been on a steady rate of climb for several decades.
| pokot0 wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why EU VAT is considered a tariff,
| while US sales taxes are not? They both seem a sale tax to me.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Only people who are wrong consider VAT a tariff. Yes,
| importers have to pay it, but so do local manufacturers.
|
| VAT has basically the same effect as sales taxes with a much
| more complicated tax incidence.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| At an individual level, it's not more complicated: it's
| reimbursed instead of exempted. And if you're charging it,
| it's _easier_ , since you simply always charge instead of
| maintaining your list of exceptions.
| pjc50 wrote:
| UK VAT certainly has a complicated list of exceptions,
| especially "non-luxury food" (see the Jaffa Cake case
| https://www.astonshaw.co.uk/jaffa-cake-tax/)
| freeone3000 wrote:
| But these are per-product, not per- _customer_.
| (Businesses, charities, and some customers are exempt
| from sales tax regardless of what they are buying.)
| charamis wrote:
| Really wondering about the same, since VAT is applied to
| everything too, not only imported products and services.
| presto8 wrote:
| Because VAT is collected at the border on imports, some
| people (wrongly) consider VATs a tariff. Considering that VAT
| is rebated on exports, VATs are trade neutral.
|
| Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as
| VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate
| transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the
| incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas
| sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Does the US charge sales tax on B2B transactions? Really?
| Well no wonder you have problems with domestic
| manufacturing.
| presto8 wrote:
| Many B2B transactions are tax-exempt but it's
| complicated. And gets really complicated once
| international transactions are considered. And also
| whether the company has a physical nexus in the place the
| product is being purchased. All in all, I think it would
| be simpler if the US adopted VAT. But that seems very
| unlikely.
| 9dev wrote:
| Unlikely, given that the current administration seems
| incapable of understanding what VAT is in the first
| place...
| Yeul wrote:
| Last I checked VAT is the same rate regardless if the
| product is made in China or by pinguins on Antarctica so
| why anyone in the US gives a damn is beyond me.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| There's no federal sales tax so it varies by state.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Hmm how is it different in the US do you not get back in
| the sales tax that you paid for your input. Here the middle
| man pay tax on the buying price and then collects on the
| sell price. Then has to pay the government minus what they
| paid as input sale tax. So all increments on the price gets
| taxed till the end user. But the tax itself is not taxed
| again.
| misja111 wrote:
| The answer is: rhetoric. It's a fake argument to justify US
| tariffs. It won't work for people like you and me, but Trump
| fans will love it.
| dboreham wrote:
| They're not. Only disingenuous charlatans say they are.
| mcv wrote:
| That is really the big problem with the current policy in the
| US: it's completely unclear what the policy is and how long it
| will last. This is not a stable climate for investment. Would
| you invest in a country where the president plays Russian
| roulette with the economy?
|
| Most corporations will wait it out. Corporations that have an
| established interest (like Big Tech) will bribe Trump to get
| the exemptions they need to continue their business. Everybody
| else will have to decide how much they will want to depend on
| such an openly corrupt system. There industries that see no
| problem in dealing with corrupt regimes.
| mapt wrote:
| When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug
| supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the
| supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of
| Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply of illicit
| drugs for Chinese people (who only dealt with Chinese people),
| and then there were the vast array of drugs that are completely
| legal to get over the counter in China without a prescription
| (at a pharmacy or CTM shop) that would be controlled substances
| in a US pharmacy.
|
| That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug
| problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things+, and that
| there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western
| ailments.
|
| Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but
| culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner.
| Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in
| terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you
| don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about
| what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party
| members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes
| something closer to earning a military officer commission; The
| Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly
| regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil
| law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a
| strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the
| regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more
| extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same
| presumptions.
|
| There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of
| informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of
| a deal in China.
|
| Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of
| date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly
| Westerners in some first tier cities.
|
| + From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution,
| drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and
| feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often
| counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to
| modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were
| present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem
| to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a
| "campaign" or "struggle" against it."
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's an interesting subject. Are there any books about it?
| hylaride wrote:
| > hat the official line from the CCP was that China had no
| drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things
|
| Reminds me of a book I read years ago about the Soviet Union.
| Officially prostitution didn't exist there either, so there
| were no laws on the books about it. Enforcement usually was
| around various "antisocial" laws and usually for the street-
| walkers. Crime in general was mostly fine, so long as it
| wasn't a threat to the state, against well-connected people,
| or otherwise visible.
|
| No wonder Russia got so bad after the strong state
| dissipated.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| Regarding the potential to annoy small businesses, it's
| actually pretty easy to hire a firm to represent you in the EU.
| You'll need a lawyer at some point anyway so it's often the
| same firm.
|
| If we had the same requirements here in the US it would likely
| become the same.
| mjevans wrote:
| Delaware / Ohio corporations? I think those already exist for
| 'business friendly' incorporation states. Might also be
| Nevada and Texas, though I'm more speculating there or
| recalling singular offhand cases I heard about.
| nottorp wrote:
| > To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and
| nominate a legal representative.
|
| American companies? Register for EU tax system?
|
| I can buy from anyone in the US and worldwide for that matter,
| and as long as they're willing to figure out shipping they
| don't need to register anywhere, I can handle taxes myself when
| receiving.
|
| What "AI" did they use to write this?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You can't handle VAT rebates on your own, but America lacking
| a VAT system itself can't really take advantage of that.
| nottorp wrote:
| What VAT rebates if i import something into the EU?
|
| It says "to sell into Europe" not "to buy from Europe". In
| first case I, the EU buyer, owe VAT.
|
| In second case whoever buys may be owed a VAT rebate. But
| it's not selling any more.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > You can't handle VAT rebates on your own
|
| Individuals (sole traders, contractors etc) can claim VAT
| rebates. You don't have to have a lawyer or an accountant
| if you're prepared to figure out the rules yourself.
| erkt wrote:
| Tl;Dr: The author makes a strong case for broader, higher
| tariffs but understands it is impossible to help American
| manufacturing knowing that the next administration will cave to
| China and Wall-street and immediately move to undo everything.
| The solution is to work together to make American protectionism
| work.
|
| 1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.
|
| 2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we
| need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.
|
| 3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP
| like China? We will figure it out.
|
| 4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is
| looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.
|
| 5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to
| build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue
| to bring industry home.
|
| 6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and
| Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can
| override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to
| slow projects down.
|
| 7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will
| have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to
| reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable
| and this will harden resolve.
|
| 8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a
| very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going
| to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs
| already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always
| endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do
| not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is
| disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing
| without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will
| be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in
| servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We
| aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.
|
| 9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why
| there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they
| should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring
| back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the
| process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do
| not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.
|
| 10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a
| world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade.
| They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more
| productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade.
| The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture
| everything it NEEDS on its own.
|
| 11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the
| quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable
| foreign garbage that floods our markets. 12. enforcement will
| be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve
| it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.
|
| 13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a
| terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods
| and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire
| supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to
| components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure
| national security in a world post-NATO.
|
| 14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious
| consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through
| COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the
| market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not
| currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in
| the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in
| companies that sold out America.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| yea its difficult lets not do it
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Let's approach it from the other direction: why should we? What
| are we getting by trying to "bring it back"?
| tmpz22 wrote:
| High paying factory jobs that will allow an individual to
| purchase a home and start a family!
| krapp wrote:
| Ok. Those jobs don't exist. Now what?
| pjc50 wrote:
| How much do you have to raise the prices of manufactured
| goods to get there?
|
| People were going bananas about 10% inflation and the price
| of eggs before the election. They're not ready to 2X all
| consumer goods prices.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Factory jobs aren't high paying and even if you brought all
| manufacturing home it would barely impact manufacturing
| employment.
|
| Automation is what took the jobs away.
|
| To fix housing all you need to do is build more homes.
| America has plenty of land for that.
| drittich wrote:
| False dichotomy. An alternate position is to do it in a
| measured, planned way, not under duress as the economy tanks
| and international relations are soured.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine said (he is a
| recently-retired Co-CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing
| business).
|
| He's been telling me this, for years. It's not a secret. The
| information has been out there, for ages. I'm surprised that the
| administration didn't understand this.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.
|
| Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to
| understand complexity.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Fair point. :/
|
| My friend is watching his business get ready to die. His wife
| is still the CEO, and she's losing her shit. They're not
| alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations,
| all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something
| doesn't give.
|
| I guess the mega-rich oligarchs think this is great, but they
| don't employ the majority of Americans.
| skyyler wrote:
| The majority of Americans simply are not going to benefit
| from this administration, it seems.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of
| similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut
| down, if something doesn't give.
|
| I wonder where they were on election day, when they had a
| choice. The record of business owners voting D is .. not
| great.
| bluGill wrote:
| D has not been a good choice for small business either.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The electoral Monty Hall problem offered people a choice
| of two boxes, and we can all see what's in the one they
| picked.
| smcl wrote:
| The thing is the US already experienced Trump 1.0, so it was
| presumably easy for many to assume that Trump 2.0 would
| follow broadly the same pattern and that there'd be an "adult
| in the room" somewhere to say "this will crash the world
| economy and do three consecutive 9/11s worth of damage to the
| stock market". So even though there are some very silly
| people in very high places saying some very wild things, the
| assumption for many is that there's someone there to manage
| the chaos and minimise the stupidity.
|
| This has been a pretty sobering reminder to anyone that, in
| fact, there is no such thing.
| bluGill wrote:
| The amazing things to me is people still are not asking why
| people are so mad about the state of things they voted for
| Trump in the first place. Trump is the only one promising
| to make some changes to make life better for those who
| don't want to go to college. "Maybe he will, maybe he
| won't, but everyone else is ignoring us" is what I keep
| hearing when I listen to those people.
|
| Fix health care - socialism isn't the only answer despite
| what many hear will say.
|
| Fix school - it shouldn't be all sit at your desk but that
| is what we get. Bring back gym class. Make kids get
| practical experience building the things they designed
| (that is shop class). Math could be fun - but most teachers
| don't believe it themselves, and so they haven't a hope of
| passing that on to students.
| smcl wrote:
| Do you think Trump has some ideas on fixing healthcare or
| school? Is there even a consensus on _what_ needs fixed?
|
| You've said re healthcare that "socialism isn't the
| answer" - assuming you mean "I don't want a single-payer
| or free-at-the-point-of-use system" then I'm not sure
| what _is_ the answer then. They 've currently got some of
| the worst health outcomes on the planet despite spending
| amongst the most per-capita. They can either try _more_
| privatisation or maybe give something like Medicare For
| All a shot...
|
| And re "fix school" you seem to suggest that shop class
| needs to be more widespread and maths teachers just need
| to be more enthusiastic? If the idea is to give kids more
| options then things like making sure that there are
| widely available apprenticeship programs and technical
| colleges to develop these skills, as well as strong (dare
| I say, _union_ ) jobs waiting for them when they complete
| their training.
|
| And re maths teachers, if it's anything like the UK I
| suspect that teachers are being expected to do more with
| less at every stage of schooling. They handle more kids
| per class with fewer teaching assistants available. They
| need to handle more diverse lessons than before because
| there are insufficient PE teachers, Music teachers, Drama
| teachers etc). They're having a tougher time with kids
| behaviourally due to the rise of social media and a
| broader economic decline that causes a whole host of
| social issues that end up being schools' problem. Having
| poor school system is a symptom of greater societal
| problems, you don't fix schools without solving those
| (sidenote: you also don't solve those by pointing the
| finger at vulnerable communities like immigrants and
| LGBTQ+). Telling maths teachers to be a bit more
| enthusiastic doesn't fix any of that, it just makes the
| maths teachers hate their job a bit more.
| bluGill wrote:
| The US has great health care. It is marginaly worse than
| some other examples but nowhere close to amoung the
| worst. As for what I'd do: I would eliminate the employer
| contribuition - I hate my insurance but if I go elsewhere
| I leave behind more than $1000/month and nobody can
| compete with that - thus I'm stuck with health care that
| my HR department has choosen for me.
|
| i'm not suggesting enthusiastic math teachers is all we
| need: lack of enthusism is a sympton of a problem but
| fixing symptoms isn't enough. Likewise I'm not sure shop
| class is the answer - but schools are leaving a lot of
| people out by not having them.
|
| the us has a great school system overall but it needs to
| be better.
| smcl wrote:
| I mean if you want to compare the US to Angola, Yemen etc
| then hell yeah it's "great" and you can sorta kid
| yourself you're up there with the best of the bunch. But
| as a wealthy nation that is a pretty low bar and _really_
| shouldn 't be what you're aiming for. Perhaps I didn't
| word that very well - you're having some of the worst
| healthcare outcomes among all of the planets developed
| nations despite spending the most on it. Like it is
| _shocking_ how much of an outlier the USA is, there are
| multiple things you can measure but a really nice simple
| one people can wrap their head around is life expectancy:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-
| health.... When you plot it against average annual
| expenditure it is clear that you're getting a truly
| terrible deal.
|
| I dunno what to tell you man, it sounds like you're a
| true believer on this. I reckon everyone who has
| undergone a healthcare bankruptcy (a uniquely American
| thing, btw) or could not get treated be cause they
| couldn't afford it was a true believer before they were
| let down.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those plots are meaningless because countries measure
| things differently. Many countries for example don't
| count anyone before they are a year old while the US
| does. The US shows up very well for life expectancy, yes
| it costs a lot more to get there the outcomes of the US
| healthcare system are very good according to your own
| data (which as I said isn't good data, but it is data)
| smcl wrote:
| Honestly this has been extensively studied and the "the
| US gets shocking value for money and poor health
| outcomes" is the consensus. You can either take that as a
| personal insult, dig your heels in and say "the data is
| wrong" or "they're lying", blame immigrants or other
| things I've seen some Americans do when their "we're #1"
| belief is challenged ... or you can take notice and
| demand better from your country.
|
| It is really of no consequence to me which you choose, I
| don't live there and it's looking likely I'll probably
| skip even visiting let alone consider moving there in
| future.
| bluGill wrote:
| You changed your arrguement. You started with the us has
| terrible outtomes. When I refuted that you changed to
| value.
|
| I am not desputing that we spend far too much for what we
| get. I am desputing the solution.
| smcl wrote:
| Relative to its peer nations it has terrible outcomes. If
| you think that I'm moving the goalposts and that you
| should instead be focussed on the fact that you are
| streets ahead of the developing world, rather than
| lagging behind your peers in the developed world then go
| right ahead. As I said, I'm just bringing you the facts -
| what you choose to do with them is on you.
| bluGill wrote:
| To answer your first question which I just realized I
| hadn't: I don't think Trump as useful ideas on fixing
| healthcare of school.
|
| Healthcare and schools are both important and hard
| problems. Most people with ideas have bad ideas IMHO.
| npiano wrote:
| A genuine question, presuming no correct answer: what is to be
| done about it? China is reportedly on track to run more than
| 50% of global manufacturing by 2030, if the World Bank is
| correct. What would you do to act against this? Is doing
| nothing acceptable?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, there's no painless answer. China is not a democracy.
| They can force millions of people to endure terrible working
| conditions, pollution, corruption, and abuse, and take a very
| long view. The US can't do this.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Why do the working conditions need to be terrible?
|
| Why does there need to be corruption and abuse?
|
| Why do they have to expose their workers to pollution?
|
| As far as I know, none of those things are required for
| manufacturing.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| No, but like so much in life, doing it _correctly_ is
| always more difficult and expensive, so people that
| "shortcut" the process, often win.
|
| That's why strong regulations are actually important (not
| something that businesses want to hear -until a
| "shortcutter" starts to eat their lunch).
| bluGill wrote:
| I would act against China - because China is making political
| moves that I do not like. (they are supporting Russia in
| Ukraine, they are building up to invade Taiwan, they are
| supporting terror in the middle east...)
|
| By acting against China that means I applaud moving
| manufacturing to Vietnam. I want to help Botswana grow - and
| I wish there were more countries in Africa I could name that
| seem to be on a good path (I cannot name the majority of
| countries in Africa, the ones I can are because they are in
| the news for bad things happening. I'm not even sure Botswana
| - I mostly know about them because last time I brought up
| Africa someone from there said their country was an
| exception).
|
| Overall the world is better off with a lot of trade.
| Comparative advantage is real. There are things I can do that
| I don't want to become good at. However we also need to be
| aware that not everyone in the world is the friend of freedom
| and some must be cut off lest they grow. Nobody is perfect
| though, so you can't cut off everyone.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _By acting against China that means I applaud moving
| manufacturing to Vietnam_
|
| and
|
| _last time I brought up Africa someone from there said
| their country was an exception_
|
| Making what are essentially strategic decisions in this
| "shoot from the hip" fashion is what lands us repeatedly in
| these situations. By way of illustration, let me try one
| from the 1980's out on you:
|
| "By acting against Iran that means I applaud men like
| Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden"
|
| (In fairness to the americans who made that colossal
| blunder, I'll assume that, to them, it seemed a good idea
| at the time. They were simply not long term thinkers. So no
| one ever asked, "Hmm, what comes next though?")
|
| We, as a people, need to start thinking a bit further ahead
| than the ends of our noses.
| bluGill wrote:
| It probably was the best option available at the time.
| mosburger wrote:
| There are plenty of countries in East Africa ripe for this,
| unfortunately China is beating us there, too. Kenya,
| Rwanda, Tanzania ... all are pretty well positioned right
| now for development, but rn China is mostly the one doing
| it.
|
| (Source - worked in int'l remittances w/ African receiving
| countries)
| bluGill wrote:
| africa has constantly been exploited by those who offer
| money with a catch. China is investing a lot but those
| investments tend to come with a catch they are better off
| without long term.
|
| it is a hard problem
| constantcrying wrote:
| What would prevent Vietnam or Botswana do make political
| moves 20 years down the line? _Surely_ it is not their
| economic reliance on you, as China clearly demonstrates.
|
| I see exactly zero point in repeating the example of China
| again. Why would the outcome be different? Vietnam is
| another Communist pseudo-dictatorship. Why is this one so
| different that it won't support Russia?
| bluGill wrote:
| Vietnam is making moves in directions I want to
| encourage. Only God knows the future and he isn't
| talking. (there are some who will disagree with various
| parts of that statement, but they have offered no
| evidence that they get useful information on the future.
|
| Vietnam has been at war with China in the recent past.
| Today China is claiming seas that the US and internal law
| both call Vietnam's territorial waters - though currently
| they are not at war. Thus even if Vietnam doesn't move in
| a good direction, just keeping them where they are (as
| opposed to supporting China) is useful if only because
| all indications today are China will start a war in the
| future. (again nobody knows if they will, but they are
| preparing as if they will)
|
| Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from
| now that are bad. All we can do today is encourage those
| who seem to be moving for the better. We have no clue how
| things will turn out. Even when we make what in hindsight
| now looks like a bad decision, we have no idea how it
| would have been if we had done something different.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Vietnam is making moves in directions I want to
| encourage.
|
| Just like China did? They had a whole phase of economic
| liberalization and opening trade.
|
| >Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from
| now that are bad.
|
| Vietnam is literally another communist pseudo-
| dictatorship. Their place in the world is obviously far
| more ambiguous than that of e.g. England. The idea of
| shifting manufacturing to Vietnam because you do not like
| the positions of China is just absurd.
|
| >All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be
| moving for the better.
|
| Why should the US not focus on supporting long term
| allies who aren't communist single party states?
| bluGill wrote:
| 20 years ago China looked to be going in the right
| direction. However things change. If they get rid of
| their dictator I might again support them - depending of
| course on how they change.
|
| we should of course support most of europe which usualy
| has better government. Likewise the other countries in
| America - both north and south. And so on for anywhere
| else we can find friends. I an not a Trump fan even if
| once in a while he does something I support
| constantcrying wrote:
| What does support mean? Ship most of our manufacturing
| there or politely meet their political leadership once a
| year?
| bluGill wrote:
| Free trade. So their ecconomy grows and with it edutated
| people who can afford to see the world and in turn how
| thep have been lied to.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >So their ecconomy grows and with it edutated people who
| can afford to see the world and in turn how thep have
| been lied to.
|
| As has happened with China? When they opened up trade and
| became part of a global economy their nationalistic
| ambitions stopped and they ceased to support
| dictatorships like Russia. Also their political system
| opened up and they morphed from a uniparty communist
| country to a liberal democracy. Oh wait, the exact
| opposite happened on all accounts.
|
| You didn't answer my question. Why would Vietnam be any
| different? Why should the US help build their economy so
| that they can do the exact same thing as China did. Your
| theory of how this works is disproven by reality. _You
| can not make a country a liberal democracy by opening up
| trade with them_. It failed with China, it failed with
| Russia.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The irony is that China was actually against Russia into
| the 90s (Sino Soviet split was still on), and nationalism
| was taboo also because too many people were burned by the
| cultural revolution. Changes were made after 1989 to
| encourage more nationalism, and that all culminates with
| Xi (China and Russia are still frenemies, but mutual
| antagonism with the USA has brought them closer).
| bluGill wrote:
| > You can not make a country a liberal democracy by
| opening up trade with them. It failed with China, it
| failed with Russia.
|
| It worked with South Korea, and Taiwan. (Japan and
| Germany, but they were on the losing side of a war with
| us which is a confounding factor). It is by no means
| perfect, but I've yet to see anyone suggest something
| else that has any chance of working.
| constantcrying wrote:
| SK and Taiwan weren't communist dictatorships.
|
| Japan and Germany _did not get convinced by the virtues
| of liberal democracy and free trade_. They were both
| forcibly converted under US occupation.
| smcl wrote:
| I think they should want to do _something_ - it 's just that
| torpedoing your ties with your closest allies and trade
| partners then lighting the stock market on fire is maybe not
| that thing. China spent _decades_ building up their supply
| chains, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity and had
| support for this at state level.
|
| If the US sees it as a threat and wants to do _something_ it
| should maybe look to what China has done. Because tbh what
| Trump did re Tariffs is pretty close to "nothing" all things
| considered.
|
| They _won 't_ though because as soon as you have someone
| saying "look, let's just put together a staged plan so that
| in, say, five years we'll produce X% more electronics
| domestically..." you'll have a Republican shrieking about
| "five year plans" and how the USA is becoming communist
| pjc50 wrote:
| A great analyst once taught me the response question: "yes,
| and so what?" What's so magic about manufacturing as opposed
| to all the higher value work of the US economy? Have people
| not noticed that the average American is still richer than
| the average Chinese person by a long way, and (yes,
| painfully) more so than the average European?
|
| If you're going to talk wars, then .. US military
| manufacturing is still the world leader yet again. Plus the
| nukes.
| XorNot wrote:
| A lot of the war stuff gets framed in very odd terms. If
| you want a local defence industry then pay for it. Enforce
| component sovereignty requirements... Which everyone
| already does. Then actually react to reports which call out
| the gaps and pay to close them.
|
| This bizzare "we'll bring back _manufacturing_ and be ready
| all the time " thing seems to imagine you'll just turn the
| local widget maker over to knocking out high temperature
| stealth composites for hypersonic missiles real quick.
|
| Which is of course the story of a lot of American
| manufacturing: it's hard to get a hobby run of PCBs because
| all the PCB makers are optimized for large orders for
| defence procurement (and the clearance, supply line and
| stuff requirements that brings).
| bluGill wrote:
| Here is a what: there are a lot of Americans (and similar
| for Europe) who did not go to college, and their kids are
| not going to college. Of they went to college but got a
| degree that doesn't have good job prospects. These people
| would be better off with manufacturing jobs than what they
| can find. This is probably a minority, but it is a large
| enough minority to swing elections and thus important.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Start by realising this is going to take decades to reverse.
|
| Given the timescale any solution will require cooperation
| across political parties. You can't start something that will
| get undone in four years.
|
| Then accept it won't make much difference to the inhabitants
| of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their jobs.
|
| Start at the top of the food chain and gradually work down.
| If America can make cars but not car tyres then implement
| gradually increasing tariffs on imported tyres. 1% this year,
| 2% next and so on. Pretty soon you have a car tyre industry
| again.
|
| Know when to stop, just like it doesn't make sense for a
| banker to clean their own house it doesn't make sense for a
| rich country to be making tee shirts.
|
| Of course this won't happen because of the American political
| system.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Then accept it won't make much difference to the
| inhabitants of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their
| jobs.
|
| If automation took those jobs then why aren't all those
| automated factories in USA?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They are. Manufacturing output in the US has never been
| higher.
| testing22321 wrote:
| If it doesn't make sense to make t-shirts, why does it make
| sense to make tires?
|
| They're an environmental nightmare and very, very thin
| margins.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Tyres were just an example I plucked out of my arse, I
| wasn't suggesting they were important.
|
| >They're an environmental nightmare and very, very thin
| margins.
|
| Which is an argument for consuming less tyres. It doesn't
| really have much to do with where you make them other
| than perhaps it is better to make them in a country with
| stronger environmental regulations.
| corimaith wrote:
| Under normal circumstances, when a country is running a
| massive surplus, their currency should appreciate, weakening
| their exports and thus recalibrating trade balance back to
| zero. That isn't happening right now, because China (and
| other surplus nations like Germany and Japan) relies on
| buying massive amounts of US treasuries to weaken the Yuan.
| That's one of the reasons why the US dollar is the reserve
| currency. It has to be, because only the US has an economy
| large enough to provide high-yield, low-risk treasuries and
| is willing to do so.
|
| Trump's tariffs would theoretically rebalance trade on the
| long term, albeit in a highly destructive manner. But the
| more diplomatic solutions as proposed by other commentators
| like Catherine Tai, Yanis Varoufakis or Michael Pettis would
| be the introduction of capital controls to stem the demand
| for US treasuries, or better, the reintroduction of Keynes'
| proposal of the International Clearing Union back in 1945.
| The ICU's role would be to actively balance global trade
| surpluses via the international currency bancor, of which
| would have fixed control of FX rates rather than relying on
| FX markets to punish surplus nations and help deficit nations
| respectively. As for nations outside the Union, they would
| just get treated similar to the USSR.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >What would you do to act against this?
|
| Bloc building. Europe has countries which do lots of
| manufacturing. Use those to gradually reduce reliance on
| China by slowly restricting Chinese access to the Bloc market
| and build up supply chains inside the Bloc.
|
| Making everything in the US can not be done without a very
| severe decline in living standards.
|
| >Is doing nothing acceptable?
|
| How high is your desire to learn Chinese?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.
|
| Why would you assume they don't understand? Every time they're
| questioned about the tariffs the narrative shifts. We have a
| trade deficit, we're getting ripped off, we want to bring back
| domestic manufacturing jobs, we'll automate them with robotics
| and AI, we're playing hardball to negotiate a better trade deal
| and get rid of fentanyl, it's a matter of national security, an
| economic emergency, the dollar is overvalued.
|
| You cannot trust a word from them. If you want to understand
| why they're doing something you must look only at incentives
| and outcomes. My current analysis is that there's some internal
| conflict, but the overall push for tariffs comes from a desire
| to crash the economy and use the downturn to consolidate wealth
| and power.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| I genuinely don't believe there's five-dimensional chess
| happening here. The problem is simply that the US president
| is a repugnant, stupid, erratic egotist who's surrounded
| himself with nasty people of varying levels of intelligence,
| with stupid ideas about how to run the country, and this is
| the policy result.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| To be clear, I don't think it's chess either. I think Trump
| likes tariffs and wants to appear strong by slapping them
| around. I think some, but not all of his hangers-on are
| using this to push for a recession. There are multiple
| hands on the levers of power here, but there's a common
| interest in transforming the US into a Russia-style
| oligarchy.
| fullshark wrote:
| Some did understand it I think (maybe not Trump), but were
| tired of hearing it couldn't be done and decided to try. A
| large % of Americans are happy at least someone is trying, and
| at the very least perhaps some lessons will be learned, and the
| parties will recalibrate their policy platforms to actually
| accomplish reshoring.
|
| That's the optimistic POV at least imo.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Missing reason #15: commercial lenders with a brain realize that
| these tariffs and this self-imposed domestic crisis will
| dissipate in the next ~6 years. Nobody's going to lend in this
| market to try to spin up a new greenfield project in the US that
| will take years to get operational when they can sit and ride it
| out - ESPECIALLY at these interest rates.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I'm not so sure.
|
| The tariffs most certainly will dissipate but we can't discount
| the chance that they may be replaced with actual written in law
| voted on by congress and signed by the president taxes that
| have similar but much more durable effects.
|
| Manufacturing and heavy industry really hates off-shoring. They
| only do it because the sum total of other policy makes it the
| only viable option. I can see them taking a decent haircut in
| pursuit of some longer term goal.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I have a suspicion that the coming tax cuts will be extreme,
| and the gaps in critical funding will be covered with tariff
| income. This will essentially make tariffs a cornerstone for
| government finances.
|
| Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are
| primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are
| primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.
|
| What tax breaks has he aimed at these people beyond some of
| the overtime and tipping (which is expected to only equate
| to about $2K)?
|
| Instead:
|
| >The largest tax cuts would accrue to the highest-income
| families, the Treasury said.
|
| > Household in the top 5% -- who earn more than $450,000 a
| year, roughly -- are the "biggest winners," according to a
| July 2024 analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy
| Center. They'd get over 45% of the benefits of extending
| the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it said.
|
| > A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of
| the broad Republican tax plan had a similar finding.
|
| > The bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the
| total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, according to the
| Wharton analysis, issued Thursday. The top 10% would get
| 56% of the value, it said.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I don't know what tax plan that is an analysis of, but
| Trump has stated he wants to eliminate income tax for
| those under $150k.
|
| I don't know what news source you trust, but if you
| google it, he stated it back in March.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I admit I had not heard this one. But the first thing I
| saw on it said:
|
| > According to Lutnick's interview with CBS News, Trump's
| tax policy goal is to remove federal income taxes for
| individuals earning under $150,000 annually.
|
| (omitted some of the other bullet points around tariff
| funding and tip exemption)
|
| > While Lutnick later walked back the certainty of these
| plans, he clarified that the proposal is aspirational and
| depends on the ability to balance the federal budget.
|
| I have serious doubts about the likelihood of a Trump
| proposal that even his Commerce Secretary says are
| "aspirational". Then again, the other part of Trump is
| that sometimes he does whatever he wants, regardless of
| what his Secretaries have said or known (witness the
| tariffs being paused mid hearing, leading to a Republican
| politician frantically swiping at his iPad in the middle
| of his testimony about the value of keeping the tariffs
| despite widespread market uncertainty).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Trump is a populist president. He is the right wing
| Bernie Sanders. Eliminating income tax for those making
| under $150k is right wing version of a "Billionaire
| Stipend" for everyone under $150k. Of course the
| republican guard is going to downplay the insanity he
| spews, but here we are with blanket tariffs and China
| virtually cut off.
|
| Trump and Sanders aren't opposites, they're next door
| neighbors with a common goal and mostly superficial
| disagreements like whether tax cuts or stimulus checks
| are better hand out approaches. They both want to trash
| trade deals and both want tariffs. If you are perplexed
| as many where why so many Bernie bros voted Trump over
| Hillary in 2016, this is the answer.
|
| They are both blue-collar presidents, and both want to
| inflict damage onto the elite. The problem is that the
| elite are the system, their health is a function of the
| economies health, so it's a "buckle-in" moment when
| someone comes in who wants to rough up the elite.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| If Trump and Musk aren't "the elite", I'm not sure who
| is. Unless what you really mean is "the educated".
| Kirby64 wrote:
| It's already stated in the source quote. Extending the
| TCJA.
|
| What he says is almost irrelevant to what he actually
| does most of the time. He 'says' he wants to lower taxes
| on the lower income folks, but the tax bill he actually
| passed was essentially a handout to wealthy and
| businesses. He 'says' he wants to bring back
| manufacturing, but the reality is his tariff actions do
| nothing of the sort.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The government could make loans directly and guarantee purchase
| prices, but it's also stopped making payments congress
| committed it to, so you'd be crazy to trust any promises from
| the administration.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Not only will it take years to get operational, there is no way
| it would ever reach the scale and reach of Chinese
| manufacturing, not in six years, not in sixty. Even if they
| throw trillions of investor money at it.
|
| China and others are clearly demonstrating the power of
| capitalism with state support. The US is too busy infighting
| and keeping capitalism and politics separate (small government,
| let the market decide etc). You wouldn't find enough employees
| that want to work in manufacturing; you'd need millions to even
| try and get close to what China is doing.
|
| Now I'm not actually OK with what China is doing, the
| paragraphs about worker conditions were quite telling. But I
| will recognize that it gives them the upper hand in
| manufacturing that the US hasn't had since the 50's.
|
| (meta: I'm gonna have to specify "the 1950's soon" don't I?)
| slfnflctd wrote:
| The apostrophe when specifying decades is incorrect, it's a
| common grammatical error.
|
| Should be "50s" and "1950s". Sorry, I usually don't do this
| but I otherwise liked your comment and thought you might want
| to know.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| hacker news is so much fun.
| myflash13 wrote:
| > demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support
|
| This is actually an excellent reason for tariffs. If we can't
| beat them at their game because it goes against our
| principles, then just don't buy their stuff.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's almost like the U.S. is going to lose either way.
| floatrock wrote:
| So rather than competing when a more efficient innovation
| seems to have come about, just put our hands over our eyes
| and pretend it doesn't exist to our markets?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is a big one. Once upon a time, the Democrats and
| Republicans listened to the same think tanks, so there was
| continuity in planning. Now, they seem to be opposed to plans
| _simply because_ the "other side" came up with them. The
| whiplash we've been experiencing has torn the economy apart and
| scared businesses away.
| e40 wrote:
| You're almost right. This is not a both sides issue. One side
| has made a concerted effort to get us to this point, and it
| started in the 80s or before.
| thinkindie wrote:
| The US should look into other countries efforts to replicate
| Silicon Valley, you just can't. You will get some niche good, you
| will waste some money there, but you won't get the same level. '
|
| This, without even considering for a moment that China is 4+
| times the US.
| csense wrote:
| There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work.
|
| But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a
| job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working
| spouse and children.
|
| How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people
| really want. Tariffs are simply a means to that end.
|
| I wish people would stop writing articles about 100% criticizing
| tariffs and instead write articles 50% about criticizing tariffs
| and 50% brainstorming alternative solutions to achieve the same
| objective.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| > But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get
| a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-
| working spouse and children.
|
| > How do we get that level of prosperity back?
|
| The issue is that this is a false premise. The house sucked.
| Only 1/3rd of American families had a single car at the time,
| and the cars sucked. We can go on and on about everything else.
| Not to mention the social environment at the time sucked.
|
| That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the
| issues Americans face. But tariffs with a shifting set of
| sanewashed justifications are just Not It.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| > There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not
| work.
|
| Work to do what?
|
| > But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get
| a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-
| working spouse and children.
|
| Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or
| manufacturing?
|
| > How do we get that level of prosperity back?
|
| Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing
| inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all
| the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few
| decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from
| building housing and therefore driving up housing costs.
| Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable
| developed countries almost all of which deliver better
| healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able
| to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the
| government support children's upbringing by paying for high
| quality education, instituting rules and regulations that
| require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.
|
| Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine.
| The US is far richer than most of those countries.
|
| Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling
| from 18mm to 13mm.
| csense wrote:
| > Work to do what?
|
| Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better
| for workers.
|
| > Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or
| manufacturing?
|
| Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories,
| especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of
| towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local
| factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the
| reason these factories were so high paying is because the
| jobs were unionized.
|
| Companies moved overseas to save money on that expensive
| labor.
|
| Now, companies have all the negotiation leverage. "If you
| unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas"
| is a real and credible threat, as countless companies have
| already done it.
|
| Tariffs are supposed to make operating overseas more
| expensive. Undo the economic justification for moving the
| jobs overseas and they will come back.
|
| This takes away the companies' negotiation leverage. The "If
| you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations
| overseas" threat isn't credible if everyone knows overseas
| manufacturing is super expensive due to tariffs.
|
| I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly
| remember when some of those factories were still operating. I
| saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-
| collar community decay into an economic wasteland. The drugs
| are getting bad. A lot of people have lost hope. Young
| ambitious folks see no reason to stay here.
|
| The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to me
| that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed, intelligent
| people who don't seem to understand it.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work
| better for workers.
|
| Seemingly, this is going to magically happen? Where are the
| programs to make sure this _does_ happen? Erecting tariffs
| is one thing, but having an actual _plan_ and executing on
| said plan is another. So far, all I see is rising prices
| and looming threats of job cuts due to slow downs which
| stem from increased costs, and there is nothing coming to
| buffer that.
|
| Let alone, the investment capital isn't moving in this
| direction. As of this writing, the general posture of the
| Republican donor class is 'wait and see how long the
| tariffs last' not 'lets invest in American industry again'
|
| >Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories,
| especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of
| towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a
| local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of
| the reason these factories were so high paying is because
| the jobs were _unionized_.
|
| Emphasis mine. Do you believe that the modern Republican
| party is pro union? Do you really think they won't
| undermine organized labor even if jobs come back in some
| form? Even though the modern Democratic party have a spotty
| history on labor issues, the Republicans have shown for 40
| years to be the anti labor party. They rarely - if ever -
| pass legislation that is pro labor. This administration
| isn't proving to be different in that regard either, and it
| wasn't different the first time around.
|
| >I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly
| remember when some of those factories were still operating.
| I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-
| collar community decay into an economic wasteland.
|
| So did I. Hallowed home town and all. One of the poorest in
| the state I grew up. You know what else never happened?
| Sustained public policy to help these areas. There were
| largely no programs to help transition workers from one
| industry to another. We don't have comprehensive safety
| nets and retraining / re-education programs for workers. We
| lack all of that. Why aren't we starting by implementing
| _those programs_? Its rather wishful thinking that bringing
| manufacturing back to the US, that it will end up in these
| same areas to begin with, because manufacturing is very
| _different_ than it used to be. I doubt most of these areas
| would be good places to re-build manufacturing capacity in
| the US. What manufacturing is done here is already
| concentrated in the South which precludes huge chunks of
| the traditional rust belt.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to
| me that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed,
| intelligent people who don't seem to understand it.
|
| Do you understand that labor is priced into the cost of the
| product? Who is going to buy all of these American products
| made by highly paid unionized workers?
|
| I understand the Rust Belt situation sucks, but people
| can't afford to buy everyday consumer goods made with
| American labor. I'm wearing an American made pair of shoes
| right now that is _20-30x more expensive_ than a pair of
| shoes from Walmart, and even 'less expensive' US made shoes
| like Red Wing are 10-15x as expensive. Now imagine paying
| 10-30x more for _everything_ , it's not sustainable.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think it's a complicated equation and there may be room for
| some strategic tariffs, de-regulation, anti-dumping, competing
| more on manufacturing etc. But the time you're talking about?
| Almost the entire world's industrial capacity was decimated
| other than the US.
| thechao wrote:
| When I was studying economics, my macro professor used to
| belabor the point that post-WW2 US socioeconomics was a highly
| unique (and special) time-and-place; and, it is a mistake to
| generalize economic theory from that time-and-place.
|
| So... here goes: rather than proclaiming a "housing crisis",
| maybe we're seeing the end of an exceptional period of "housing
| affordability". (A similar analysis of Europe and Asia applies,
| piecemeal.)
|
| As such, if we want to re-enter into a new period of housing
| affordability, we need to ask ourselves what we plan to give up
| and/or trade for that?
|
| For WW2, it was millions of lives and worldwide devastation. It
| seems like we'd need a complete re-evaluation of the way
| wealth, family structures, and social safety nets work in order
| to vastly expand housing. (In the US.)
| snarf21 wrote:
| We don't. We need only take a look at Detroit, holdout of
| American manufacturing. They have been automating and
| robotizing everything they can. ["... However, the Federal
| Reserve Bank of St. Louis notes that motor vehicle
| manufacturing employment declined 17% from 1994 to 2018, while
| motor vehicle productivity increased by about 13% over the same
| period..."] If manufacturing does come back to the US, it won't
| create very many jobs. Mostly just the people to maintain and
| fix the machinery.
|
| Given the improvements in cameras and computer vision and AI
| and robotics, there is no reason to think this won't
| accelerate. A long long time ago, labor was cheap and resources
| were expensive. Today, the opposite is true. Keynes predicted
| in the 50s that we would be working 15 hour work weeks. The
| reason he was "wrong" was that he underestimated our insatiable
| human greed. We all want more. Average house size in the 50s
| was < 1200 sq ft. Today it is 2400+. Each kid _must_ have their
| own room that is 12x12!! (I grew up with 4 boys in a 10x10,
| lol). Each kid _must_ get a new $200 bat _each_ year for little
| league, etc. We want a higher standard of living for ourselves
| and our kids. This is understandable but we forget our role in
| the never ending chase.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| oh that can be done in 3 easy steps.
|
| 1. win a world war that destroys the economy of every other
| country in the world for a decade.
|
| 2. destroy about the past 50 years of technology and all
| knowledge of how manufacture it.
|
| 3. Kill 90% of people over retirement age to lower demand for
| housing, healthcare costs, and retirement benefits.
|
| In the modern world with modern technology there's a lot less
| productive work out there for people without specialized
| education. We could do a better job of training more people for
| trades jobs (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc), and removing
| college requirements from some professions (e.g. med school and
| law school could probably be college level education rather
| than post college) but anyone saying that we're going back is
| just lying.
| mlsu wrote:
| Why will a factory job will pay enough for one person to raise
| a family and buy a house on a single income?
|
| Like what is unique about factory work that allows for this?
| I've heard stuff like this so much and I just do not believe
| it. Is anyone working in a factory in the USA today able to buy
| a home and have a stay at home spouse on a single income?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People literally do just that today in the midwest. The coastal
| housing imbalance is just that a housing imbalance and not
| reflective of a lack of buying power today. Also consider that
| americans back then outside of the car and home had no other
| large purchases. No computer, no $1k phone on a $1k/yr plan, no
| big tv. People weren't even eating out or flying back then when
| they could afford a family vacation.
| XorNot wrote:
| How much do you think a house costs, vs how much do you think
| a TV costs?
|
| And perhaps more importantly, do you have any idea what rent
| currently is costing? As a fraction of median income?
|
| This is an avocado toast argument.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What if I told you that you can buy a 3br turnkey house for
| maybe $100k all over the midwest. Now consider living at
| your parents for four years after highschool rent free
| while working literally any job full time. You'd probably
| be able to throw down 50% on that house at least.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > americans back then outside of the car and home had no
| other large purchases. No computer, no $1k phone on a $1k/yr
| plan, no big tv. People weren't even eating out or flying
| back then when they could afford a family vacation.
|
| Back then cars and homes and essentials were relatively cheap
| and TVs and flying were expensive. Today it's flipped. TVs
| are cheap, phones are cheap. Essentials, like housing, are
| expensive.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/en_VpZtUFcE
| pjc50 wrote:
| > used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that
| could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse
| and children.
|
| When was that last really true? 1971?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >How we get that level of prosperity back?
|
| By making everyone poorer. Seriously.
|
| You are competing with your fellow citizens for those things.
| This was true even back then.
|
| Right now, today, it has never been easier to make a lot of
| money working. So you need to compete with people in that
| environment. You need to be able to outbid those people for
| that beautiful home you want. In an environment of lots of
| educated and skilled workers getting skilled salaries for doing
| vary valuable work. That's where the bar is.
|
| We can lower the bar back to blue-collar-high-school-diploma,
| but then we need to also sacrifice all those high earning
| college degree jobs.
|
| Not going to happen.
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _How we get that level of prosperity back?_
|
| It's so simple it hurts. Stop the ruling class hoarding all the
| wealth.
|
| Top tax bracket used to be 94%.
|
| Have a VERY steep wealth tax, an inheritance tax and whatever
| else is needed. The fact individuals exist with many hundreds
| of millions of dollars while so many in the same society are
| struggling so bad is a disgrace.
| ziml77 wrote:
| > How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people
| really want.
|
| And something they're not going to get. Manufacturing is going
| to be heavily automated. The money is going to continue to
| funnel into a small portion of the population.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| America?
|
| No.
|
| The shareholder class underestimates it.
|
| A lot of Americans realize that it's going to be hard, which is
| why we should have made an example out of the first guy to profit
| off of sending manufacturing off to the shores of a geopolitical
| rival.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Americans also have more free time and disposable income
| because of that decision, among others. Why would you want them
| to struggle more?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The people in the areas where things used to be made
| certainly have more free time, but they don't have disposable
| income.
|
| Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given
| by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down
| the main employers for entire towns.
| pjc50 wrote:
| US unemployment rate floats along at about 4%, and is kept
| from going any lower to prevent inflation.
|
| There are localized problems - and it's all very similar to
| the post-Thatcher UK - but you cannot be serious in
| imagining that employment would magically return to the
| exact spots it left. In fact that's one of the sub-problems
| OP talks about: so you want a US Shenzen. Where are you
| going to put it?
|
| (UK equivalent: we're discussing keeping Scunthorpe blast
| furnaces open, so that we can have a "secure" supply of
| "domestic" steel .. made entirely from imported
| ingredients. Because the mines the plant was built to
| refine are empty)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's odd how little factories moving from union areas to
| red states gets mentioned in this context.
|
| Areas gutted, jobs lost and some lesser number of jobs with
| less benefits and pay created elsewhere.
|
| So many political ideas seem to only be allowed to be
| discussed if you can add a garnish of racism or xenophobia
| to them.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You don't hear people complaining about that because the
| states that are the net losers of those jobs are full of
| people who think factories are dirty and unsightly and
| pay garbage wages, etc, etc, hence why they're fine with
| their politicians implementing the policies that are
| driving them out in the first place. Sure, the blue
| collar people know what's up but they're outnumbered by
| the white collar economy handily enough that it never
| becomes a leading political gripe you hear about from
| these states.
|
| Whereas when states that aren't behaving that way lose
| jobs, factories and industries to Mexico or China they're
| all "hey WTF" over it because they actually cared and
| didn't want that economic activity driven off.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Boeing started a plant in SC:
| https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/10/boeing-
| open...
|
| Then later moved all 787 production there:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24544139
| https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-
| dea...
|
| While the main articles seemed to have a good riddance
| tone, the HN comment section seemed to be more restricted
| in that view.
|
| >It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership
| will turn things around with even less focus on quality
| and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving
| back towards engineering driven approaches.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| Question: if the jobs were off shored, but the resulting
| profits were shared more equally, would Americans still
| complain?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I wouldn't expect "now that you've caught us we'll pay you to
| shut up" to go over well.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| "Caught us" implies that the capitalists, the people who
| own the manufacturing plants, did something immoral, or
| illegal or under handed, but in the economic system that
| everyone championed in America, especially at that time,
| this was simply allowed. Seems like the fundamental anger
| is about the injustice of the economic system that leads to
| such consequences.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yes, definitely yes.
|
| America suffers from a flattened income curve. There are many
| many more people earning $100k+ today than in 1960 (inflation
| adjusted). America has an envy problem first, equality
| problem second, spoiled child problem third.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| I would not necessarily say that the envy is unjustified.
| If you live in a rich country you ideally want all citizens
| to become wealthy. Else, irrespective of income, you will
| be lorded over by those who are magnitudes richer than you.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm not talking about billionairs or the ultra wealthy. I
| am talking about the 60-90% top earners category.
|
| You can cut out the top 10% of earners in the country and
| it still wouldn't do much to change the situation for
| those in the <60% earning percentiles.
|
| To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home
| isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock. It's because
| the other bidders have STEM masters degrees and dual
| income high paying jobs, and probably a few hints of
| financial literacy thrown in too.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home
| isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock.
|
| When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total
| yearly economic output of a mid-sized American
| metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce
| distortions, even if only because the people who actually
| do the labor under those people are being paid less in
| order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth
| of that person.
|
| And that's before getting into the other problems with
| the housing supply.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >who actually do the labor under those people are being
| paid less
|
| No, that's where you have it backwards _they are being
| paid more_. That 's the exact reason why they are buying
| that house when you say "who the fuck can afford that".
|
| Ironically, they are also the ones being exploited the
| most by the top 1%.
|
| An amazon warehouse sorter will never create or do
| anything that makes amazon much more money than what they
| are paid. They get $18/hr for producing $21/hr of value,
| doing the same static task all day everyday. Amazons
| "profit margin" on these workers is almost nothing.
|
| The lead cloud architect though gets paid $350k/yr, but
| can design a single change that will make amazon $30-40
| million/yr. The profit margin on them is insane. And they
| are the ones outbidding everyday people on things,
| driving up costs.
|
| Back 60 years ago, everyone was much more clumped around
| the same (lower) income, so the houses where smaller and
| the prices more amenable to more people.
| aurelien wrote:
| It is just a point of pragmatism. Countries that wish to bring
| manufacturing back to their country just have to use people to do
| that just like they used people to put the production outside.
| Which by the way will produce lot of business :)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I don't think anyone underestimates that, as much as some people
| with the author's viewpoints would like it to be true.
|
| To paraphrase Kennedy: "We choose to [bring back manufacturing].
| We choose to [bring back manufacturing] in this [or the next]
| decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but
| because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize
| and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
| challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are
| unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the
| others, too."
|
| We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Putting aside the rah-rah patriotism, you perhaps don't
| understand the problem any better than Trump does. The moon
| mission to which you allude was difficult but, critically, that
| difficulty was not felt by most Americans: it was a challenge
| for NASA engineers. Trump's current economic plan will increase
| inflation, cripple America's role in world trade, and result in
| negligible increase in manufacturing in the short term. Wildly
| unpopular policies do not last in a democracy.
| podgorniy wrote:
| > To paraphrase Kennedy
|
| What in the modern situation suggests the comparable level of
| diligence in approach to the goal? The fact that both goals are
| far-reaching does not suggest comparability of approaches to
| the solution.
|
| Changing the way society/economy operates is nowhere near
| "building X," whatever X is, whether it's something hard like a
| bomb or a collider.
|
| > We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.
|
| How do you know that you haven't won already? Shouldn't the end
| goal be clear? In the case of Kennedy you're referring to,
| criteria and motivation were clear.
|
| --
|
| To a non-US bystander, your comment sounds like a no-thinking
| patriotic slogan. The details of the article are such that you
| can take any argument and bring it into discussion in order to
| show its irrelevance. But we're discussing slogans irrelevant
| to the situation and belief in the win, even though the win is
| not defined.
| causal wrote:
| Did you read the article? The author is advocating for
| manufacturing in the US, but is pointing out the ways these
| policies undermine that very goal.
| constantcrying wrote:
| How many additional hours are Americans going to work? What pay
| cuts will they take? How many years later du they want to
| retire?
|
| These are the questions people need to ask themselves. We both
| know what the answer is.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Americans need to take pay cuts so we can bring back high-
| paying manufacturing jobs!
|
| /sarcasm, or summary of other discourse in this thread?
| constantcrying wrote:
| High paying manufacturing jobs seems entirely delusional.
| If you want to compete with China your workers must be as
| efficient as Chinese workers, so US manufacturing workers
| can't be better paid and doing less hours. That can not
| possibly work.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's difficult but necessary to bring manufacturing back due to
| defense logistical reasons.
|
| We build about 100 SM-6 missiles a year. How long does this last
| against a peer? 12 hours?
|
| I don't know if tariffs are the best way to do this but some
| manufacturing _must_ come back one way or another.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Tariffs work against the goal.
|
| The only sane way to bring back manufacturing is investments
| like the chips act.
|
| Think about it this way, you are a widget manufacturer trying
| to place a new factory. You could put it in say Canada and
| enjoy cheap imports and exports of your product globally. It's
| cheap to produce and easy to sell.
|
| Or you could place it in the US, but now you are looking at a
| minimum 10% tax on importing the resources you need. On top of
| that, a significant portion of the world (especially the
| richest nations) are tacking on an addition 10% or more tax on
| your product because it came from the US.
|
| Would you build a factory in the US? Maybe if you can source
| everything in the US and you are fine with your primary market
| being only the US. Otherwise, it's a bad business move.
|
| When talking about something like semiconductors, global access
| is really important to be profitable. Low or no tariffs and the
| proximity to China and other raw resources powerhouses is a
| major reason why so much of the semiconductor industry is in
| Asia.
| tbirdny wrote:
| America doesn't underestimate it, its president does.
| dashundchen wrote:
| I saw a chart passing around from this Cato Institute survey
| (Cato is a right wing think tank) [0]. It made me laugh.
|
| > America would be better off if more Americans works in
| manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20%
|
| > I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my
| current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73%
|
| [0]
| https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...
| pjc50 wrote:
| They're going to end up with some sort of corvee forced
| labour scheme enforced by ICE, the logical conclusion of "
| _other people_ should go work in the factories ".
| cratermoon wrote:
| We already have that, it's called prison labor. The current
| regime will certainly ramp that up and throw even more
| people into forced labor camps.[1]
|
| BTW we don't talk enough about the gigantic loophole in the
| thirteenth amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary
| servitude, _except as a punishment for crime whereof the
| party shall have been duly convicted_ , shall exist within
| the United States, or any place subject to their
| jurisdiction. [emphasis added]
|
| 1 https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/flyover-country
| constantcrying wrote:
| That is not a loophole. Also prison labor tends to be
| "unskilled", so useless and even counterproductive in
| manufacturing roles the US would need if they were to
| compete with China.
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp
| constantcrying wrote:
| "Unskilled" is what I meant. People with zero economic
| value who only can do tasks where machines are already
| superior to them. That definitely is the case for much of
| the prison population. It is better that they are kept
| far away from manufacturing _because_ they are unskilled.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > It is better that they are kept far away from
| manufacturing
|
| I've got bad news for you, then.
| https://www.vox.com/2018/8/24/17768438/national-prison-
| strik...
| bluGill wrote:
| Those two are not in conflict. The claim is 20-25% of the
| population would be better off if they moved to a
| manufacturing job. The other 75-80% are better off where they
| are, but making the bottom better makes everyone better.
| balozi wrote:
| For better or worse the man is exposing the mindboggling scale
| of deindustrialization that was hidden underneath America's
| transition to a "knowledge economy". Decades of failed economic
| policy has led America to this point.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Unfortunately, that ship sailed a long time ago. Why is no
| one in the administration paying any attention to the
| outsourcing of high skill knowledge work to India and
| elsewhere? Obviously I have a bias working in technology, but
| it seems to me to be a much more CURRENT issue and one that
| can actually be addressed in the present.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The state of the art is literally a half century beyond where
| american manufacturing was when it died. Anecdotally according to
| older family members who had those old manufacturing jobs, they
| were working at companies doing stuff like bending a steel rod at
| the end and then shipping it off to a sub contractor. This was
| not glamorous work. Most of them got into it because you don't
| need to speak english to bend a pipe in a factory. And they did
| everything in their power to ensure the next generation would not
| have to work those sorts of jobs.
| zero_k wrote:
| America is not a country, it's a continent. I know, Canada will
| be a province, and soon Panama of course, but in the meanwhile,
| it's a continent, not a country.
| codedokode wrote:
| But famous American themselves call their country "America".
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| If you search a dictionary for "America", the first result will
| likely be "The United States of America".
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america
|
| It doesn't make you wrong, but you're also not _right_.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTj8VBsTQ/
| nomdep wrote:
| /s He is right, we should just crawl under a rock and die
| instead.
|
| Remember the JFK "We choose to go to the moon" speech?
|
| (I wonder how many of this defeatist articles are financed by
| China somehow).
| ks2048 wrote:
| Trump is doing his version of the JFK vision. We choose to
| dismantle the country and strip it for parts.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| A personal anecdote from someone close to me. A food plant in
| Canada (so not heavy/high tech manufacturing), was importing raw
| materials from US, processing it and exporting it to US. After
| Trump tariffs, they bought some small plant in the middle of
| nowhere USA. Moving most of the equipment to that US plant,
| increased the salaries of Americans that worked there before
| (very low salaries compared to Canada). So yes, it's unskilled
| labour but an example of production moving quickly back to US.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Building up manufacturing has always been a period of pain for
| the population. There is so much to learn and so much hard work
| to do with, at least initially, so little gain.
|
| Competition is extremely high initially, products will be
| ridiculed for being expensive and low quality. Companies will
| fail and go bankrupt, workers will suffer from that.
|
| "Bringing manufacturing back" is a path of pain, not a way to
| fast economic success. There is no way to change that, tariffs
| will certainly not change it. Are Americans ready to leave their
| office job and work overtime in factories and engineering
| departments? No, automation will not do this for you, you are
| competing with a country which knows far more about automation
| than you do. To compete with them you need to be better and
| cheaper.
|
| Lastly look how Germany struggles, right now. Their industry is
| in large parts starting to loose any competitive edge and will
| continue to do, unless very significant cuts are made somewhere.
| You can not keep the same living standards while someone is doing
| twice your work for half your costs.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| Isn't manufacturing mostly a red herring? Sure some select people
| who are currently in Washington might care about it from a
| geopolitical angle, but the electorate is not lamenting the lack
| of manufacturing jobs, but rather their decreased share of the
| proceeds of the no.1 national economy in the world. Even if you
| bring all manufacturing back, I doubt those same people will be
| happy working in those factories.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a
| manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a
| service job that pays $25/hr.
|
| The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons
| and in strategic areas.
|
| And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in
| response to emergencies.
|
| But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by
| onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will
| have to be extremely important components of adding these
| capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking
| will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up
| making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if
| it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.
| apercu wrote:
| For strategic, economic, national defense and public health
| reasons, I completely agree with you.
|
| Too bad a large portion of our electorate is brainwashed by
| propaganda and/or completely out to lunch.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If we're going to defy the invisible hand, we should at least
| do it to benefit people in a concrete way - health care,
| education, UBI. Doing it for "strategy" is equivalent to simply
| burning the money people would have otherwise saved by doing
| nothing.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| The components of a strategic manufactured product can be as
| simple as an injection molded switch, a LiION battery,
| capacitors, copper wire, etc., so the notion of bringing only
| "strategic items" back is as much a myth as the idea its mostly
| coming back to the USA. The goal here is to diversify the
| supply chain globally so its not concentrated in China.
| Internally this is sold as bringing MFG back to the USA (will
| happen to a noticeable degree), but that's not the actual plan.
| ta1243 wrote:
| So putting tarrifs on Mexico, Canada, Europe helps diversify?
| elbasti wrote:
| A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an hour
| than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A skilled
| tradesman can make $40+.
|
| Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires
| commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage
| of labor--not because of wages.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>A skilled assembly worker makes closer to $30 or $40 an
| hour than $25. And that doesn't account for overtime. A
| skilled tradesman can make $40+.
|
| In theory. In practice the numbers are way lower.
|
| As some one who has done quite a big time in India IT
| services firms, have lots of war stories, our Delivery
| manager would often tell us if US managers only knew adjusted
| for regular all nighters, whole week on-call hell weeks.
| Development phases where teams would be working days at
| stretch in office. The actual per hour rate of an engineer in
| India is at best $1 - $5 an hour. You just can't bill the
| customer that way.
|
| Only reason why this even works is India is still poor and
| people work for anything.
|
| Im sure, adjust for everything(in real practice)
| manufacturing hourly wages in China aren't all that different
| and wouldn't be surprised if they are at something like $1
| per hour, or something such.
|
| Americans have little idea how much affluence and luxury
| their ordinary citizen has. Most of the world would do
| anything even to be poor in the US.
|
| Fair enough to say nobody in the US is signing up to work a
| hellish factory job for $1/hr anytime soon.
| elbasti wrote:
| I was talking about the cost in the US, not overseas.
| zepolen wrote:
| Manufacturing can be automated, and that's what should be
| done.
|
| Chinese finds it cheaper to pay people to do it.
|
| America will find it cheaper to build robots to do it.
|
| Then when no one has a job America will revert back to paying
| people to do it.
|
| Life will always find a way to balance everything out.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| > It's years of accumulated skill, but it's also a culture that
| is oriented around hard work and education that the United States
| no longer has.
|
| Sounds more like China has an exploited educated class/lack of
| oppurtunity than America has bad education.
|
| _Plenty_ of American workers can multiply in their heads and
| diligently perform there work. These people work in white collar
| jobs though, not in factories snapping together phone cases for
| 12 hours a day.
|
| The author isn't totally wrong here, Americas bottom tier labor
| pool sucks, but they miss the bigger picture when comparing
| Chinese and American workers. China has skilled workers doing
| unskilled work. That's why they are so good. That's also why
| bringing manufacturing to the US will be so hard. Ain't nobody
| wanna get a degree so they can work a hot factory floor all day.
| karn97 wrote:
| Westerners have had too good of a life and you cannot compete
| with an asian who is told every day if he doesn't perform he
| will be homeless. You just cannot compete.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Westerners have had too good of a life
|
| You're not going to sell the electorate on ".. and so we're
| going to make your life worse to compete with China", though.
| karn97 wrote:
| Just talking about the reality we face
| jghn wrote:
| The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of
| Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more
| Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans
| thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked
| in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan.
|
| In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually
| wants this.
|
| [1]
| https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-946f-70263adba...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Americans are cosplaying (voting their belief system, not what
| they'll do, the "revealed preference"), as they do as farmers
| [1] [2] [3] [4], as they do as "rural Americans" [5]. It is an
| identity crisis for tens of millions of people [6]. Their
| crisis is our shared political turmoil. Happiness is reality
| minus expectations.
|
| From the piece: "The people most excited about this new tariff
| policy tend to be those who've never actually made anything,
| because if you have, you'd know how hard the work is."
|
| [1] https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agriculture-shifts-
| farm...
|
| [2] https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-
| cr...
|
| [3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
|
| [4] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-
| insights...
|
| [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18
|
| [6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-
| are-a-...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| While simultaneously needing migrant labor with lower minimum
| wages and labor laws for agricultural workers.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The control and status they've had is diminishing, and they
| are taking it out on the rest of us. Regardless, it will be
| lost. People are tricky. Onward.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Agreed and the same people do a lot of their shopping at
| Amazon/Dollar General/Wal-Mart where low price goods are
| _only_ possible because they are made off shore for much much
| lower wages. Bringing that manufacturing back here would
| destroy their buying power.
|
| I do find it interesting that a lot of these same people are
| against raising the minimum wage because "it will bankrupt
| all the businesses" but somehow think that bringing
| manufacturing for the goods they buy back to the US won't do
| the same. At best, going from off-shore labor costs of say
| $15/day to $15/hour (minimum for US workers) is an 8x
| multiplier and will somehow magically work but a 1.5
| multiplier on minimum wage is just untenable for any
| business.
|
| Honestly, it is mostly an emotional response around
| "fairness". They don't want others getting a "raise" when
| they don't "deserve it". However, everything they get is
| 1000% deserved. The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was
| convincing the middle class that all their woes are the fault
| of the poor. The political comic of "That foreigner wants
| your cookie!" captures it pretty well (imo).
| mjevans wrote:
| Offhand, I believe that trick started with tribalism
| (generally, the 'other' is the most obvious scape goat),
| became racism in various forms (they look different / go to
| a different church it's /their/ fault), and has shifted to
| classism with thinly veiled racism included.
|
| It's not much different than how a young child will blame
| anyone else for something that's gone wrong / they got
| caught doing. Maybe our society should do a better job
| promoting responsibility and allowing parents to offer
| oppertunities for children to be responsible; instead of
| infantalizing everyone entirely until some magical number
| has passed and suddenly they're an adult who was never
| previously empowered to be responsible.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Othering has driven a lot of the hate and derisiveness of
| the 21st century. A lot of the political messaging and
| advertising tends to specifically focus on othering.
| apwell23 wrote:
| just like management class in any typical corporation
| 999900000999 wrote:
| We already have a massive prison industrial complex, a lack of
| basic rights and a complete disregard for due process.
|
| Very soon we'll be forced to make shoes and other things behind
| bars. No trial needed, just indefinite detention.
| 9dev wrote:
| Now _that_ is an elegant solution! They are starting to
| punish people with the wrong opinion and strip them of their
| citizen rights already; instead of flying them to El
| Salvador, might as well keep them as slaves in a federal
| prison! Pesky dissidents and manufacturing problems solved at
| the same time!
| rjsw wrote:
| Arbeit macht frei.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Old school Soviet school of thinking, very nice.
| kamaal wrote:
| Would interesting to know what percentage _themselves_ or
| _their own children_ wanted to work at a factory. Can tell with
| a huge degree of confidence for all practical purposes thats 0.
|
| Its always easy to expect other people to make sacrifices
| working these jobs, while imagining you and your kids working
| office desk jobs.
| fleek wrote:
| Is everyone on hacker news so entitled and privileged they
| cannot even imagine an American citizen wanting to work for a
| living?
|
| I absolutely would work a factory job if it paid 100k+ and
| meant owning a home someday.
|
| Instead I got 100k student loans and make 60k at a desk and
| I'll never have a life outside of work because I simply can't
| afford it.
|
| I'll be 35 this year after 12 years of working and just
| starting to have a positive net worth.
|
| American dream my ass.
| jghn wrote:
| > if it paid 100k+ and meant owning a home someday
|
| That is not going to happen.
| y-curious wrote:
| A 100k factory job and you're calling _others_ entitled?
| This is the equivalent of the famous Arrested Development
| skit, "what does a banana cost, $10?"
| fleek wrote:
| Every tradesman I know makes north of 80k, granted it's
| backbreaking work. I assume working in a factory such as
| semiconductors pays 6 figs, as an engineer or foreman of
| some kind.
|
| If they are literally stamping parts together on an
| assembly line then I guess yeah it's not going to pay
| 100k.
| nemomarx wrote:
| how would a 40k a year manufacturing job help though? (real
| salary of someone I know in the field right now)
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| You would be able to afford a lot less if everything you
| bought was made in factories where every worker was paid
| north of $100k. That includes your home, by the way.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Bringing back factory jobs isn't bringing back the American
| dream. It's just replacing the shitty gig work you have to
| do to barely get by with a shitty factory job that you have
| to do to barely get by. If they pay well, it'll drive up
| the cost of goods a ton and still be unhelpful for people.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| This lines up with the experience of the people I know who have
| worked in factories, there seems to be a disconnect with all
| these pundits and economists (and many people on the internet
| in general) talking about basic manufacturing work and the
| people I have met with actual factory jobs. The pay could've
| been worse and it wasn't the worst job I've heard of but it
| also wasn't great (they said they would've preferred a boring
| office job). There's a reason the pundits talking about the
| virtues of manufacturing jobs are pundits.
| knubie wrote:
| I mean 20% of the population thinking they would be better off
| working at a factory is huge. So we need more than that?
| 9rx wrote:
| It says _" only 20% of Americans thought that they would be
| better off if more Americans worked in factories."_ Which
| isn't the same as believing they would be better off if they
| worked in a factory.
|
| I agree with that sentiment. I would be better off if more of
| you, just not me, worked in factories instead of trying to
| compete with me for my non-factory work.
| dynm wrote:
| There's absolutely no contradiction here.
|
| Currently less than 20% of Americans work in factories. All
| those 80% need to want is that the 20% of people who want to
| work in factories can do so.
| m000 wrote:
| If that 20% never had a factory job before, it is not a
| reliable indicator. It just means their current job is
| already shitty. They may get a factory job and realize that
| they were better off flipping burgers, even with less pay.
|
| From TFA:
|
| > When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told
| my supplier I was going to "work a day in his factory!" I
| lasted 4 hours.
| bananalychee wrote:
| This poll is being propped up as evidence that people don't
| actually want to work in a factory, yet more people voiced
| interest in doing so than are currently, by an order of
| magnitude. If you believe there's a disconnect between
| perception and reality, that's fair, but it would have to
| be off by an order of magnitude on the positive side to
| support the premise, and an anecdote about a Chinese
| factory is very weak evidence of that. I would posit that
| many people would be happier and more fulfilled working in
| a factory than being stuck doing gig work or packing
| foreign products for Amazon or even bullshit desk work, but
| I'm not elitist enough to pretend to know what blue-collar
| workers in stagnant towns actually feel, let alone argue
| that they actually want the opposite of what they say.
| Personally, I wish I had the chance to work in a factory at
| 16 years old instead of a call center.
| paulcole wrote:
| It's the same as every tech bro on here who says, "Go join the
| trades!"
|
| People want to be sure that their success is protected and they
| love telling other people what they should do.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I would consider factory work if it paid a liveable wage and I
| didn't have other options.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I started out asking myself, what would it take for
| American's to be okay with factory work. For example, my
| grandfather worked in a GM plant in Kansas City for most of
| his life. I mean he had started out wearing suits and doing
| books for a bank when he was young and fresh out of high
| school.
|
| And then I remembered, oh yeah, the Great Depression happened
| when he was young and he was let go from his bank job -- the
| bank folded. When the decent paying factory job at an auto
| assembly plant eventually came along he probably jumped at
| it.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Everyone wants more manufacturing in the US, but nobody wants
| to be a factory worker. People would rather starve or go
| homeless than work in a factory. Until Americans overcome their
| pride, this is going to make building manufacturing in the US
| very difficult.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Everybody wants to be a factory worker if the compensation is
| good. Why do you think Chinese people work in factories?
| Because it pays better than other jobs they can find.
|
| "But if factory wages are good then products will be
| expensive"
|
| No, because the wages for the factory worker is less than 1%
| of a products shelf price.
| BatmanAoD wrote:
| If 20% of people really think they'd be better off as factory
| workers, that's actually kind of a lot. Can you imagine if
| 20% of the working population really did work in factories?
| That's an enormous number.
| maxglute wrote:
| Let's me real... 80% of the hard shit in US factories will be
| ran by mexican migrant labourers like in agriculture. And maybe
| that's enough of a "win" for US interests.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this
|
| As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read
| their reply.)
|
| However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is
| heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work
| as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the
| solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value
| proposition for the employees.
|
| I am ambivalent toward tariffs, but the _idea_ is that if we
| make foreign products more expensive then the higher price of
| domestic goods becomes more palatable by comparison. If paying
| domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and
| if people are willing to pay that price _for whatever reason_ ,
| you will start to see growth in manufacturing.
|
| It's also silly to reject long-term goals simply because
| achieving them is difficult.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Instead the products might just cease to exist. Or cease to
| exist in a particular market. Tariff-free trade brings into
| being products or markets that previously didn't exist.
| justin66 wrote:
| > If paying domestic workers more raises the price of
| domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price
| for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in
| manufacturing.
|
| Why would you need to pay them more? Remove their legal
| ability to organize, cripple their social safety net, and
| they will either work or die.
|
| I'm not advocating for that, but it does seem to be the path
| we're deliberately taking.
| runako wrote:
| > If paying domestic workers more raises the price of
| domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price
| for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in
| manufacturing.
|
| We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that
| Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led
| to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items.
|
| This notion that we should move Americans from high-
| productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs, and that such
| move will somehow enhance our prosperity is nutty. Lower-
| productivity jobs mean less income for workers, means less
| income in the system, means lower prosperity for all
| Americans. Moving tens of millions Americans to higher-
| productivity jobs while maintaining relatively low
| unemployment has to be seen as one of the economic success
| stories of the modern age.
|
| Separately, Americans do not _feel_ like this happened. That
| 's a different discussion, about allocation of wealth. Our
| poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich"
| western EU countries. Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita
| than the UK. The difference is that the US has designed a
| system where every citizen lives a precarious existence,
| potentially a few months from destitution while other rich
| countries have not done that. We are allowed to make
| different choices in the US if we don't like this outcome.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that
| Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which
| led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value
| items.
|
| But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives
| were nearly or equally expensive? That's the real test, and
| whether foolish or not that's what they are trying to do
| with tariffs.
|
| > Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for workers
|
| Are you suggesting former factory workers all became
| scientists and engineers? If that's true then fantastic.
| But I'd like to see evidence that what they are doing now
| is somehow more productive.
|
| > Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many
| "rich" western EU countries.
|
| Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a
| reflection of a higher wealth inequality?
| danans wrote:
| > > Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than
| many "rich" western EU countries.
|
| Not the OP, but poor as used here seems to refer to
| average quality of life , quality of infrastructure, etc.
|
| > Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it
| a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?
|
| Higher wealth inequality leading to stretched public
| services and infrastructure, which lead to lower quality
| of life , despite higher nominal GDP per capita.
|
| You are probably much better off being a poor person in
| Spain (33k GDP/capita) vs Mississippi (40k GDP per
| capita), because at least you don't need to worry about
| the cost of healthcare.
|
| You're more likely (but still very unlikely) to get
| extremely rich in the US though, although probably not in
| Mississippi.
| runako wrote:
| Spot on. I would extend your analysis to include the
| median middle-class person is probably better off in
| Spain vs most/all US states. This, even though the
| Spaniard personally earns less income. Largely as a
| result of the economically precarious nature of living in
| the US.
|
| Healthcare, childcare, education, retirement are all big
| expensive things the US does incredibly poorly.
| danans wrote:
| Even more, the huge problems in the US like crime and
| poor healthcare outcomes are made worse by the increased
| inequality.
| s_dev wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat
| rchaud wrote:
| Reminds me of the "college is a scam, learn a trade" people,
| all of whom went to college and plan to send their kids to
| college as well.
| fromMars wrote:
| The world is an interdependent eco- system these days. The idea
| that a country can isolate itself an reproduce expertise that has
| flourished elsewhere is a bit silly and tilting at windmills.
|
| Globalization is a fact of the world today and the best path to
| better lives for everyone is through mutual cooperation and
| policies that lift all boats.
|
| Trump's goals and attempts to change this are foolhardy.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I had to stop reading at the Michael Jordan baseball part.
| Everything after that wasn't believable anymore. He wasn't _that_
| bad at baseball[1].
|
| 1. https://vendettasportsmedia.com/michael-jordan-wasnt-that-
| ba...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| He was a mediocre AA player... compared to his basketball
| skill, he did absolutely suck at baseball.
| ks2048 wrote:
| He wasn't that bad at baseball compared to a random person or a
| minor league player.
|
| He _was_ that bad at baseball compared how good he was a
| basketball.
|
| The article seemed correct IMHO,
|
| > What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball?
| He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player
| in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing
| basketball.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of environmental conflicts that disappears in the US
| thanks to manufacturing moving to China.
|
| In the 1990s there were numerous manufacturing plants in the US
| (two on the South Hill of Ithaca alone) that were found to be
| contaminated with solvents like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
|
| People thought it was great stuff, you wouldn't believe how hard
| it is to get cutting grease off things after you turn them on a
| lathe and vapor de-greasing makes it go away just like that.
|
| China has some of the most advanced agriculture on the planet
| including a "vertical farm" that can sell straw mushrooms for
| about $2 a pack where they are super-proud that humans only touch
| them with a forklift. (Contrast that to the labor-intensive
| mushroom farms of Pennsylvania where somebody cuts each one with
| a knife.)
|
| We are pretty omnivorous (I think mealworms start with "meal")
| and my obsession with anime and Japan has turned into serious
| sinophilia but my wife and I are hesitant to eat "Chinese Food"
| grown in China because of widespread environment contamination, I
| mean they've been building up heavy metal stocks ever since
| Emperor Qin Shi Huang poisoned himself with mercury.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah, it's underrated how the Chinese boom just did not care
| for environmental impact, and because political organizing is
| banned the public are limited in how much they can complain
| about it.
|
| It used to be a thing that people were importing massive
| quantities of baby formula to China because they didn't trust
| locally manufactured stuff.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Why would obsession with anime and (I assume Jaoan is a typo
| for) Japan lead to sinophilia?
|
| You know sinophilia means "love of China", and that anime and
| Japan are not Chinese, right?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out the typo, I fixed it.
|
| Yes, but they're culturally related. Anywhere where people
| write with Chinese characters or used to write with Chinese
| characters has legends about nine-tailed foxes, for instance.
| The intelligentsia had access to Chinese literature and this
| diffused into the public imagination. [1]
|
| For me it started out with being willing to enjoy media in an
| unfamiliar language (first Japanese) that gradually became
| familiar. Then playing the Japanese game _Dynasty Warriors_
| that got me thinking about the _Romance of the Three
| Kingdoms_ and about the characters and the place names and
| other old Chinese stories like _Journey to the West_ and
| pretty soon I am enjoying Chinese pop culture about old
| stories and new stories of the fantastic and even learning
| some Chinese, getting curious about Chinese mobile games that
| aren 't known at all in the west because Chinese people
| cosplay as characters from them, etc. (At the university
| where I work I overhear conversations in Chinese almost every
| day)
|
| Yes, Japan is a different culture which I still enjoy and
| appreciate, but for me it was also a gateway to China. [2] I
| was an anime fan for 30 years but in the last 3 years I've
| had the same kind of giddy feelings for Chinese pop culture
| that I had about anime at the beginning and of course that
| means I'm going to buy a whole fish and eat it with my family
| because my son's Chinese friend suggests it.
|
| Lately I've been playing the Japanese game _Dynasty Warriors
| Origins_ which has both Chinese and English voices and find
| it strange on one hand to hear legendary Chinese heroes
| speaking Japanese which I mostly understand and then listen
| intently to the Chinese which to me is still a wall of
| unfamiliar syllables where I struggle to pick out proper
| names and an occasional word or phrase -- but I have a great
| time trying!
|
| [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosphere
|
| [2] ... and it goes the other way, China's pop culture is
| inspired by Japan (I think it's funny that many Chinese games
| like _Azur Lane_ use Japanese voices in the west because they
| know the kind of person likely to play that kind of game
| knows phrases like _suki da!_ and has an emotional feel for
| Japanese even if they aren 't fluent in it)
| margorczynski wrote:
| Still, this kind of outsourcing of manufacturing (or even more
| food production) puts the US in an incredibly uncomfortable
| position, especially that China is its main geopolitical enemy.
|
| What if a war erupts? Suddenly the US cannot produce a lot of
| essential stuff - I think Covid was a good example of that
| happening.
|
| Of course the question is can this be done and what will be the
| price if so.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Last time I looked the US was a net exporter of agricultural
| products to China. Well, until the retaliatory tariffs hit.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Food, airplanes, tech IP (eg software, phone designs) are the
| main exports of the USA to China.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Subsidize the essentials let the free market sort the rest. I
| think we still want competitive markets within our borders for
| the stuff we subsidize so we don't get stagnation of the
| industry. Maybe there are clues how it could be structured like
| we subsidize farming.
| causal wrote:
| The author is not anti-US-manufacturing. He explained how the
| current tariff policy undermines US manufacturers. He is
| pointing out the obstacles and what we must do to overcome
| them. The obstacle is the way.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _What if a war erupts?_
|
| I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for
| different reasons.
|
| But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US,
| then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the
| start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than
| worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the
| reality.
|
| We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios.
| Rather we should plan on the assumption that we want to confer
| maximum benefit on the US in likely non-apocalyptic future
| timelines.
| wormlord wrote:
| I think the collapse of the American Empire is no more
| preventible than the collapse of the British, Spanish, or Roman
| empires. The issues with the US being the reserve currency has
| been known for a while now (and was even predicted by Keynes
| before the Bretton-Woods summit):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
|
| Any discussion of "bringing back manufacturing" that doesn't
| mention government spending or social programs to educate and
| upskill the population is not genuine. The current leadership are
| fools and ideologs who will only hasten the decline, which might
| actually be better globally if it lowers emissions. Time will
| tell I guess.
| Herring wrote:
| Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question
| was whether they'd fall back relatively gracefully like
| (Western) Europe, now with multiple countries ranking at the
| top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether they'll become
| Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the
| worst quality of life.
|
| It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly
| on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing
| that way.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than
| the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took
| Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it
| probably holds.
| wiseowise wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territor
| y...
|
| Very graceful.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is
| joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of
| how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and
| that's before you add in all the crap in Africa.
|
| Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine
| shindig and my statement would still hold.
| Herring wrote:
| Yeah in retrospect I could probably have phrased that a
| little better!
| Danmctree wrote:
| The toll was far greater than just that of conflicts. If
| you look at increased mortality during the period you'll
| see excess death in the millions. Wiki says 3.4 million:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet
| _Un...
|
| In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in
| the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for
| completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard
| to tell from the stats the proportion of impact
| s_dev wrote:
| The fall of the Soviet Union was anything but graceful.
| Within months of the dissolution of the USSR Russia had
| children becoming prostitutes in order to get money for
| food.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| In 1986/87 top USSR newspapers were covering high class
| prostitution for foreign businessmen in Moscow hotels. A
| few years later, foreign currency prostitute was ranked
| among most desirable occupations for women in an
| anonymous poll.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I think the current Russia-Ukraine war is the delayed end
| of Soviet Union collapse.
|
| Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to
| reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent
| republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks -
| until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the
| Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of
| Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin
| in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already
| independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's
| Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.
|
| So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months
| followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved
| without a fight a couple of weeks later.
|
| I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts
| being fought out in the open.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-
| turmoil-yelt... - free to read with NYT registration
| 42772827 wrote:
| The American Empire never existed, because it never could. The
| US made the explicit decision _not_ to occupy the defeated
| forces after WWII, save for strategic forces in place to
| protect the interests of the _host_ countries. The US opened
| its market (the only market of size left and still the largest
| consumer bases in the world, by far) with no tariffs.
|
| What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of
| debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer
| interested in subsidizing the global order.
|
| The current discussion re: "bringing back manufacturing" is
| making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is
| involved: taking him at his word. The point isn't to bring back
| all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some
| manufacturing will return -- whatever is high value added and
| benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody
| thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.
|
| Also, those who are looking for an American decline as
| comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely
| disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self
| sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is,
| it's still -- _still_ -- the safest place to park capital,
| still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice
| China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to
| its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to
| mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides
| by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest
| of the world combined... and also holding the virtually all of
| the world 's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a
| requirement for semiconductor production.
| wormlord wrote:
| > The American Empire never existed
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r.
| ..
| pjc50 wrote:
| > The American Empire never existed, because it never could
|
| This theory doesn't really explain what was going on at
| tremendous expense in Iraq, Afghanistan or even all those
| years ago in Vietnam.
|
| If there is a decline, I expect it to be in internal security
| and the transition from high-trust to low-trust society.
| 42772827 wrote:
| It explains it precisely. The United States is a maritime
| power. It has never had the capability to maintain longterm
| occupation the way the Soviets or Ottomans did.
| wormlord wrote:
| You realize that an Empire does not need to be configured
| the exact same way as the Roman Empire, right? A
| combination of soft power, clandestine operations, and
| targeted military intervention is more resource-effective
| than a constant occupation, and should still be
| considered an empire.
| 42772827 wrote:
| The English will be glad to hear their empire remains!
| wormlord wrote:
| The Five Eyes Nations are part of the US Empire, that is
| a correct assessment.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Then explain what they've been doing in South America for the
| past 100 years.
| adamrezich wrote:
| This is explicitly referenced in "A User's Guide to
| Restructuring the Global Trading System", written November 2024
| by Stephen Miran--current Chair of the Council of Economic
| Advisers of United States--which outlines the general ideology
| and strategies behind the current tariff situation.
|
| https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
| Herring wrote:
| I'd believe that article more if Trump hadn't called on
| congress to eliminate the CHIPS act, or if tariffs+Musk
| hadn't undermined it, or if republicans were for the Green
| New Deal, etc. If you're interested in onshoring, the smart
| thing would be to work on a targeted approach in high-value
| areas.
|
| It's a really complicated manoeuvre even if you're not
| actively trying to shoot yourself in the foot. Eg Domestic
| factors (automation, corporate offshoring decisions, etc)
| also contributed to manufacturing job loss. A weaker dollar
| would probably help, but isn't a silver bullet.
|
| The main article for this post goes into this in a lot of
| detail.
| wormlord wrote:
| My pet theory is that he was in his 30s when the Plaza
| Accords happened and they really imprinted on him. If the
| rising Japanese economy could be brought to heel then so
| could the Chinese (ignore the fact that Japan was under the
| US security umbrella). It's no more rational than the
| fondness you might have for the first car you drove.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| America doesnt really have an empire. What is America's Hong
| Kong, India, etc?
| wormlord wrote:
| Dude come on
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_imperialism#Strategy
|
| Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, are locations that
| are directly under US control. The entire western hemisphere
| is within our sphere of control, and a huge chunk of the
| planet was either directly aligned with us (EU, AUS/UK) or
| was compliant for fear of regime change.
|
| The country itself was founded on the destruction of dozens
| of civilizations, a victory so total you don't even consider
| it as part of US imperial conquest. I can't believe I even
| have to explain this to people on here my God.
| const_cast wrote:
| America's empire isn't really built on blantant colonialism
| (although we do that, too). It's built on "planting" US
| favorable governments all around the world.
|
| I mean, we have half of Africa shooting themselves in the
| foot over and over for our own benefit. And every time it
| looks like an African nation is going to do something about
| it, some counter-military force appears out of nowhere (with
| US arms?) and some important political heads are
| assassinated.
|
| This isn't a conspiracy theory, either. The destabilization
| of world governments done by our government to our benefit is
| well recorded.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the collapse of the American Empire is no more preventible
| than the collapse of the British, Spanish, or Roman empires_
|
| They each had longer runs than we've had.
|
| My pet theory is lead. From 1950 to 1980 we birthed a leaded
| generation [1]. Today, up to 60% of American voters were born
| before 1975 [2]. (Voters born between 1950 and 1980 came into
| the majority in the 1990s and should fall into the minority by
| 2028, but only barely. So in summary: Iraq War, Financial
| Crisis, Covid and Trump 47. It won't be until the 2040s when
| truly unleaded voters, those born after 2000, command a
| majority.)
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35254913/#&gid=article-
| figur...
|
| [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-
| changing...
| elbasti wrote:
| Like OP, I work in manufacturing (after 15 years in startup
| land). I'm not as experienced as him, but I work in manufacturing
| that makes similar products on both sides of the US/Mexico
| border.
|
| Let me add some thoughts:
|
| 1) _Capacity, not cost, is the main driver for nearshoring_. All
| things being equal, a manufacturer would rather produce a product
| in the US than overseas. _The cost of modern products is mostly
| parts & material, not labor_. When you add logistcs expenses, the
| theoretical cost advantage of overseas vs local is not _that_
| great. Remember:the people on the other side of the border are
| capitalists too! They want to keep most of the surplus of
| nearshoring to themselves! The problem is that there simply is no
| capacity, both in facilities and especially in people.
|
| 2) _What matters even more than capacity is the first derivative
| of capacity._ In other words: how quickly can I spin up a new
| factory if I win a big deal? How quickly can I spin one down if
| the client goes away? How long will it take me to get a permit to
| connect my new factory to the highway? In the US, these costs and
| timelines are massive. Real estate, permitting, hiring. There is
| an order of magnitude difference here, in cost and time.
|
| 3) _The labor problems are real_. I don 't want to disparage the
| american workers I work with, because they are amazing. Truly
| fantastic craftsmen. But they are hard to find. You'd be
| surprised how many people show up who can't read or can't read a
| tape measure. How hard it is to find people that want to work 8
| hours a day, 5 days a week. By contrast, in our overseas facility
| we have qualified workers literally showing up at our gate every
| day asking for work.
|
| In other words, the root cause problems with american
| manufacturing are---surprise surprise!--the same problems as with
| other parts of the US that are in decay:
|
| - Disfunctional local government, especially around permitting,
| construction, housing and transit
|
| - Disfunctional education & healthcare systems.
|
| - A lack of strategic investment in infrastructure (rail,
| highways)
|
| - A social safety net that is totally out of whack, with a high
| cost burden for employers & employees, with little to no
| immediate quality-of-life benefits for the working population
|
| Tariffs solve exactly zero of those probems!
| franktankbank wrote:
| The cost of manufacturing your stuff is not labor dependent
| only because you are probably putting together low cost
| components made with cheap labor. What if you had to make the
| spring or the resistor or the little painted metal box? Could
| you do that without labor being the big cost?
| elbasti wrote:
| I actually make pretty high cost products with relatively
| expensive labor (welders, electricians).
|
| Even then, materials & parts dominate.
| XorNot wrote:
| What? How much labor do you think goes into making a spring
| or a resistor? These are parts which cost fractions of a cent
| and are cranked out by the tens of millions.
| system7rocks wrote:
| This is an interesting read though I'm not an economist but even
| pick up that the author is wrong about some of these points.
| Still, I don't think the author is an economist either. And a
| little harsh on US workers - but I know there are people really
| struggling in the US who need work and bring their problems with
| them.
|
| What a mess this country is in.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think most people have a very confused understanding of
| money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, _not money_.
| Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To
| get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy,
| you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to
| accommodate high value workers.
|
| Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes _is not_ high
| value work. The slice of value available to convert to currency
| for the worker is very tiny. So you end up having to play games
| with the economy which inevitably will blow up in someone 's
| face. $60 t-shirts so we can pretend that the value in a t-shirt
| is much more than it is, so we artificially make t-shirt
| manufacturing competitive with, say, automobile manufacturing.
| californical wrote:
| I somewhat agree with your point, but it's also important to
| include the other side of that pricing.
|
| If it actually costs $60 (really more like $25 for made-in-
| America t-shirts I've bought) to make a t-shirt, with
| environmental regulations and human costs accounted for, then
| isn't that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were
| artificially cheap at $10 for imported ones due to ignoring
| externalities? In that case, producing these simple products is
| actually a bit more valuable than you suggest.
| ragazzina wrote:
| > isn't that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were
| artificially cheap at $10
|
| Maybe a part of the $15 difference is in marketing.
| charlie90 wrote:
| I disagree with this. Everybody wears clothes. Everybody eats
| food.
|
| You can't put a monetary value on a t-shirt, because people
| will buy them anyways. Who is to say that t-shirts aren't $60?
| People only think that t-shirts are "low value" because we have
| offshored the labor and are used to very low prices. Meanwhile
| I bet most Americans can't even sew.
| bluGill wrote:
| You are missing something: quantity. A toilet brush itself is
| low value, but the US needs 30 million per year (this is a
| guess, but it seems reasonable enough - every person buys one
| every 10 years, which seems right based on how long they last.
| I am likely off, but probably not by an order of magnitude so
| let us use that number for discussion unless/until someone
| really wants to find a better number). If you can make/sell a
| million brushes per year with a gross profit of $1 on each that
| is a million dollars, if labor and the machines are amortize to
| $.50 each you net profit is then $500k/year - many small
| company CEOs would be happy with that.
|
| You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important
| point is low value production is always about volume.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| now do marx's labor theory of value
| jccalhoun wrote:
| There are some interesting things in this but there are also some
| deeply cynical anti-working class stereotypes:
|
| >You don't have people who insist on being paid in cash so that
| they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics
| on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
|
| >Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other
| and their manager. They don't take 30 minute bathroom breaks on
| company time. They don't often quit because their out-of-state
| mother of their children discovered their new job and now
| receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don't
| disappear because they've gone on meth benders. And they don't
| fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday
| got converted into pills.
|
| >Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations.
| These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own
| eyes.
|
| Really? How does he know if someone is on disability? How he know
| many of these are not seen in China? If they aren't then why
| aren't they? I don't think it is as simple as work ethic.
| a2128 wrote:
| >There are over a billion people in China making stuff.
|
| There surely can't over a billion factory workers in a population
| of 1.4 billion. I looked up a population pyramid, and let's say
| 100% of the population aged 15-64 is employed at a factory job,
| that's ~70% of the population which is only 985 million people.
| pknerd wrote:
| I loved his writing style. Everything is simple, understandable,
| and to the point for the people like me who don;t know much about
| this topic.
| ranadomo wrote:
| > Let's focus on America's strengths in high end manufacturing,
| agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all
| countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated
| drones for agriculture at 300% to encourage their manufacture
| here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54% to that
| that we apply to t-shirts.
|
| Everything wrong and right with the author's thesis. Our present
| day high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation are
| already facing the steepest tariffs from a broad range of
| countries. The uneven playing field extends to IP theft, heavily
| subsidised and protected industries abroad and other forms of
| unfair competition like port traffic manipulation or burdensome
| legislation.
|
| The author think that "targeted tariffs" would have a different
| effect from what we see now with trade war and retaliatory
| threats, market instability and uncertainty. This is false, but
| also ultimately harmful to our "agricultural drone industry".
| It's hard to have a niche industry without the larger picture,
| and it's hard to have "drones" without knowing how to manufacture
| constituent parts and having a reliable domestic supply chain for
| such. A domestically sourced supply chain encourages innovation
| and adaptation to immediate customer demands and goods can arrive
| in days or hours instead of weeks or months. Innovative requests
| to parts makers aren't immediately harvested by Chinese
| industrial spies and knowledge and technological advantage can
| remain local for longer, allowing for time to progress again
| before others can catch up.
|
| Encouraging lazy and unoriginal drone manufacture in moated "made
| in USA" assembly lines is precisely the low-end type of job that
| "no one wants to do" and will inevitably produce the least
| capable drones the least efficiently or profitably. Our
| manufacturing and industrial capacity needs to be the world's
| best and most cost competitive because nothing else will do.
|
| Only automation can save American industry. There will be "fewer"
| jobs but they will require skill and training. Robot management
| and supervision and repair and update and retooling will all
| require a large labor force. Creating robots and the software
| they run on will continue to be an important and large sector of
| the software industry. But manufacturing is only about jobs in
| the way that having a healthy agriculture industry is "about
| jobs", hardly at all.
|
| Manufacturing real goods is the difference between servility and
| freedom given that modern war in the nuclear age also entails
| producing billions of tonnes of metal and blowing it up in
| distant countries, and could require replacing percentages of the
| global shipping tonnage that would be destroyed in a major
| conflict. It requires manufacturing thousands of substation
| transformers and the aa systems to defend them.
|
| If we had invested strategically into a variety of heavy and
| light industries over the past 30 years, we almost certainly
| would have invented better processes and formulae for making
| things than we currently possess. We could have more globally
| competitive steel, even more advanced finished products and the
| knowledge and experience to "make anything better and more
| profitably than anyone". Industrial production and manufacturing
| make up roughly 15% of US GDP today. "Bringing back
| manufacturing" might increase that number significantly but it's
| hard to see how or why it would need to be more than 30% outside
| of wartime. That wouldn't even require a doubling of the jobs
| involved because much of this would have to be automated.
|
| I agree with the author's emphasis on education and "fixing"
| things being critical in the execution of any kind of industrial
| renaissance. If the tariff fight lowers tariffs globally, that is
| a small move in the right direction of leveling the playing field
| and rewarding domestic producers who are globally competitive.
| bluGill wrote:
| Robot drones probably are something the US should do. Access to
| US farms is useful for anyone making agriculture products.
| Remembers these drones are part of the supply chain for food,
| and so doing them in the US makes the supply chain closer. You
| want the ag drones made in small city, not Silicone valley.
| However your might write the software in Silicone valley - that
| is where you will find a supply of people who can do that -
| some of those people will then be making regular trips to the
| factory though to learn how it works.
| dventimi wrote:
| _" America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing
| Manufacturing Back"_
|
| "America" doesn't underestimate or overestimate things. People
| do. So _which_ American people underestimate the difficulty of
| bringing manufacturing back? Name names, or it didn 't happen.
| axegon_ wrote:
| The true and sad truth is that manufacturing can be moved
| anywhere but the people that keep parroting about it's importance
| are in complete denial about the primary issue: costs. These
| costs have very little to do with infrastructure and building
| factories or logistics. Those are a contributor, sure, but that
| only scratches the surface. While China has seen insane growth in
| the last 20 years, that growth is at the expense of workers. No
| doubt they have a lot of value in terms of skills(which take a
| long time to acquire) but you also need to remember that there is
| a difference between the significance of working in Asia and
| Europe/north America. To us Europeans (and North Americans) work
| brings stability and security. In Asia, work is the difference
| between life and death, regardless of how skilled you are-you are
| legally expandable. Does anyone seriously believe that iPhones
| will be made in the US? The basic salary at foxconn is just under
| 320$/month or $1.81/hour. That is around 10x less than the US.
| This is ignoring the atrocious working conditions and far above
| the 40 hour work week. If we do factor in that as well, the
| difference is likely in the 25-30x range. I come from a country
| with a minimum hourly wage of around $3.6, let me tell you, as
| soon as the clock hits 18:00, people will drop everything where
| they stand and go home. The only way to compete with China is to
| automate everything and let machines do all the work, which is
| not a terrible idea but also nearly impossible to achieve. And
| even if you spend two decades doing all that, there are costs to
| all the R&D to get there. No one is going to buy a $15k iPhone,
| nor will they buy a $20K laptop. A logo that says "Made in X"
| won't justify the price. This comes from someone that uses a
| dual-xeon workstation as a personal computer.
|
| Here's another example: a market that has been completely
| dominated by China: consumer drones. Believe me when I say this,
| I hate DJI and while I have one, I refuse to use it because of
| all the security implications. How many European and US companies
| are competing with them? Quite a few actually but the big names
| off the top of my head are Parrot and Skydio. I own both a Parrot
| and a Skydio and the quality of both is amazing. Yet they are
| still barely keeping up with DJI and at 5x the cost despite the
| demand - DJI still holds 90% of the market share. I can justify
| the price because of my privacy concerns but that's 1/1000
| people. For most people it's always going to be a trade-off
| between price and quality+privacy.
|
| If you want to enforce all that through tariffs, just put 5000%
| tariffs so that the local manufacturing cost will be the same as
| the cheap import and you solved the problem. How many people will
| be willing to spend 100 bucks for a pair of socks? That's a
| different story. The soviet union attempted something similar for
| several decades while trying to copy western technology. Anyone
| that knows a bit of history can tell you how that ended.
| Spoilers: not a success story.
| acyou wrote:
| This article seems to be full of propaganda and downright lies.
| For instance, there are plenty of tool and die makers left in the
| USA, plenty of injection molding machines. I have personally seen
| them and met the tool and die makers as well as the machines
| making the molds.
|
| It's difficult to address the giant article full of
| misrepresentations point by point. It's tough to see it up at the
| top of HN. Wish that I could do something to correct the
| misinformation that is being disseminated.
|
| This person has a vested interest. They manufacture cheap crap in
| China (or Vietnam, I don't care) for American kids to suck on.
| What more do you need to know?
| mindtricks wrote:
| If you feel there are misrepresentations, then just pick one
| point and discuss that. I've worked in manufacturing-dependent
| companies and industries, and lived in China for years. His
| observations don't feel entirely off-base to me and fit much of
| what I've observed. So if there is something wrong here, help
| us clarify one part of it.
| acyou wrote:
| "To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into
| shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds
| needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as
| soon as one of those molds broke, we'd be in trouble, because
| there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The
| people who knew how to build and repair molds have either
| passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem,
| we'd have to order a new mold from China or send ours back,
| shutting down production for months."
|
| This is what I have the most problem with. As I said above:
|
| "For instance, there are plenty of tool and die makers left
| in the USA, plenty of injection molding machines. I have
| personally seen them and met the tool and die makers as well
| as the machines making the molds.".
|
| The reality is that there are many injection molding machines
| in the USA making weapons, medical devices, electronics
| enclosures and connectors, car and airplane parts, and other
| high margin products, not kids toys. And it's a lie to say
| that tooling, molds, and tool and die makers and shops aren't
| widely available in the States. They just don't want to pay
| more for them, and are therefore disseminating propaganda to
| the contrary.
|
| And, I have also spent time in China, I have toured the
| factories there, I know what I am talking about as well.
| trc001 wrote:
| It's really only one guy that underestimates it
| sightbroke wrote:
| I am by no means an export on manufacturing, nor international
| trade, economics, or virtually anything relevant to
| manufacturing. Just a layman here.
|
| Observationally I fear there is a lack of nuance in discussing
| "bringing back manufacturing" (really re-expanding) to the U.S.
|
| I fear the lack of nuance is due to bias based on not liking the
| guy in the red tie or the other guy that's in a blue tie so
| there's just blinders about whether or not a particular policy
| will achieve a particular stated goal.
|
| The next thing I see is it just lumping manufacturing all into
| one bucket.
|
| Take manufacturing smartphones. Because the U.S. doesn't assemble
| iPhones the U.S. appears to be bad at manufacturing? No, I think
| it's just not good at assembling iPhones.
|
| Just looking at numbers, sure the U.S. steel production is
| dwarfed by China but globally it's still a major producer. And
| there's no discussion of quality.
|
| Look at oil & gas. I'm pretty sure the U.S. both produces the raw
| material and refined product at a significant amount globally.
|
| Plastic manufacturing. I toured a bottle manufacturing plant last
| summer. It's primary a customer was Limited Brands (Victoria
| Secret)
|
| It built molds. It upgraded factory equipment roughly every 8
| years (increasing production & reducing labor costs). Why was it
| able to manufacturer bottles in the U.S. even it's selling at a
| higher price? Because it's primary customer was essentially down
| the street. That is, apparently the cost to not import across the
| globe more than offset the cost to manufacture here.
|
| I understand that's just an example and I'm trusting the
| information from that company was reliable.
|
| But first I think we need to be honest about how much
| manufacturing is here and what type. Then discuss which policies
| are likely to achieve goals we may have in mind.
|
| I think there's merit to manufacturing semiconductors and
| batteries here. But we need to also be aware that while
| manufacturing may bring jobs, an increasing amount of labor will
| be automated.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Yes, there's little nuance. I see so many people saying it will
| be _hard_ to bring back manufacturing jobs, or "we can't go
| back to the 50s," and then they just stop as if that settles
| the argument. The implication, which they never say out loud,
| is that we shouldn't even try, just accept things as they are.
| Just be the Big Consumer until someday the rest of the world
| doesn't want our dollars anymore, and then what?
|
| Seems much better to look seriously at the manufacturing we
| still have (as you say, it's considerable), where we can expand
| on that, and where we're lacking and need to rebuild.
| bluGill wrote:
| We also need to look at what manufacturing we want. That is
| why the military needs keep coming up - in case of war we are
| unlikely to be able to get things from China so we better
| have a different source (though the source need not be in the
| US - Canada should be just as good so long as we can keep
| Canada our friends - same with the EU).
|
| Once the military needs are met, I don't care what we make,
| just that we need good jobs for people who are not able to
| handle more complex jobs.
| sightbroke wrote:
| > just that we need good jobs for people who are not able
| to handle more complex jobs
|
| If manufacturing becomes more efficient at using labor from
| automation that seems like that would lower the number of
| available jobs wouldn't it?
|
| Unless consumption grows with the increase in output so
| that more factories are needed to meet the demand?
|
| If you need 1000 cars and automation takes it down to 10
| people from 100 people before, where are those 90 other
| people to get jobs?
|
| Unless you grow the need for cars to 10000.
|
| Simplification I know, but I am confused at how
| manufacturing is supposed to endlessly support a large
| "less-complex task" labor supply while simultaneously
| providing a good standard of living?
| bluGill wrote:
| for starters we need to make lots of different things.
|
| we also need education reform so that those people get
| the education needed to do more complex tasks insteade of
| droping out. What this looks like I don't really know.
| casey2 wrote:
| All of these points are overstated or just flat out wrong. For
| example the price of cheap manufacturing labor in America isn't
| higher than it looks, it's much lower, because there are an
| extremely large number of NEET men.
|
| The iphone, while impressive, is not the end all be all of
| American manufacturing. The major goal is to bring back tool
| makers and increase industrial density.
|
| >Chinese manufacturing labor isn't just cheaper. It's better.
|
| >In China, there are no people who are too fat to work.
|
| This is obviously just dumb anti-american propaganda. Since this
| article isn't written in good faith it's not worth my time to
| debunk point by point.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| These are all good points, but I'll add a different take here.
|
| The points are correct but rather than bring "all manufacturing
| back", the goal should be to aim for an 80:20 or 70:30. And it
| will still take decades, but at least with a far better chance of
| success.
|
| For companies that rely on a global supply chain, manufacturing
| and even raw materials should aim for mostly global but a
| guaranteed 20 to 30% local.
|
| It's one way to offset a real market problem, where unchecked
| market forces drives all production offshore or "nearshore;
| leaving the nation vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
|
| For essentials like grains, I'd even argue that the nation should
| opt for an 70:30. It'd be insane for us to offshore the majority
| of production.
| hintymad wrote:
| The mainstream assessment is deindustrialization is inevitable in
| the western world because all kinds of legitimate reasons: the
| cost is too high. The talent pool is too small. We are left
| behind and lack critical IPs and infrastructures. People are too
| lazy/stupid/uneducated/self righteous/<your favorite derogatory
| phrases>. We can hang on to our high-value service industry.
|
| What I don't understand is, why would people even want the US
| dollar and its service industry if we can't produce sufficiently
| any more? And what about future conflicts in the world? The US
| can't even produce enough saline solution or disinfectant wipes,
| let along active pharmaceutical ingredients? Did people see what
| China goods we tariff on? We tariff China for advanced materials,
| electronics, machineries, and etc, yet China tariffs on our raw
| materials and agricultural goods. And we think the US can
| maintain its wealth by behaving like a colony of China? When
| there's a conflict between us and China, what do we do? Beg them
| for the life essentials? And we keep yelling to punish Russia and
| help Ukraine to win the war and we should, but with what? We
| can't even out produce artillery shells faster and cheaper than
| Russia, or drones faster and cheaper than China. Admiral Yamamoto
| used to say that he saw so many factories and chimneys in
| Philadelphia that he knew that those industries could turn into
| efficient war machines if Japan ever declared war on the US.
| Would he be able to say the same today?
|
| As for what we can, wasn't the US a manufacturing powerhouse
| until early 2000s? BTW, the US is still a manufacturing
| powerhouse in some sectors, but we just can't make things cheap
| enough with good quality because we pretty much destroyed our
| light industry. Didn't China have nothing and it was heavy
| investment from the western world that helped China grow so fast
| and so rapidly? Then, why can't we shift investment back to the
| US and bring our key industries back? We kept talking about
| technical difficulties, yet we ignore the necessity of the
| matter.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this
| topic, I know what I am talking about."
|
| "I'm a first generation American..."
| keashe12 wrote:
| I think there are many people in the United States that would
| rather have manufacturing jobs than to have fast food or retail
| jobs.
|
| Kirk
| lerp-io wrote:
| earth doesn't need more factories, consumer shit needs to be
| printed out of some sort of organic material that is able to
| decompose quickly.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| or change the consumer habit to consume less, and/or change how
| things are produce in order to them last longer (reduce planned
| obsolescence) or even better we rebuild the system to serve
| human needs instead of feeding capitalism's endless growth.
| bawana wrote:
| We offshored manufacturing for profit. We are now offshoring
| brainpower. Manufacturing will only come back in the form of
| intelligent robots .
| nyeah wrote:
| Fine, we underestimate the difficulty. But we can make a detailed
| plan like other countries do. The US has massive advantages. Just
| no longer so massive that we can expect to win on sheer
| awesomeness.
|
| I feel like we in the US have a horrible split evaluation of
| ourselves: either we're supreme or we're doomed. Both sides of
| that split are emotional states, not useful facts.
| acdha wrote:
| > But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do
|
| The problem isn't that we don't know this: it's that the person
| making the decisions rejects the idea of needing to make a
| detailed plan, or even understand the situation well enough to
| recognize the problems a plan would need to address.
| nyeah wrote:
| Administrations come and go. Voters need to calm down and ask
| for something rational.
| thctphr wrote:
| I don't think it's realistic to bring manufacturing back, so to
| speak. Are the words being taken literally here? Does this truly
| mean Orange Man wants to bring all manufacturing back to the
| United States, or do we want to weaken our largest competitor and
| buy those cheap products in other countries who are less of a
| threat, speaking in terms of their technological advancement and
| economical trajectory?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for
| awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to
| make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the
| manufacturing tech and supply chains...which is pretty much
| impossible.
| palmotea wrote:
| > China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for
| awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to
| make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the
| manufacturing tech and supply chains...which is pretty much
| impossible.
|
| Not too long ago it was "common knowledge" that the Chinese
| couldn't do advanced stuff, now it's "common knowledge" you
| can't do advanced stuff without the Chinese.
|
| Nothing is impossible (at least in this area). If someone
| says it's impossible, they're really saying "I don't wanna do
| it."
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That's complete BS. China has been building out this
| advantage for a couple of decades now, and anyone paying
| attention knows this. The common knowledge presented by
| Trump isn't very useful.
|
| Yes, America too could build out this capability by
| aggressively investing in it for a couple of decades.
| dboreham wrote:
| One American did the underestimating.
| jollyllama wrote:
| It depends what you mean by "America" and it depends what you
| mean by "bringing manufacturing back."
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I prefer the alternative explain: this is just trump bringing in
| a national sales tax without having to go through the senate or
| eat the unpopularity.
|
| There seems to be no actual plan to actually bring back
| manufacturing (this would require different tariffs, loans, tax
| accounting rules, etc). And there seems to be no targeting of
| china (everywhere is being tariffed, allies and enemies,
| strategic suppliers and places with no trade with the USA etc)
| readenough wrote:
| I think Molson Hart should add a panda to their line of stuffed
| animals.
| blindriver wrote:
| The amount of pooh-poohing of this idea is even more than I would
| have expected from HN, despite tech's love of belittling others
| ideas.
|
| The reason we need manufacturing is because the middle class is
| decimated. None of us tech workers feel it because we don't live
| in neighborhoods that have been decimated by it. We have all
| benefitted from globalization immensely but we don't have
| neighbors, families or friends that have been destroyed by it.
|
| Too many people say it will take "years" to get factories
| operational. That's why Elon is there. He knows and has done
| this, to point out which regulations need to be axed in order to
| improve the time to market for new factories. Trump will listen
| to him and get rid of any regulation that doesn't make sense, or
| even regulations that do make sense but take too much time. For
| better or worse factory building will be faster over the next 3
| years.
|
| Now that we have these greenfields for new manufacturing
| opportunities, instead of standing there with your arms crossed,
| shaking your head why the idea won't work, how can you take
| advantage of this new opportunity to get rich?
| pif wrote:
| > We have all benefitted from globalization immensely but we
| don't have neighbors, families or friends that have been
| destroyed by it.
|
| Blue collar workers were the first to push for globalization,
| because they suddenly could afford a lifestyle that used to
| require the salary corresponding to a couple of steps upper in
| the corporate ladder. A blue collar salary suddenly could
| provide for many more amenities... til the salary was no more!
|
| Everyone wants manufacturing back, but only for the products
| _they_ can produce, because everyone still wants to buy at
| Chinese prices.
|
| Furthermore, the regulations that most stand in the way of
| cheap manufacturing are environmental regulations, and good
| luck with that! We have got used to breathe clean air, and I
| feel most people still love clean air more than they hate
| globalization.
| blindriver wrote:
| Blue collar workers never pushed for globalization because
| they knew exactly what would happen, they would lose their
| jobs and they did.
|
| The irony now about Chinese goods is that those of us that
| can afford it avoid them as much as possible. I check every
| product that I buy on Amazon to make sure they aren't made in
| China because they could be sending me poisoned goods.
| pif wrote:
| > Blue collar workers never pushed for globalization
|
| Maybe they didn't with their words, but they surely did
| with their money!
| qgin wrote:
| Given what's likely to happen with with AI and robotics over the
| next 10 years, all this debate about bringing back manufacturing
| jobs is pretty silly
| daveguy wrote:
| There is no technological path to AGI, much less intelligent
| robots, in the next 10 years. Everyone underestimates the
| massive amount of parallel processing going on in a single
| human brain. That doesn't even consider how massive the sensor
| array is. The doublings required for our artificial technology
| to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how
| much Moore's Law slows down.
| rollcat wrote:
| > The doublings required for our artificial technology to
| catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how
| much Moore's Law slows down.
|
| "A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away
| indefinitely."
|
| https://m.xkcd.com/678/
| Havoc wrote:
| The part that blows my mind is timing. It's going to take years
| to get anything up and running. Yet tariffs are cutting supply
| immediately.
|
| wtf is the plan for the 5-10 years in between?
| chewbacha wrote:
| oligarch buy up of failed industries. Then we all live as
| renters.
| thyristan wrote:
| Building a new factory needs a few years from idea to start of
| planning to production. 2 years if you are really really quick
| maybe, 4 to 6 years might be more realistic. The term for the
| current administration ends in 3.5 years and the next one
| probably won't be lead by Trump, so things will change.
|
| This means that nobody will even start moving production back
| yet, they will pay lip-service, do the minimum to get along for
| this term, and hope for the best for the next one.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Politicians have been running on platforms of about undoing the
| damage of offshoring since Obama's first term at least, now
| here we are in 2025 and someone just won an election and it
| played a key role so clearly it's a big important thing and
| it's reasonable to expect it to stick around as an issue on the
| official party platforms. There is a non-negligible chance that
| in 2029 there will be someone in the white house who continues
| to push in that direction, even if the specific policy is very
| different from the current tariff policy.
|
| The wise thing to do is to at least make steps in the direction
| of on-shoring or at least make your plans and investments
| compatible with it.
| jongjong wrote:
| Nonsense. Bringing manufacturing back to the US will be easy.
| Economists will probably call it "Miracle on the hudson river".
|
| Economists are full of bs. They keep framing everything as
| impossible and when something good happens later, going against
| all their predictions, they call it a miracle... Maybe these
| economists are just projecting by assuming everyone else is just
| as incompetent as they are.
|
| Of course if society was made up only of economists, we'd still
| be living in caves, worrying about the difficulty of bringing
| firewood back to the cave.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| 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.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Which means policies that reverse that are immensely important.
| The process of offshore our jobs and much I.P. took decades.
| Getting them back and rebuilding manufacturing support will
| take a long time, too.
|
| Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives
| that encourage large leaps in progress.
| glitchc wrote:
| Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low.
| There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal
| onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have
| stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the
| employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the
| employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market
| themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the
| work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and
| a net drain on their revenue sources.
|
| Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure
| how we can fix it.
| nradov wrote:
| Employees have always been responsible for managing their own
| career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise? It
| would be foolish for an employee to let someone else handle
| career growth for them as their interests aren't aligned (or
| even known). If you want help with career growth then find a
| _mentor_ , don't rely on your manager.
|
| Managers should facilitate training to improve employee
| productivity and help prepare them for a promotion. But that
| isn't really the same as career growth.
| glitchc wrote:
| > Employees have always been responsible for managing their
| own career growth and always will be. How can it be
| otherwise?
|
| On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well
| into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your
| career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to
| the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care
| of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly
| recent.
|
| Edit - added source (1993):
| https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-
| no-...
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| It didn't stop in the 70s. In many countries in Europe,
| Asia, and elsewhere, it's still common for businesses to
| retain employees over the arc of their career.
| glitchc wrote:
| Certainly true, my comments are specific to the North
| American workplace.
| runako wrote:
| Even the creepy business terminology "human capital"
| implies something that a business actively wants to grow.
| That is in stark contrast to how most businesses manage
| their people today.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Not entirely. Businesses don't try to grow things like
| buildings and inventory, they try to manage them at
| levels that make sense for their present and projected
| sales.
|
| (So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees
| get)
| runako wrote:
| Inventory is part of working capital. Companies generally
| understand that they want to expand working capital.
|
| Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital
| at all.
| keeda wrote:
| I find "human capital" better than "human resources", as
| it has connotations of something valuable to be invested
| carefully as opposed to something simply to be consumed
| and discarded.
|
| Of course, in the end it doesn't really matter, it is all
| Orwellian anyway.
| owlstuffing wrote:
| Outside of government, this shift also coincides with the
| decline of pensions and the rise of the 401k.
|
| Career growth has always been a shared responsibility
| between employees and employers. In white-collar fields--
| especially medicine and engineering--education has long
| been frontloaded, with formal schooling as the main on-
| ramp.
|
| Blue-collar jobs, by contrast, have relied more on trade
| schools, mentorship, and hands-on training. These
| pathways have steadily eroded since the 1980s.
|
| Much of this traces back to the Open Door Policy with
| China and the broader Free Trade Agreements that
| followed. These moved massive segments of industry
| offshore--along with the structures that once
| incentivized long-term employee development through
| education and skill-building.
|
| Revitalizing domestic industry could reintroduce
| competition among employers, which in turn could restore
| the pre-1990s incentives for long-term investment in the
| workforce.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's the same problem in the trades. Apprentices tend to
| cost the company more than their output so no one wants
| to hire and train them.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > If you want help with career growth then find a mentor,
| don't rely on your manager.
|
| Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your
| manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both
| knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both
| parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned
| unless fraud is involved.
| nradov wrote:
| No, that's not how it usually works (at least not for
| professional and managerial employees in the US). Mentors
| are typically more senior, not peers and not someone in
| the employee's direct chain of command. They may be in an
| entirely different organization.
|
| I don't know how you could believe that career growth
| interests are aligned between employees and their
| managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal
| career path will involve changing companies at some
| point. This is generally not in their current manager's
| best interest.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| As a manager, I disagree. It is entirely within my
| interest to have a direct do better; this provides me a
| path in the future to switch orgs when they switch orgs.
| If I level up or leave, I bring them with. If they level
| up or leave, they potentially bring me with. Team, self,
| org in descending order of priority. Companies are
| temporary, network is what carries you until the end of
| your career.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best
| advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your
| network is your net worth but only if you give more than
| you take.")
| specialist wrote:
| My bestie works in sales and marketing. Events, promotions,
| audience engagement. Long time experience with national
| brands, loves helping local businesses (side hustle).
|
| A huge part of her job is recruiting and hiring. Part of
| her pitch is proactive career development.
|
| Paraphrasing: I want you to join our team. I also
| understand that this job is just one stop on your journey.
| While you're here, what can I do to help you get the skills
| and experience you want for your next job?
|
| Consequently, she has a HUGE network, built over decades.
| Something comes up and she knows just the right person. She
| has her pick of new opportunities.
|
| Wouldn't you love to have her as your boss?
|
| I've had precisely 2 bosses in my career that had any
| impulse for nurturing, mentoring, career development.
| Whereas I've tried to be that kind of boss, given the
| limits of our current system.
| hilux wrote:
| > How can it be otherwise?
|
| It was otherwise. And is IS otherwise in many other rich
| countries, as well as not-so-rich ones.
|
| In these places, the employer-employee relationship is more
| of a _relationship_ and less of a transaction to be
| reassessed every morning.
|
| If you don't believe it, because you've never seen it, then
| you are probably American, probably young. And seeing other
| possibilities is a good reason to study (modern!) history,
| and to travel.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| You fix it the way every other industry has fixed it:
| broke/agent model.
| Keegs wrote:
| Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of
| a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train
| someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else
| and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.
|
| A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for
| the training and then forgive them over time if the employee
| continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the
| tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable
| income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive"
| companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right
| after they give you $200k worth of training.
| Retric wrote:
| Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training
| upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don't
| actually cost that much to operate internally and generally
| allow someone to do something very specific and useful.
| There's plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a
| bonus after 1 year of service.
|
| 50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary
| bumps for retention, but the first set of training should
| have paid for itself before you're offering the next.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training
| upfront.
|
| Why not?
|
| > 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary
| bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.
|
| "Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more
| expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the
| competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so
| how does that work?
| Retric wrote:
| > is more expensive than
|
| Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more
| than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe.
| Employee churn is really expensive but if it's not coming
| out of your budget middle management doesn't care.
|
| Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to
| poor incentives.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _you would have people screaming about "abusive"
| companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right
| after they give you $200k worth of training._
|
| Because it _would_ be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-
| so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - _in the
| company 's estimate_ - and then force them to stick around
| for years.
|
| "But nobody made them agree to that!"
|
| Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a
| shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same
| people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| > "But nobody made them agree to that!"
|
| And to amplify your point just a bit, if the alternative
| is losing your healthcare and possibly going homeless,
| what does "agreeing" even mean anymore?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they
| can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're
| out $200k, so they don't do that.
|
| And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere
| else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling
| employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage
| slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not
| paying people enough to stay.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| What you're describing already exists and are aptly named
| TRAPs (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions). Companies
| already abuse these and in fact are illegal in California.
| Here's an article covering it from a few years ago:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-us-companies-
| charging-...
| AsmaraHolding wrote:
| Isn't that simply the inherent risk associated with
| business ventures? Not every investment will yield a
| profit. I recall reading about Ward Parkinson, one of the
| founders of Micron Technology. During his tenure at
| Fairchild Semiconductor, the company paid for his Master's
| degree at Stanford. However, upon graduating, he promptly
| left to work for Reticon.
| dangjc wrote:
| This! My company is mid size and we can't hire junior
| people for fear they'll jump to FANG right when they're
| starting to become productive for us. And we can't afford
| FANG compensation for senior people.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not
| a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU,
| Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either.
| Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those
| that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of
| each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG
| salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews,
| one hour each? If that's not enough to judge a potential
| hire then I don't know what is. Once the hiring is fixed
| you should have lots of great candidates available.
| pengaru wrote:
| > Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used
| to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's
| problem, while the employee could focus on the work.
|
| Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me
| about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on
| the work? ktnx
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If you don't upskill for free with no additional comp, how
| will they continue to cram down labor costs to make their
| quarterly numbers? You are, broadly speaking, treated as an
| asset to be sweat until you can be replaced.
| pengaru wrote:
| Well, tbf, it's not like there's no carrot in this case.
| (I'm at a FAANG)
|
| But I'm sure what you're describing is common in the
| general case.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Certainly, at FAANG outlier comp, it is likely worth your
| while vs the median.
| imglorp wrote:
| It's also fundamental tech and a research pipeline supporting
| new ones.
|
| There are numerous examples of whole competencies were
| transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and
| marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving
| only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from
| coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/1
| 0/22/america...
|
| And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc ... Which corp
| has the gumption to fund any of that again? They'd rather pad
| the current quarter than invest in the next.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees.
| Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.
|
| I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they
| learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how
| their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and
| that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the
| money train and training train leaves the boat.
|
| I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so
| many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now
| only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so
| all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if
| they can profit from it.
|
| Granted I do think if you build something innovative you
| should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot
| of blood, sweat, tears and money.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I always seem to join the ship when the money train and
| training train leaves the boat.
|
| From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be
| expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on
| more.
|
| When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in
| the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the
| change.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates.
| Investing into the new thing, in a world order where
| copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D
| a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on
| products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and
| make it a bad strategy - or else..
|
| Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not
| exists without the international order and goverments have
| a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big
| players.
| ta20240528 wrote:
| Literally patents.
|
| But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY
| country you want protection. Most companies don't do this
| and then whine about copies.
|
| And lest someone whose never done it says they don't
| work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for
| patents to expire.
| nickff wrote:
| What you're describing is monstrously expensive, and
| doesn't actually prevent IP violations, it just allows
| you to recover some of your losses, which is also
| expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-
| by-night operations.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What you're describing is monstrously expensive
|
| I would actually consider this to be an desirable side
| effect: if you want governments to enforce your monopoly
| using their state authority, you better pay for this
| really well. :-)
| UltraSane wrote:
| In networking the situation is just ridiculous. Companies
| just expect people to know Cisco Nexus, ASA, XE, Palo Alto,
| Linux, AWS VPC, and do a bit of database and backup admin all
| for less than $100,000 a year.
| rlpb wrote:
| That's sounds like a functioning free market. Either they
| find the quality of labor they require at that rate, or
| they don't. Either you take such a job at that rate because
| you have the required skills and knowledge and that's your
| best offer, or you don't.
| apercu wrote:
| > Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not
| more often, than actually doing the work.
|
| Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has
| been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all
| kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to
| somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been
| spending some time on LinkedIn this year.
|
| What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of
| the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn
| posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.
| hattmall wrote:
| The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all
| about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and
| I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual
| business. It's typically something like the business hires
| a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company.
| The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I
| actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of
| those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a
| cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign
| freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who
| speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-
| english speaking coders locally.
|
| It's not much different in other industries though, so many
| layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially
| illegal immigrant that does the actual work.
| epolanski wrote:
| > We just don't want to employ people
|
| I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global
| geo economics.
|
| There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is
| economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy
| prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).
|
| That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or
| tariff you put.
|
| But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN
| users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy
| while offloading things that made more sense to be done
| elsewhere.
|
| I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade
| balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless
| and don't make your country richer.
|
| Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some
| delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing
| for the sake of it.
| almosthere wrote:
| Cost of labor is the issue: china is enslaving people to
| work.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Source?
| Kirby64 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
|
| Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies
| these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's
| some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many
| years of a variety of forced labor operations from these
| camps.
| Clubber wrote:
| Simple google search, first result:
|
| https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-
| studie...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Doesn't that feel like a massive overstatement? They have
| worse working conditions for sure. "Enslavement" is absurd
| if we are speaking about the macro level.
| jofla_net wrote:
| Those nets tho...
| martin_a wrote:
| Overstatement? China is going fully facist on the Uyghurs
| for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of
| _Uyghurs_in_Chin...
| runako wrote:
| The US specifically outlawed slavery except among
| prisoners. The US also operates prison labor at very low
| rates.
|
| I'm not sure this is a meaningful point of differentiation.
| anon6362 wrote:
| US corporations benefit today from slave labor by people
| housed in for-profit prisons where there are incentives
| to over-prosecute brown and poor people. These include,
| but aren't limited to:
|
| - Aramark
|
| - Avis
|
| - IBM
|
| - JCPenney
|
| - Kmart
|
| - McDonald's
|
| - Nintendo
|
| - Sprint
|
| - Starbucks
|
| - Verizon
|
| - Walmart
|
| - Wendy's
|
| - Whole Foods/Amazon
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The other side of this coin is cost of living. If housing
| costs more in the US, so does everything else. If
| everything costs more, people have to be paid more in order
| to make a living, and that makes the US less competitive in
| the global labor market.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| > I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple
| global geo economics.
|
| I don't see a difference. If we want local industry, we must
| address the global geo economics.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is the root issue
|
| This idea that "labor is cheaper elsewhere" is simply a neutral
| statement of economics -- but it's not, it's a political
| statement . The US and by extension the "western capitalist
| world" has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then
| later globally slavery.
|
| The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer to the US post
| war is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to
| be explicitly capitalist. Read "Understanding Defeat" for
| detailed proof of the 7 year occupation in the Japan, to
| destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture and
| replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to
| MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices like unionization
| but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into
| cooperatives and syndicates.
|
| China moved into that position because Japanese labor began
| getting "more expensive." Nixon and Kissinger saw an
| opportunity to exploit "cheap" labor because there were no
| protections for workers or environmental protections - so
| "opening up china" plus the Nixon shock and floating of
| interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost.
| This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971.
|
| NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural
| slave countries etc... On and on just moving the ball until
| there's nowhere else to exploit.
|
| It's not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move
| wherever it needs to in order to exploit "arbitrage
| opportunities." Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.
|
| Just like #2 in Austin powers said:
|
| > Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit
| evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to
| have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted
| to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world
| anymore. It's only corporations.
| 42772827 wrote:
| The last time we got employers to care about employees it was
| because the unions dragged the bosses into the streets and beat
| the daylights out of them.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think you're exactly right there.
|
| >> We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture
|
| > That's trivially false given we're the second-largest
| manufacturer in the world.
|
| I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the
| numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be
| "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only
| manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing,
| and China manufactures everything else.
|
| My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the
| US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing
| output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.
| habinero wrote:
| No, we're a very close second in terms of output, almost on
| par. [0]
|
| The difference is China has something like 10x the number of
| workers in manufacturing and can efficiently take on smaller
| or custom work.
|
| ---
|
| [0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-manufacturing-
| scor...
| paul7986 wrote:
| How many Americans are dying to and will do tedious labor (not
| many), as well robots, automation and AI can do a lot of it and
| or will end up doing a lot of it.
|
| If we want to strengthen America (military & economy)
| immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such
| reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in
| our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to
| four family members here that are able to start working and
| contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding
| up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when
| we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on
| beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.
| bregma wrote:
| These two to four family member who immigrate would not also
| be required to serve in the military? If not, what are the
| criteria used to select the one-out-of-five?
| nneonneo wrote:
| Importing immigrants directly into the military sounds like a
| bad idea. I'm guessing many would be less likely to want to
| lay their lives down for the new country, so drafting them
| seems like a great way to end up with a bunch of disloyal
| troops.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| The French Foreign Legion is a famous counterexample to
| your argument here. They might actually have the best
| Esprit du Corps in the world. In particular because they
| have to since they are indeed comprised of random
| foreigners and historically at least low-level criminals.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That's trivially false given we're the second-largest
| manufacturer in the world.
|
| Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically
| made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that
| infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us
| moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy
| to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated
| with that.
| elcritch wrote:
| This attitude that manufacturing is moving down the tech tree
| ladder completely misunderstands manufacturing. IME the
| entire notion was invented by elitist economists and embraced
| by CEOs looking to justify sending manufacturing overseas for
| short term profiteering. Regular people bought in because of
| the promise of cheaper gizmos.
|
| It's the sort of attitude that infected Boeing and resulted
| in taking them from the peak of aviation to an embarrassment.
| Because they don't know how to lubricate doors or tighten
| screws.
|
| Building things is hard, and requires significant technology
| and skills among a lot of people. A service based economy
| inherently looses that technology and skill.
|
| Tim Cook interviewed and said China isn't the low cost labor
| anymore it once was. China has become the place that knows
| how to manufacture things, especially electronics.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the
| state of the country, this will continue.
|
| The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax
| incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto
| Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could
| buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high
| quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of
| quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can
| only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work
| culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.
| strict9 wrote:
| > _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.
| chii wrote:
| > 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.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Away from unfettered capitalism, clearly.
| jmyeet wrote:
| We produce weapons. We are an arms dealer empire.
|
| Our biggest exporter is Boeing and sure Boeing produces
| commercial aircraft but their position has a lot to do with
| inertia as the accountant leadership of Boeing is doing their
| best to destroy Boeing by nickel-and-diming every aspect with a
| complex web of outsourcing that will fall apart the second
| there is any disruption in international trade.
|
| What China has now is the infrastructure and ecosystem to
| manufacture. You need some tiny screws made of titanium? Well,
| there's a factory that produces that down the street.
| partiallypro wrote:
| > We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing
| people.
|
| I don't think it's just that. We manufacture, but we aren't
| great at the entire chain. China is much better are specialized
| tooling, etc. We have definitely lost a lot of knowledge in
| critical parts of the chain.
| korse wrote:
| I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for
| industrial/mining/agricultural customers.
|
| 'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross
| simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of
| skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business
| growth for years,
|
| The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want
| to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I
| certainly jump through hoops to live in an area well removed
| from the industry I work in but not everyone has this luxury.
|
| The second is psychological. How many kids do you know who are
| ready to commit to a future of 35+ years of factory work in
| their early twenties, even with reasonable pay. This influences
| manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor
| thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when
| there is a high probability they will make a career change
| within 3 years isn't really acceptable.
|
| This is HN, so I don't know if this resonates but as a thought
| experiment, would you take a welding/machine
| operation/technician position for 25 - 45 USD/hr (based on
| experience)? Overtime gets you 1.5 base rate and health
| insurance + dental + 401k is part of the deal. All you need is
| a GED, proof of eligibility to work in the United States and
| the ability to pass a physical + drug screen on hiring. After
| that, no one cares what you do on your own time if you show up,
| do your job and don't get in an industrial accident. Caveat,
| you have move away from anything remotely like a 'cultural
| center' but you do have racial diversity. Also, you will
| probably be able to afford a house, but it won't be anything
| grand or anywhere terribly interesting.
|
| There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've
| posted. Why don't people take them?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of
| the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into
| training employees when there is a high probability they will
| make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable.
|
| We've had decades of large companies laying people off
| (effectively) without warning, and the lessons of "don't
| trust an employer" are... fairly well understood by a lot of
| folks. If I had the promise of working some place for, say,
| 20 years, with a statistically 0% chance of being let go
| because someone wanted to goose the quarterly numbers to get
| their bonus... yeah, I'd have gone for it years ago. Even 25
| years ago, that wasn't much of an option with most companies.
| Lean/Kaizen/JIT were all big movements by the 90s and ability
| to ramp down headcount was a requirement for most companies.
|
| Where does 'skilled' labor for specific types of
| manufacturing processes come from? High school? With slashed
| budgets and worsening teacher/student ratios?
|
| Businesses could step up and create environments that people
| competed to work at - pay decently, invest in their workers
| and community - but that requires a commitment to stick with
| the people and community even in the lean times. And most
| companies don't want to, or more likely simply _can 't_,
| operate that way.
|
| 30 years ago I considered positions like that. Some of my
| family and friends did, and were there for years - decades in
| some cases. I don't think there's many of those left any
| more.
| korse wrote:
| You make a good point about the Lean/Kaizen/JIT
| philosophies + headcount.
|
| I've always been associated with mid-size (< 500
| million/yr) where much of that 'wisdom' sounded good but
| didn't work out so well in practice. Sadly for the
| consulting folks, it isn't actually possible to lean out an
| entire supply chain and still maintain the ability to
| respond to market fluctuations. Being lower on that food
| chain, if you lay off reliable operators/maintenance during
| something like the COVID slump then you are screwed when
| business comes back because you can't rehire/train fast
| enough to fill orders that are needed 'next month'.
| silisili wrote:
| > There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what
| I've posted. Why don't people take them?
|
| It's pay. It's always pay.
|
| You gave a range so I'm guessing the lower end is starting
| out, why take that when nearly every entry level job, with
| far less demand, pays about the same?
|
| Start your pay at $45/hr and people will flood in. If they
| aren't, it's because the factory is too remote for population
| to get to. Put that factory in any mid to large midwestern
| city and it'll be flooded with applicants.
|
| How do I know? About an hour south of Louisville, Amazon
| keeps building giant warehouses and hiring workers, and
| people fight over those jobs. They don't pay half of that.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Preach. How long does it take train someone to get them to
| $45hr level of experience? The truth is that it doesn't.
| Companies love using yoe as an excuse to pay newer workers
| less. Manufacturing is not like software engineering where
| you have to constantly be re-educating yourself.
| rlpb wrote:
| Staff who've been around a while, understand how a
| company operates and can seed that understanding into new
| staff are more valuable to companies. For example: if
| every worker were replaced with an equally skilled worker
| tomorrow a company regardless would not be able to
| function. It therefore makes sense that a senior employee
| can demand a higher wage [than a new starter] even if
| their direct productivity is no different and so a
| gradient in wage for seniority is exactly what one would
| expect to see in a free market.
| sfn42 wrote:
| In Norway skilled trades generally require a 2-year
| education and an apprenticeship. After education you start
| the apprenticeship for which pay starts at like $5-7.5 an
| hour but every 6 months it increases until you finish the 2
| year apprenticeship.
|
| This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical
| plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters,
| construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of
| stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice
| program so it's very cheap to train young workers.
|
| The people who choose this path generally end up pretty
| well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like
| mid to late twenties and make even more later.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Lol, $25hr. McDonald's entry-level wage is $20hr in CA. The
| $5 premium is not enough of an incentive to move to the
| middle of nowhere for a job.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Adjusted for cost of living, this could be double the wage.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Will your pay gradually increase to $45 or more at
| McDonald's?
| TiredGuy wrote:
| Yeah I think I would say you're right to doubt if this
| resonates on HN. You're posing it to an audience which has
| very little GED-level representation. HN more often has
| people who did well in school and are at a much better
| disposition for higher-salary jobs.
|
| I'm not part of the target population but my guess is that a
| large factor has to do with people's tendency to go down the
| path of life that is most similar to the path they've already
| tread. If you grew up in a 'cultural center' it's less of a
| paradigm shift to take the crappy job around the corner
| rather than move somewhere slightly more remote to start a
| new career even if in the long run it could actually lead to
| a more decent life.
| owlstuffing wrote:
| > We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing
| people.
|
| That's a misleading oversimplification. While it's true we
| haven't stopped manufacturing, we did offshore a massive
| portion of it--especially after the Open Door Policy with China
| and subsequent free trade agreements. That shift didn't just
| change where things are made; it fundamentally altered
| corporate incentives. Once production moved overseas, the need
| to invest in domestic labor--training, benefits, long-term
| employment--shrank accordingly.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Yes, I should have said "we just stopped employing
| americans".
| owlstuffing wrote:
| I suppose so, since your use of "we" includes both America
| and China et al.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The problem is that we're talking about "manufacturing" as one
| big homogeneous thing. The US obviously makes a bunch of stuff,
| but it has very limited ability to make lots of kinds of stuff,
| especially in a hostile trade environment.
|
| The US manufacturing sector is about half the size of China's
| in terms of value-add, but it's much smaller by any other
| measure. The US has focussed on high-value verticals like
| aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property
| provides a deep moat and secure profit margins. That kind of
| manufacturing doesn't produce mass employment for semi-skilled
| or unskilled workers, but it does create lots of skilled jobs
| that are very well paid by global standards.
|
| That's entirely rational from an economic perspective, but it
| means that US manufacturing is wholly reliant on imports of
| lower-value materials and commodity parts.
|
| A Chinese manufacturer of machine tools can buy pretty much all
| of their inputs domestically, because China has a really deep
| supply chain. They're really only dependent on imports of a
| handful of raw materials and leading-edge semiconductors. Their
| US counterparts - we're really just talking about Haas and
| Hurco - are assembling a bunch of Chinese-made components onto
| an American casting. To my knowledge, there are no US
| manufacturers of linear rails, ballscrews or servo motors.
|
| If the US wants to start making that stuff, it's faced with two
| very hard problems. Firstly, that it'd have to essentially re-
| run the industrial revolution to build up the capacity to do
| it; secondly, that either a lot of Americans would have to be
| willing to work for very low wages, or lots of Americans would
| have to pay an awful lot more in tax to subsidise those jobs.
|
| It's worth bearing in mind that China is busy moving in the
| opposite direction - they're investing massively in automation
| and moving up the value chain as quickly as possible. They're
| facing the threat of political unrest on a scale they haven't
| seen since 1989, because of the enormous number of highly-
| educated young people who are underemployed in unskilled and
| semi-skilled jobs.
|
| Lots of Americans want to bring back mass manufacturing
| employment, but very few of them actually want to work in a
| factory. You can't resolve that contradiction through sheer
| political will.
| hilux wrote:
| > The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace
|
| Which is about to take a huge nosedive, as both Europe and
| China pull back on buying critical systems from the US. And
| can you blame them?
|
| There's an excellent youtube series (by a Finnish ex-military
| officer) on the likely impact of recent events on US arms
| sales to Europe. They do have choices!
|
| Trump and Musk's threats to invade and blackmail (e.g. by
| cutting off Starlink) will be felt long after they're both
| gone.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I did a tour of a huge beer plant in the US. The 4-5 floors
| where they made the beer had maybe a dozen people total. I
| was told back in the day it would have been thousands of
| workers.
|
| It's not even aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Any
| manufacturing that comes back onshore will not employ massive
| amounts of people.
|
| They will automate it. Which, to be fair, will help employ
| some Americans. But it won't be employing them to work 9-5 in
| a factory. It will be used to employ Americans to build and
| maintain the machines building the product.
| dimal wrote:
| It's shareholder capitalism. Capitalism can be a great thing,
| but shareholder capitalism defines profits as the _only_ reason
| for a corporation to exist. Humans are simply resources to
| extract work or profit from, and destroying the future of the
| country is an unfortunate externality. CEOs are obligated to
| behave like sociopaths. Lying, cheating, stealing, and
| subverting democracy are all good business if it returns value
| to shareholders. We see this over and over again, and wonder
| why our society is so fucked up.
|
| And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even
| if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do
| anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat
| than them and eat their lunch.
| elcritch wrote:
| The notion of shareholder primacy capitalism is one of those
| ideas that seems great on paper, much like communism, but its
| end effects are disastrous.
|
| It seems great cause it's simple and gives a nice simple
| answer to "what's capitalism" and "how to make effective
| companies". That intellectual (existential?) laziness is
| costly long term however.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| I think it's worth specifying even further: wealthy business
| owners don't want to _pay_ what a US employee costs.
|
| Most jobs are wholly unsustainable. You have to job hop every
| couple of years to keep up with inflation because God knows
| you're not getting a raise that keeps you comfortable.
|
| This has led to churn and brain drain and the slow collapse of
| US domestic business.
|
| It's not that people don't want to work, it's that wages have
| fallen so far behind the cost of living that it's financial
| suicide to stay in any one job. Even with all the traps like
| employer sponsored healthcare, most people just can't afford to
| be paid the pittance most businesses are willing to pay.
|
| This is a deep societal illness in the US. We've glorified and
| deified the concept of greed to the point where even talking
| about income inequality and the unimaginable concentration of
| wealth is just anathema. It's seeped into the everyday
| consciousness in the form of "I'm the only one that matters,
| fuck absolutely everyone else"
|
| I genuinely believe that America will never, ever recover until
| we address this. We will always be this sick and broken country
| until the state entirely collapses or we get our shit together
| and address income inequality.
|
| I have some real serious doubts that we'll ever get there, but
| it's easy to be pessimistic.
| akircher wrote:
| The USA is number 1 in median disposable income at purchasing
| price parity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_househ
| old_and_per_c...
|
| This makes me think that it at least as much to do with high
| (unrealistic?) employee expectations as business stinginess.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Most companies that do manufacturing in USA are oriented to
| making business-to-business products, where high margins can be
| achieved.
|
| As an European, there have been many decades since the last
| time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product
| that is intended to be sold to individuals.
|
| There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA,
| e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in
| USA.
|
| When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made
| in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.
| cashsterling wrote:
| 100% agree with you!
|
| I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most
| of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials,
| aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want
| to be.
|
| One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views
| manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and
| there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to
| increase shareholder value.
|
| So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that
| increases the cost of their cost centers:
|
| - employee training & development? hell with that.
|
| - Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing?
| Why? isn't everything mostly automated?
|
| - manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show
| a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and,
| then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched
| internal manufacturing development investments where we
| conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the
| projects still didn't get funded.
|
| There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business
| people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total
| cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs.
| outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that
| MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations
| really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.
|
| Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely
| increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would
| be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate
| between difficulty and speed.
| 6510 wrote:
| You could simply make taxes scale inversely with the number
| of employees. Make the tax scale with a lack of career path.
| Even more tax if you don't have a system to measure and
| reward performance. More tax for lack of R&D. They don't have
| to be huge amounts, just enough for the MBA to stfu.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 7. Uncertainty seems overlooked these days. The job of
| politicians is to make people and businesses dare. Making people
| dare getting an expensive education or starting a business or
| hiring your first employee or whatever it might be. What that
| requires will vary (if it's a social security system or a tax
| break for new companies or whatever). But something it _always_
| requires is trust in the stability. That the calculus for an
| investment is valid over N years. That laws or taxes don 't swing
| wildly with political cycles.
| mlinhares wrote:
| That has been the bane of brazil for decades, every politician,
| at every level, undoes or stops whatever the previous
| politician was doing so there's absolutely no guarantee what
| you're doing today will still work tomorrow.
|
| Its a terrible state and situation to invest in a business
| doesn't benefit anyone. My hometown had a large cultural center
| built by the mayor, he couldn't run for reelection again, new
| mayor is elected, completely ignores the whole thing was built
| and lets it rot. Everything is only done for an election cycle,
| the next cycle could bring something else entirely.
|
| Its terrible to live in a place like this, Americans have no
| idea how bad this is going to be for the country.
| e40 wrote:
| For decades one political party has fomented this by pushing
| disdain for intellectuals and experts and the effectiveness
| of government itself.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Not America, Trump
| dghughes wrote:
| Even if you guys did rebuild e.g. textile factories down there in
| crazy land you're not going to pay workers $300/month to be able
| to compete globally. Nobody wants to pay $1,000 for a pair of
| underwear.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| Tariffs don't help you compete globally -- they're about
| disadvantaging the global in favor of the local.
|
| Someone may be able to pay workers $300/month and make them
| work the "996 working hour system"[1], but if they then have to
| mark up the end product by 100%, the disparity between local
| and global price to consumers narrows.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
| ggerules wrote:
| Extremely well written!
|
| I agree with just about everything in the blog post, except, the
| underlying Michael Jordan baseball analogy example. Does the
| analogy hold if we swap Michael Jordan for let's say... Bo
| Jackson? He really was very good at a number of sports before his
| hip injury.
| newsclues wrote:
| Difficult sure, but the economic incentives and national security
| implications will make the difficult task possible
| anon7000 wrote:
| This article was a really interesting take on this too:
| https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/11/america-is-missing-the-n...
|
| The tldr of that post is: - To be really good at making robots,
| you need to iterate fast
|
| - To iterate fast, you need all component manufacturers nearby
| (or you'll be wasting weeks shipping parts from somewhere else)
|
| - To be really competitive at manufacturing, you need to be good
| at robotics.
|
| - If you're missing all of these pieces, it will be hard to catch
| up with (say) China, which has been exponentially growing in
| every possible aspect of manufacturing for decades. Not only do
| we not have strong manufacturing, but we don't have strong
| robotics companies, don't have many of our own robotics
| components companies, and don't even have much in terms of raw
| materials. Whereas China has been investing heavily in _every
| single one_ of these areas.
|
| Bringing manufacturing back means investing in all aspects of the
| supply chains which lead to technical innovation in
| manufacturing, which is really hard to do when the supply chain
| is set up to pull from our current competitor.
| danvoell wrote:
| "incentivize, subsidize" - yes. There should be less incentives
| and tax breaks for "holding an asset" and more incentives for
| making things that improve human lives. Most of the laws are set
| by the incumbents who stand to lose what they have built and who
| have the money to pay the lawyers to set the tax code. Real
| estate should not get incentives unless its getting someone in a
| home. Private equity, same. Venture capital, after a certain
| point, same. If you are worth a bazillian dollars, same. A lawyer
| with balls needs to take on the tax code. I'm kind of hoping the
| whole Harvard escapade awakens a few legal idealists out there.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Written when the tariff on Chinese phones was only 54% and later
| 10%.
|
| Ah, those were the days.
| elif wrote:
| It really is starting to bother me when people attribute a
| deceptive narrative crafted by one individual to "American
| thinking" as if there was even a lone individual in this country
| who was earnestly believing a global trade war would solve a non
| existent trade problem before the narrative became convenient to
| our dictator
| ethagknight wrote:
| This article is very goofy. America manufactures very complicated
| things. Building an iPhone at scale is not complicated.
|
| 1- Tariffs will bring some manufacturing back to the US. The
| before/after tariff pricing is ficiton- price points cannot
| simply be doubled, pricing is extremely complicated and
| sensitive, Apple would have already had the iPhone set at $616 if
| they believed that was an attainable price for the volume.
|
| 2- Weak industrial supply chain- we have an incredible supply
| chain and industry can hop right on. Trains, planes, and
| automobiles galore. Extremely adaptive and we have plenty of room
| to expand. Auto manufacturers dont seem to mind building in the
| US, slightly more complicated than the toys that Molson sells.
|
| 3- We dont know how to make it: some things sure, most things:
| yes we do. We do have some additional capacity building required
| but this is not some crazy challenge. The beautiful thing about
| it is that, for the stuff we cant make easily, we can just pay
| the tax and keep in motion. It becomes a simple optimization
| calculation.
|
| 4- effective cost of labor- this is a challenge for sure but it
| has significant upside implications for American labor and the
| American lower and middle class. Again, this is a simple
| optimization. He points to all the fraud in the American system
| and the slave-like conditions of the Chinese system as if those
| are things things that shouldn't be addressed / barriers to entry
| for US? US needs lots of improvements that should be addressed
| not matter what.
|
| 5- Infrastructure- I seriously doubt the electricity stats but
| accepting it at face value, we have endless gas and sunlight in
| the west, US can adapt here as well. China notably does NOT have
| endless gas supplies.
|
| 6- Made in America will take time- OK? I am here for it!
|
| 7- Uncertainty- I would love to see them permanent. But locking
| in some wins from 4 years of America-first, modernized
| manufacturing base will go a long way.
|
| 8- Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing- why is that
| something you get to declare and presume? I think Americans will
| love job opportunities.
|
| 9- The labor does exist, we are just paying them to not work.
| it's an epidemic and circular problem. We also dont have jobs to
| put low skilled workers to work with.
|
| And so on...
| calebm wrote:
| > And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric.
|
| This.
| bostonwalker wrote:
| > And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of
| saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say
| they'll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and
| 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a
| presidential decree
|
| This is the big difference between a tariff regime that is
| _credible_ in such a way that the business community can plan
| investment around it, and the current one that has mostly just
| caused chaos and confusion.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| > Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they're
| physically faster with their hands; they can do things that
| American labor can't. It's years of accumulated skill, but it's
| also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education
| that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no
| people who are too fat to work. The workers don't storm off
| midshift, never to return to their job. You don't have people who
| insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their
| disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory
| floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
|
| he knows a lot about manufacturing but weirdly not much about
| labor. very unsubstantiated, derogatory comment.
|
| it gets worse!
|
| > In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The
| workers don't storm off midshift, never to return to their job.
| You don't have people who insist on being paid in cash so that
| they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics
| on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
|
| > Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each
| other and their manager. They don't take 30 minute bathroom
| breaks on company time. They don't often quit because their out-
| of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and
| now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don't
| disappear because they've gone on meth benders. And they don't
| fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday
| got converted into pills.
|
| > And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to
| be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and
| read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American
| workforce cannot do that.
|
| like the fuck? where are your sources? this sounds like some
| ignorant shit to say
| monetus wrote:
| It is extraordinarily malicious, and reminds me of Michael
| Richards.
| beachtaxidriver wrote:
| Lol that was my reaction too, this guy is an asshole. He should
| just leave.
| igravious wrote:
| Basically [Inside Business
| China](https://www.youtube.com/@Inside_China_Business) in a blog
| post.
| tobir wrote:
| The litigiousness point should have been at the top of the list.
| You can build roadways, but if you constantly have stories in the
| news of people striking it rich by suing someone, and half the
| billboards you see in your town is of people telling you they'll
| help you do it, then it's going to be extremely expensive to
| employ folks.
|
| It'll be easier to teach folks hard work, it's very difficult to
| change a culture when 1. A huge sector of our legal system geared
| towards it 2. People can easily get rich off of it.
| superqd wrote:
| The most fundamental problem in the U.S. is this: Infinite Growth
| Capitalism
|
| The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political
| and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the
| expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on
| investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize
| the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth
| above all else crushes and consumes everything.
|
| Increasing local manufacturing will only create more
| opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that
| literally hates their existence.
|
| A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are
| supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives
| to simply be tolerated and disposable?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-17 23:02 UTC)