[HN Gopher] America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a fact...
___________________________________________________________________
America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
Author : voxleone
Score : 453 points
Date : 2025-10-13 14:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| nashashmi wrote:
| I am perturbed by the power consumption of these behemoths
| causing high market prices for everyone.
| pengaru wrote:
| We've been through this before; "history may not repeat itself
| but it certainly rhymes":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg
| martinclayton wrote:
| https://archive.is/TY950
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial
| robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already
| has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't
| that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the
| fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You're right. I
| made a bad inference and defended it. That's on me." We don't
| want that behavior on the assembly line.
| vkou wrote:
| What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class,
| instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it,
| and it's not going to be coming back.
|
| It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration,
| except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or
| pay taxes.
| smt88 wrote:
| Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their
| spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior
| shakes out and for interest rates to drop.
|
| AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
| ummonk wrote:
| Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce
| reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high
| interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up
| the slack.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing
| without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who
| can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance,
| while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are
| shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are
| real, and will build real things.
|
| _Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025
|
| _Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf]_ -
| https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China...
| - May 5th, 2025
|
| _ASPI's two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of
| long-term research investment_ -
| https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec...
| - August 28th, 2024
|
| > Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields
| spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial
| intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing,
| advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech
| Tracker's dataset has been expanded and updated from five years
| of data (previously, 2018-2022) to 21 years of data
| (2003-2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in
| research leadership over the past two decades towards large
| economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China's exceptional
| gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years
| from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years
| (2019-2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64
| technologies in 2003-2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of
| 64 technologies in 2019-2023, increasing its lead from our
| rankings last year (2018-2022), where it was leading in 52
| technologies.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be
| backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so
| market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing
| that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in
| addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI
| is Too Big to Fail.
| Bratmon wrote:
| This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to
| people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field
| of robotics.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
| ReliantGuyZ wrote:
| I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech
| advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better
| manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so
| interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow
| arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied
| work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable
| answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about
| manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine
| that follows a _tiny_ instruction set (at least in comparison
| to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the
| execution _every time_. This seems to me like the complete
| opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that
| Wall Street are cheering.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I am not an expert in this, and don't necessarily believe it.
| But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation
| requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And
| that much of the factory automation that hasn't happened is
| because it's too costly to get to that level of specificity
| in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be
| cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence
| you could get around those constraints.
|
| The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the
| most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight
| recognition.
| crote wrote:
| > existing manufacturing automation requires that
| specificity due to technical constraints
|
| Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing
| automation is built around repetitive motions because an
| assembly line is making _multiples of the same product_.
| Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is
| completely pointless.
|
| One-off manufacturing _can_ to a certain extent be
| automated. We 're already seeing that with things like 3D
| printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in
| most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread
| generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is
| _always_ going to be have significantly lower per-unit
| costs than ordering 1, and if you 're ordering 1000 you can
| probably afford a human spending some time on setting up
| robots or optimizing the design for existing setups.
|
| There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom
| can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead
| to a manufacturing revolution.
| buu700 wrote:
| I think you could make an analogy to the difference
| between ASICs and general-purpose CPUs. ASICs are great,
| but CPUs have flexibility and massive economies of scale.
| Similarly, a specialized machine might be more efficient
| than a humanoid robot at a particular task, but advanced
| humanoid robots could theoretically do all the tasks and
| as a result would likely end up being manufactured in
| very high volume.
|
| Imagine a future where any hardware startup could design
| and provision an assembly line as easily and cheaply as
| software startups today use cloud computing. Maybe after
| a certain scale it becomes economical to consider
| replacing steps of the manufacturing process with "ASIC"
| solutions, but maybe there'd be a long tail of things
| which would continue to remain best served by general-
| purpose robots indefinitely.
| beeflet wrote:
| What if everything in the economy could be efficiently
| produced through one-off manufacturing methods? This is
| something I have been thinking about a lot lately as i've
| been working on 3d printing/CNC/aluminum casting.
|
| It avoids the need for any sort of parts shipping, and
| can be easily retooled to make war machines in a time of
| emergency (which is one of the motivations to bring back
| american manufacturing).
|
| The main problem with this is that you still need
| surface-mount components if you are going to make PCBs,
| and you still need magnets to make motors, etc.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I've heard that the general transformer architecture ( _not_
| specifically LLMs, which imply a _language_ model, but
| applied to sensory perceptions and outputting motor commands)
| has actually been fairly successful when applied to robotics.
| You want your overall assembly line to have a tiny,
| repeatable instruction set, but inside each of those
| individual instructions is oftentimes a complex motion that
| 's very dependent upon chaotic physical realities. Think of
| being able to orient a part or deal with a stuck bolt, for
| example. AI Transformers potentially would allow us to
| replace several steps in the assembly that currently require
| human workers with robots, and that in turn makes the rest of
| the assembly much more reproducible (and cheaper).
|
| Training these models takes a bunch more time, because you
| first need to build special hardware that allows a human to
| do these motions while having a computer record all the
| sensor inputs and outputs, and then you need to have the
| human do them a few thousand times, while LLMs just scrape
| all the content on the Internet. But it's potentially a lot
| more impactful, because it allows robots to impact the
| physical world and not just the printed word.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds
| because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and
| check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding
| acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "pass",
| generate another one until it does. Then grade according to
| "efficiency" metrics and feed it back in.
|
| As long as you do that, the penalty for a a slop-based
| fuckup is just a less efficient toolpath.
| arcbyte wrote:
| Manufacturing robotics is all about movement. All movement
| exists on a spectrum of difficulty and context needed to
| perform. For instance, welding the steel plates together in
| an empty and repeatable consistent 3d space is now on the
| lower end of difficulty. Navigating through a partially
| manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash
| assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly
| difficult for a robot to do.
|
| The more we can bring down all the difficulty of all these
| processes, the more we can accelerate manufacturing locally.
| cvz wrote:
| That's at odds with everything I know about manufacturing
| robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The
| complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the
| robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust
| that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of
| specific features. That is by design, not because (or at
| least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning
| its own motion. The whole system is designed to be
| predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you
| need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
| bluGill wrote:
| > The whole system is designed to be predictable instead
| of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the
| same thing millions of times.
|
| That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great
| and easy when you will do the same thing millions of
| times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the
| robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is
| $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When
| you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a
| lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are
| "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".
|
| Costs have been going down. In high school I took the
| class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I
| took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though
| I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly
| recommend even though it was only for fun). These days
| almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even
| aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable
| programming language. (it probably isn't)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| And yet China already has 100% automated vehicle production
| lines.
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-
| western-...
| crote wrote:
| > Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab
| to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of
| context and is incredibly difficult for a robot to do.
|
| Not really. The robots are programmed by having a human
| manually guide it, so the robot itself doesn't really have
| to do any navigation - it just has to follow a predefined
| path.
|
| Want to install different variants of dash components?
| Split it up into methods and have the robot return to a
| neutral position after each method. You're _literally_
| programming it.
| credit_guy wrote:
| That's not how the LLMs should be used in manufacturing. It
| is still the current assembly lines robots that will do that.
| LLMs can be used by the humans who design the automation
| workflow, as coding assistants. That can lower the breakeven
| number of items that can be automated. Maybe if today it only
| makes sense to automate the manufacturing of a widget only if
| you can sell more than 100000 of those widgets, then with LLM
| assistance that number can be reduced to 1000. Whenever you
| have a 10x improvement of something, there's scope for a
| mini-revolution to happen.
| smileson2 wrote:
| I'm not even clear on what people mean when they say 'AI'
| anymore
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > factories with no humans on the assembly line.
|
| Not an American myself, but why should that be good for
| ordinary American citizens?
|
| Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value
| of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?
| smileson2 wrote:
| we're talking about what really matters here, the investors
| bluGill wrote:
| This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have
| to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the
| benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it
| is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should
| be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little
| labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to
| do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who
| are incapable of doing something else)
|
| There is the constant argument that what when machines do
| everything. We are not there yet, and so far there is no
| reason to think we will be anytime soon.
| crote wrote:
| > Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass
| produced with little labor costs.
|
| If only. In reality they'll be as expensive as they can
| make them without completely killing sales, just like they
| are right now.
| scared_together wrote:
| > The only ones who lose are those who are want to do
| boring work instead of something creative.
|
| Aren't the creative jobs also being taken by LLMs and image
| generators?
| vkou wrote:
| > This is great for ordinary Americans.
|
| If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good
| for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the
| boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast
| amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services.
|
| The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2]
| do the boring immigrant jobs.
|
| AI can't just handwave all this shit away because
| 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns
| or not, there's a _massive_ backlash from various flavors
| of nativists about jobs. Why isn 't it directed at all of
| these pie in the sky AI promises?
|
| ---
|
| [1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What
| difference does it make to me _where_ a factory is located,
| when that factory doesn 't employ me or my neighbours? The
| people collecting profits from it aren't going to share
| them with us.
|
| [2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job?
| Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
| bluGill wrote:
| Unrestricted immigration is good - they just want a
| 'boogyman' to blame unrelated problems on.
| nxm wrote:
| Sarcasm much I hope
| bluGill wrote:
| The truth. If you think otherwise you have been mislead
| by people who have been good at pushing a narrative and
| never been challenged.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > The only ones who lose are those who are want to do
| boring work instead of something creative.
|
| Yes! I'm pretty sure the guy working his ass of at the
| factory does so because brain surgeon doesn't pay enough...
|
| Is this the next version of "trickle down economics"?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an
| entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic
| welders online and working.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech
| executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to
| fault the journalists specifically.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced
| cruise control as "full self-driving".
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own
| investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and
| events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking
| points of executives, then they're producing
| advertisements, not journalism.
| bluGill wrote:
| Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in
| the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being
| more money in sensationalist reporting (My American
| history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I
| have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will
| as well) there has never been much.
| seydor wrote:
| Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be
| the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western
| world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
|
| I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs
| related to power over people, where you can always slack
| instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
| jerlam wrote:
| Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be
| built in countries that struggle to build and run normal
| factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
| starky wrote:
| This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively
| on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural
| networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a
| lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are
| still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough
| to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers
| recently when they asked how their factory compared to others,
| "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm
| choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest,
| quickest, and with high quality."
| lnsru wrote:
| Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products
| built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a
| small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most
| can't. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying
| at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole
| week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
| thaack wrote:
| > Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at
| conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
| I work in a factory and see this daily.
|
| My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US.
| This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's
| appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very
| small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the
| factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If they're losing employees, then they must not have that
| much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to
| work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job
| being monotonous...
| stouset wrote:
| The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside
| that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to
| attract talent.
|
| Paying higher wages _might_ help retain employees (or not!
| there are jobs people just won't keep doing no matter the
| pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point
| where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also
| might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep
| prices low.
| snozolli wrote:
| _there are jobs people just won't keep doing no matter
| the pay_
|
| I do not believe this common claim.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Theoretically, an utterly horrible job with great pay
| would attract a lot of workers who do it for some time to
| get a financial boost before moving on.
| stouset wrote:
| Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where
| more people will decide to do some job. But for
| _practical_ purposes the pay needs to be in line with
| still being able to price your products competitively in
| a global marketplace.
|
| Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the
| needle all that much on a job that's backbreaking,
| monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth.
| Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due
| to your location.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where
| more people will decide to do some job_
|
| Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer.
| Everyone wants something for nothing.
|
| The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited,
| immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do
| manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They
| took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the
| economics have.
|
| As for your last paragraph, the oil fields have been able
| to meet their need for employees for the most part, and
| that ticks every one of your undesirable factors. So what
| gets workers there? Pay.
| chongli wrote:
| You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs
| with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support
| a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through
| college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the
| Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole
| family, all on the salary of a high school educated
| factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You'd
| have to pay factory workers well into six figures for a
| lifestyle like that.
|
| What happened? Cost disease [1]. All of the big ticket
| things in that lifestyle (except for the car) skyrocketed
| in price relative to inflation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
| nradov wrote:
| That was never the reality for most factory workers.
| Usually the car was cramped with a single bathroom, the
| wife picked up some part-time work, most vacations were
| road trips to go camping, and not all the kids went to
| college. Inflation and growing income inequality are
| legitimate problems but let's not paint an unrealistic
| picture of "the good old days".
| ponector wrote:
| Obviously it was only for white people. And for sure not
| a regular factory worker who is doing simple tasks. Maybe
| floor manager...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Not a sprinter van clearly if it was cramped with a
| single bathroom.
| nradov wrote:
| Whoops too late to edit I meant house.
| nradov wrote:
| Pay, plus a willingness to hire workers who might not be
| tolerated in other jobs due to background check issues or
| HR policy violations. (I am not claiming this is
| necessarily a bad thing.)
| Pulcinella wrote:
| We need actual data to decide how significant is
| "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses
| complaining no one wants to work for "significantly"
| higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
| stouset wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is a ridiculous take. $0.05/hr is $104
| a year for a full-time job. Zero people are going to have
| that be the tipping point for them to take on a
| monotonous, often physically draining job that they'd
| otherwise turn down.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Yes that is my point. What business owners consider
| "significant" and what sane people consider significant
| are often quite different.
| stouset wrote:
| I apologize, I misread this and thought you were
| suggesting that $0.05 _was_ significant.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You underestimate the low end of the labor market. People
| may not jump for a nickel, but they absolutely will for
| $0.25-0.30.
| lenkite wrote:
| A lot of folks like repeatable, monotonous jobs. They can
| loose themselves in a trance doing the same thing for
| hours.
|
| The problem is that American bosses will never hire these
| kind of people. They can never pass the interview game.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Except you can't just zone away in a factory job. Workers
| need to pay attention if they don't like injuries. It the
| job doesn't need much skill, it doesn't necessarily mean
| it's easy or safe.
| gaindustries wrote:
| > The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the
| factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
|
| Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest
| possible pay + benefits is really pathetic.
|
| And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume
| full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no
| health insurance.
|
| On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a
| nightmare to work for.
| thaack wrote:
| It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering
| 100% of health insurance premiums.
| gaindustries wrote:
| There's somethhing you're not telling us or not being
| honest about.
| flybrand wrote:
| It's common. People would rather work in a Wal-Mart as it
| is more social and less demanding. The physical space is
| nicer.
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| It's probably the hours. A lower middle class income is
| not worth losing my every waking hour over.
| jordanb wrote:
| Decent chance given that it's a plastics plant probably not
| unionized and probably in a red state that the air is not
| healthy to breathe.
| kelipso wrote:
| Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the
| Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus,
| OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute
| monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right
| shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated
| but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Marysville
| honkostani wrote:
| Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice
| commands and augmented reality.. i would love something
| almost automate-able while doing something that also needs
| higher brain functions.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the
| factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
|
| Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs
| and collect applications?
|
| Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-
| trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
|
| Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic
| job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong
| zip code.
|
| Seen but never hired: _Fully_ qualified people who are awful
| at job interviews.
| thaack wrote:
| I have no involvement with the plant directly. My
| understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good
| graces with local probation officers & craigslist
| classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my
| understanding.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > the best luck they had was getting in good graces with
| local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.
|
| I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may
| not have more-granular info than this.
|
| But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to
| utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was
| no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely
| eyeballs.
| phillyboy82 wrote:
| Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies
| when they need X number of low level employees or temps
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies
|
| Son #1 got employed there early but it turned out that a
| small group had a deal with management and got 100% of
| the work. New hires went out on one job immediately and
| then never again.
| phillyboy82 wrote:
| Also they'll do local job fairs on site, at local
| community colleges. You'd be surprised how many people
| still listen to FM in their car so ads go up there too
| locally.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Uh... The newspaper.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't understand why Craigslist is being framed as a
| some step down here (while probation clearly is).
| Craiglist is exactly where you instantly have many eyes
| on your ad and people will send in resumes without the
| bullshit filtering of the various portals.
|
| Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be
| overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job
| realistically, you'll get people realistically interested
| in your job.
| joenot443 wrote:
| > There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the
| most likely eyeballs
|
| Bit of an aside, but if anyone else is in this position
| and trying to reach the eyeballs of jobseekers who aren't
| actively using portals, I really can't recommend local
| Facebook groups enough.
|
| A post from a real account (not the business) saying
| "Gizmo Plastics are hiring line workers for $18/h, anyone
| interested?" will get some guaranteed traction. In my
| small town Ontario groups, I've never seen a post looking
| for laborers go ignored.
| i80and wrote:
| > job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history
| (1st time job seekers).
|
| It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of
| putting up as many catch-22's as we can.
| keiferski wrote:
| I guess most of these jobs don't allow for music or YouTube
| to be used during work?
|
| I'm just thinking that people already spend a lot of time
| just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch
| YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn't be as
| unpopular.
| scns wrote:
| Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching
| YouTube though?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah I guess it's probably not realistic for most factory
| jobs. I am just thinking that "get paid $20 an hour to do
| a simple task and watch YouTube/listen to music" is
| actually kind of appealing to many people.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This is a lot of security guard and front desk jobs. if a
| boss doesn't like smartphones on the job, I know people
| who read books or knit between tasks.
| ta1243 wrote:
| When I was 18 I got paid below minimum wage to sit in my
| car delivering pizzas while listening to the radio. Far
| better than the higher paid shop job I tried at
| university.
|
| Today with not just unlimited music (with no adverts),
| but the vast amounts of audio books you can listen to,
| it's even more appealing for people with limited
| financial obligations.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Watching YouTube though?
|
| Yeah, I can't make that work. Only my most routine work
| can be done with the TV on (and providing it's my 5th
| rewatch).
| riffraff wrote:
| It's a matter of habit and personal traits.
|
| I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still
| sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some
| anime or tv show.
|
| You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and
| switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the
| video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just
| don't care.
|
| I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met
| more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare.
| Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Having worked at a very simple factory job that involved
| hot-pressing plastic-aluminium film into shapes, yeah,
| that would end badly. It's unskilled job, that doesn't
| mean it's mindless.
|
| If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,..
| or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
| rgblambda wrote:
| From my limited experience working in a factory
| environment, listening to music can be a real workplace
| safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts
| or coworkers shouting warnings.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Do you hire deaf people?
|
| I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing
| earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like
| pretty funny.
| kube-system wrote:
| US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person
| and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe
| for them to do their job.
|
| US employers are not legally required to make
| accommodations for people who simply want to listen to
| music at work.
|
| Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening
| (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for
| emergency vehicles.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBDPno
| lmm wrote:
| > US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person
| and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe
| for them to do their job.
|
| > US employers are not legally required to make
| accommodations for people who simply want to listen to
| music at work.
|
| So it would be reasonably possible, but since it's not
| legally required they'd rather make their workers
| miserable for no benefit, and then complain how difficult
| it is to hire people?
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, just because an employer can make reasonable
| accommodations for one or a few deaf people, doesn't
| necessarily mean that it would be reasonable or safe for
| the entire organization to operate in the same way. A
| "reasonable accommodation" could be something like a
| modified job role. E.g. you might move someone from a
| role that can't safely be done while deaf into a role
| that they could do. That's something that you could do
| for one or a couple of people, but you couldn't do for
| everybody.
|
| I do agree with the sentiment that employers should take
| more efforts to make their jobs enjoyable to do. But some
| job sites have things that can kill people. The reason
| that heavy machinery beeps when it backs up is because
| people died at work before it did.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| If you have even the slightest amount of situational
| awareness sound deadening or infotainment gizmos will not
| render you unaware of an approaching emergency vehicle.
| Scan your mirrors, scan your instruments, scan the
| horizon, repeat. The problem is unqualified, uneducated
| drivers.
| kube-system wrote:
| Sound is great because it does not require line of sight.
| There's a reason why emergency vehicles have both lights
| and sirens, and it isn't because all of them have
| unnecessary equipment.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Agreed, but the root cause of the issue the emergency
| vehicle operator are noticing isn't sound deadening or
| infotainment gizmos, it's inattentive distracted drivers.
| Probably playing with their cell phones instead of
| driving. Similarly, in a manufacturing situation playing
| with your phone or watching tv is likely to cause
| problems. Inattention and inability to focus on the job
| is the problem. You can't solve that with technology, but
| you can with education.
| kube-system wrote:
| Distracted driving is certainly a problem.
|
| But, have you ever driven a quiet vehicle in an urban
| area where there are plenty of objects to block your line
| of sight? It is quite easy for a emergency vehicle to
| sneak up on you in a modern vehicle _even when you are
| paying attention_.
|
| It's really a simple relationship -- if you block sound,
| it makes it harder to hear things.
|
| This is exactly the reason why newer emergency vehicles
| have things like rumbler sirens. These sirens don't do
| anything to make people more attentive, but what they do
| is generate frequencies that are more likely to penetrate
| into modern vehicles.
| motorest wrote:
| > Do you hire deaf people?
|
| I think you may start to understand the requirement once
| you realize the issue is where attention is and is not
| placed, instead of what sense is being exercised.
|
| I mean, think about it. The recommendation was to consume
| forms of entertainment. In the factory I worked, there
| was a mandatory safety rule where you were required to
| establish eye contact with forklift drivers. Why is that
| a requirement?
| djtango wrote:
| Funny - eye contact is my "secret" to crossing the road
| in places like south east asia
| EasyMark wrote:
| that's not a problem if the people who will be
| interacting with fork lifts stay in designated areas as
| do the forklift operators. Nothing is ever going to b 0%
| chance of an accident but simply adhering to basic rules
| should keep people on an assembly line listening to
| spotify from taking a forklift to the knee. Have you ever
| worked on a factory floor at all? Sure some positions
| would be impossible but not for 80-90% of them.
| rgblambda wrote:
| In the factory floor I previously worked in, you needed
| to cross the forklift's domain to go to the bathroom and
| break room. This involved using exits also used by the
| forklift. You needed to hear it coming.
|
| Even setting aside the forklift, having music playing
| reduces your ability to hear a coworker shout "Help, my
| clothes are caught on the line. Push the emergency stop".
| bluGill wrote:
| Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud
| enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be
| able to hear the safety signals though.
|
| YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work
| when the line moves the next part to you. There are also
| safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the
| various hazards which are always there.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where
| watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the
| roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit
| that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer
| which causes many bigger headaches.
|
| I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year.
| Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest
| challenge. The manager for the promotional materials
| company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has
| loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a
| couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they
| (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super
| strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the
| mentality was far different than when he started in the
| workforce.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| He just needs to wait a decade, the Chinese workers will
| be retiring and will not be replaced. Entire product
| segments probably just go away or the inflation raises
| the table such that the managers situation now is the
| norm. Problem solved.
| cpursley wrote:
| You seem obsessed with the "China population collapse"
| propaganda (which is put out by the usual suspects, btw).
| Anyways, I hate to break it to you, but this is also the
| trend throughout the entire Western world. Besides,
| automation and AI is going offset a lot of those worker
| losses (which is actually a win). And in 20 years the
| Chinese will still be giving birth to as many if not more
| people than the entire combine West.
| IsTom wrote:
| That's true that West has population decline as well, but
| due to 1 child policy the decline in China is going to be
| much steeper.
| cpursley wrote:
| I think mainly on the pensions side of things, and
| perhaps a lot of empty real estate and infra maintenance
| issues. But they will still be graduating more engineers
| than the West combined and in general, a better educated
| and more socially cohesive workforce. I think they are
| gonna be just fine, even if we don't like their political
| system (which will likely evolve, anyways).
| baq wrote:
| China demographics are disastrous, this is not
| propaganda, it's facts. That doesn't mean western aren't
| disastrous.
|
| I agree it won't matter too much, they'll automate more
| so they won't need this many people.
| cpursley wrote:
| So how is that a disaster? Wasn't one of the big concerns
| a decade or go about over population? This means less
| agriculture required, more land for nature, less
| pollution, fewer energy needs, etc.
| baq wrote:
| It's a disaster for China's economy in the long term
| unless they automate themselves, which they'll very much
| want to do. It isn't a disaster for the natural ecosystem
| obviously.
| cpursley wrote:
| Want to do? They're doing it now, and are ahead of the
| west in some processes already. It's a made up concern
| because they are a geopolitical rival. And their economy
| is already a major success story; they've lifted
| something like 800 million people out of abject poverty
| in the last 25 years.
| baq wrote:
| I don't disagree about the economic outcome today, but I
| don't understand how you can say that demographics issues
| are made up - either they are made up in the west, too,
| or they aren't. Nobody knows what will happen in the next
| 25 years, maybe nothing much, maybe we'll all be replaced
| by humanoid robots in the west, in the east and in the
| third world, too.
| cpursley wrote:
| They are made up in sense of it being some kind huge
| pending disaster for China. Also, trends can reverse with
| the right policies.
| baq wrote:
| The disaster is a classic train wreck in super slow
| motion best proxied by 30-year government bond yield,
| currently the highest on the curve at 2.27.
| cpursley wrote:
| Meh, the same usual suspects doing the predicting have
| been wildly wrong on nearly all things China for the past
| 30 years.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| Obviously, the "higher pay and significantly better benefits"
| are not actually significantly better. I'd rather we address
| that than just exploit some other workers overseas where
| they're out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like
| tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but
| also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people
| doing the work, not just the owners.
|
| Speaking of which, I don't really know your business, but a
| post starting with "my family owns a business" and ending
| with "we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them
| more" (with no specificity as to how much more).... This
| really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not
| the overall market.
| phillyboy82 wrote:
| Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so
| much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
|
| I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages
| are good, especially after the last contract, but we still
| get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an
| hour straight before their break or task switch.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| finally a positive framing on social media addiction
| antonvs wrote:
| "Get addicted to this phone, son, or you'll end up
| working in a factory!"
| denkmoon wrote:
| Then long hours of repetitive labor are a skill which
| needs to be attracted for.
| dangus wrote:
| So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or
| social media?
|
| UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are
| competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool.
| All the good candidates left your manufacturing town
| already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW
| wages aren't really much to write home about.
|
| For the last multiple decades graduating students have
| been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it
| makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when
| they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay
| and actually be in a job market that's growing over time
| rather than shrinking.
|
| UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that
| are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and
| you're under constant threat of plant closures or the
| shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and
| South Carolina.
|
| And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural
| rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live
| your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.
|
| A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or
| higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are
| looking at states/counties that have the major population
| centers. The county map makes it look like basically
| every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree
| attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having
| some counties with over 60% attainment.
|
| Almost 30% of Americans _work remotely_ at least some
| time during the week.
|
| So, basically half of the urbanized population has better
| options than working in a factory.
|
| In China, working a factory is being compared to a much
| worse prior standard of living that was much more recent.
| Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence
| farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of
| widespread poverty in at least 100 years.
| antonvs wrote:
| > we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a
| car for an hour straight before their break or task
| switch.
|
| That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to
| be able to do work like that, and especially to get
| satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm not the OP. Heavy labor is... a lot of work. It's rough
| in the body and some people aren't cut for it.
|
| In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a
| farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They'd hire 4
| crews of 4 guys each and we'd lose about half through the
| summer. They were great family to work for, but the work
| was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for
| $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former
| coworkers did.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| That just tells me that the pay was bad for the job.
|
| If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h
| and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more
| but not better.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| They wrote per hour rates though, it is just more
| difficult per hour
| yibg wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic
| manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective
| way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a
| overall small proportion of the population and ought to be
| (we probably don't want most people to be doing
| manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on
| everyone and a regressive one at that.
|
| I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently
| problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course
| exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part
| of offshoring manufacturing).
|
| Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less,
| but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in
| the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in
| places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically
| provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
|
| Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce
| higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living
| places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
| teyc wrote:
| why does this arbitrage exist? Why is the cost of energy,
| the fundamental input into every economy, cheaper in
| Asia? Tractors consume fuel, fertilisers do too. Human
| labour is the least efficient at converting fuel into
| energy. When you dig a little deeper, you'd find an
| economy structured around keeping rentiers away from the
| basics: housing, energy and food.
| yibg wrote:
| Energy doesn't come from just raw materials. It takes
| extraction, refinement, transportation etc in the case of
| petroleum, or manufacturing, installation etc in the case
| of wind and solar.
|
| If you mean in terms of general economics, why are some
| countries cheaper than others, I'm not really qualified
| to make a statement there. I'm also not talking about if
| it's right or wrong. But it is the reality today.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will
| come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music,
| take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a
| chair?
|
| The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they
| were needlessly _soul crushing_.
|
| For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your
| only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were
| monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions
| from the task, 100% focus required.
|
| Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually
| appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated
| garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no
| one in their right mind would want to work there.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| "MBA shrinkflated garbage"
|
| I'm definitely going to find a way to slip this into a
| conversation.
| profsummergig wrote:
| The problem is opportunity cost
|
| Of what?
|
| Of getting on disability (back pain)
|
| And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up
| conspiracy theories on the Internet
| sensanaty wrote:
| Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better
| pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in
| 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work
| that is harder and much less desirable.
|
| How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that
| crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more
| than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge
| number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling
| conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil
| salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically
| about whether your pay & benefits really _are_ better than
| Walmart 's (who are the number 1 employer in the states
| AFAIR, so they must be doing _something_ right).
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| I bust out loud laughing the other day when I saw two jobs
| listed here in rusty southern Ohio.
|
| One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little
| more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or
| niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public
| school system.
|
| The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more.
| Probably less hours too.
| bsder wrote:
| > The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the
| factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
|
| I'm _SUPER_ doubtful of this.
|
| When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid
| more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.
|
| Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and
| being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all
| they do is whine and complain.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods
| at a good salary when other countries were selling their
| goods in the US market without impediment.
|
| Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don't know if
| they are effective at all.
| timeon wrote:
| Yes that is usually point of the tariffs. Not this time
| as they are too broad (include products like coffee) and
| not stable (announced one day than delayed/dismissed
| etc.). Point of tariffs that current regime made is to
| destabilize both domestic and foreign markets.
| bsder wrote:
| > The issue is of course there is no market for US made
| goods at a good salary
|
| The Smarter Every Day scrubber demonstrates that is not
| true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
|
| The problem is that the US has systematically destroyed
| all the ecosystem required to manufacture by outsourcing
| everything.
|
| Maximally efficient is minimally robust.
| trollbridge wrote:
| My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on
| the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up
| booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with
| current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters,
| sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have
| benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who
| works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts
| as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which
| are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters
| are pipefitters' union, rest are UAW even though it has
| nothing to do with cars.
|
| General advice is if you're down on your luck and need a job,
| you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step
| pay increases are mandated by the union). It's not for
| everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local
| McDonald's which starts and stays around $14.
|
| Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that
| they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW
| here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can
| get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice
| basically guaranteed.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers
| that they can supply a trained work force.
|
| Unions need to quit their management is evil message as
| well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management
| evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not
| wanting unions around.
|
| The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions
| don't do this.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| From a worker's perspective management will usually be
| evil by necessity. Staying aware of that may be a
| necessary mechanism in the US that isn't so necessary in
| other countries with different cultures and labor
| protections.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Not trying to troll but it seems like there must be some way
| to make the job at least a little interesting (e.g. by
| rotating the tasks required, providing a little space for
| skill development)?
| Theodores wrote:
| The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is
| that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want
| to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to
| do.
|
| If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will
| be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be
| available.
| anon291 wrote:
| Rubbish. Ai has been used for many years in factories and
| modern AI will be even more useful. The issue is that most
| people aren't going to be the target of this sort of AI
| advertising and also that this takes longer than making a
| chat bot
| chupchap wrote:
| What's the point of GenAI in a manufacturing pipeline? Good
| ol' ML based AI automation is heavily used in larger
| manufacturing plants to identify defects
| crote wrote:
| > Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at
| conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
|
| In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see
| manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still
| believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people
| aren't _stupid_ , they have been spending a fortune on
| automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
|
| Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so
| it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of
| _matching_ what China is already doing (let alone beating it),
| we 're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in
| automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique
| products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors,
| reduce the _distance_ to vendors, and automate everything you
| can reasonably automate.
|
| Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we
| _might_ be able to keep up.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Or you could have trade borders.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Yeah, and you're going to be poorer as a whole. People in
| backwards places like rural and urban 'hoods live
| reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively
| speaking.
|
| I don't think you understand how primitive American society
| is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a
| car.
|
| When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in
| modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty
| American products at 3x the price, the current populist
| movement will look like a party in comparison.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > I don't think you understand how primitive American
| society is compared to Asia.
|
| Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really
| claiming that American society is more primitive than
| that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
|
| Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush
| toilets.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make.
| There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about
| an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define
| groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't
| know the details, but I don't think the film made that
| up.
| wmwmwm wrote:
| I'm guessing Ramanujan:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
| trollbridge wrote:
| 20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was
| always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who
| exactly he was.
| youngtaff wrote:
| The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on
| him
|
| Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| A bit of googling suggests that the model for the
| mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was
| actually studying mathematics at college level.
|
| The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence,
| although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a
| revision book he had access to in a small place in India
| then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford
| with a range of new and strange results but expressed in
| the idiom of the revision book.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're
| near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of
| Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the
| big progress-o-meter.
|
| Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been
| working on paving roads and building schools even just
| one generation ago. To think they still are "like that"
| is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely
| done and they're moving on.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This might be a shocker for you, but flush toilets are
| really not that big a deal compared to the Asian kind.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made
| in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty
| American products at 3x the price, the current populist
| movement will look like a party in comparison.
|
| Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone
| from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long
| term disconnection from the US. They will not let the
| next Trump boss them around like they have been this past
| year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches
| another populist movement that leads nowhere and
| collapses the country as a result why should the other
| 95% of the planet care?
| nradov wrote:
| The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon
| the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security
| guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for
| large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA
| steps back from that then global trade networks will
| gradually break down because no other country or stable
| coalition has the desire or resources to step into that
| role. The situation will revert to something more like
| what we saw pre-war when most trade was regional. New
| Zealand in particular is in a weak position as they are
| heavily reliant on agriculture exports, and lack any
| ability to project power beyond their own borders.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Nope... the US has been relying on the rest of the world
| to fund it's deficit, provide land for military bases to
| project it's 'power'
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There's interdependence, which is a system that benefits
| the world and the US. The US taxes the world with
| inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been
| relatively peaceful.
| youngtaff wrote:
| > and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.
|
| People from Vietnam, Iraq and many other countries would
| probably disagree with you
| tim333 wrote:
| >I don't think you understand how primitive American
| society is compared to Asia.
|
| >People in backwards places like rural...
|
| That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia
| and compare.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are backward rural places in America. However the
| vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric
| since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may
| not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They
| bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone
| else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his
| grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years
| ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit
| driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups
| like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but
| choose not to.
|
| In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have
| electric, they don't have cars.
|
| Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here.
| Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in
| cities and towns where the workers live.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial
| facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to
| avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example.
| Distribution centers are the more modern one.
|
| It's always important to talk about rural citizens
| because politicians pretend that they don't exist. The
| rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but
| are separated both deliberately and by inertia.
| bluGill wrote:
| We build in small cities. That is different from rural.
| The people live in the town.
| tclancy wrote:
| Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him
| in the head or anything, but don't we have decades of
| research showing the negative effects of those?
| petermcneeley wrote:
| I have never had anybody make this reference before!
| tclancy wrote:
| Way back in the day I used to have the number for his
| answering machine, which had a ridiculously funny answer
| message in it.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Sure, decades of research by think-tanks hell-bent on
| pumping the assets of their sponsors at any cost to
| others.
|
| "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis is a good
| counterpoint.
| coliveira wrote:
| Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily
| automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been
| doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The
| US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce
| training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea.
| I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're
| too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
| protocolture wrote:
| Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line
| videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling
| items.
|
| Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on
| shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out
| retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20
| customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the
| back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place
| running with scale orders.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at
| a video like this and count how many humans there are to
| make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20
| speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to
| go away as an option.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
| baq wrote:
| India will gladly accept those factories for a few
| decades.
| nradov wrote:
| If that's true then why hasn't India changed government
| policy to make it a more attractive location for
| manufacturing?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Because of socialism, go look at how its two socialist
| (and most industrial states) treat capital investment!
| protocolture wrote:
| >Population implosion
|
| Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around
| making such a huge blanket statement, without even london
| horse manure crisis level evidence.
| nradov wrote:
| Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow
| decline that will particularly impact the younger
| population groups who have typically done most of the
| manual labor in factories.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-
| facts...
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's
| without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that
| is only dropping in price and rising in usability.
|
| Factory automation design as a service is already a huge
| sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital
| barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget
| will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to
| be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-
| count that process will reach. Maybe things like
| standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the
| factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly
| data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's
| Industry 5.0!
|
| Presumably it will become less possible to spin up
| production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a
| few days with some new tasks for the workers and some
| rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector
| that will see some interesting progress in the next 50
| years.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Thats a nice video, thanks for sharing. Everything shown
| there is old school automation of which China has a whole
| ecosystem for years. ALso they did they deliberately show
| only 1-3 steps of the process? Wheres the rest of the
| speaker? My video showed the speaker production from
| magnet to packaged box. I'm not convinced that there is a
| cost advantage yet since all of that technology shown
| existed in spades for years and yet my modern video shows
| people are still making speakers by hand. But it is
| making me think that maybe they can pull it off
| eventually. (Maybe the US can as well)
| obscurette wrote:
| It really just depends. There might short/small runs
| which are easily automated, and there might be a large
| scale production which are not and need hand assembly.
| The very same product might see both during production -
| fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.
| tim333 wrote:
| From the American point of view there's something to be
| said for doing a job where the money is. Like you'll make
| more in finance or as an AI engineer than making stuff in a
| factory.
|
| I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a
| house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing
| anything that's globally competitive which is why
| manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in
| finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the
| London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with
| apartments long ago.
|
| I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the
| people earning easy money push up the cost of living and
| force others to do similar to afford to live in the same
| area.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather "boring"
| stuff of a life in the day of various employees.
|
| But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their
| factory was, including really rigorous quality control,
| advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for
| the testing... and then one video was of an office worker
| who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly,
| juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and
| getting ahold of the right people when something was going
| wrong.
|
| Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
| nradov wrote:
| I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago.
| It is highly automated with most work done by industrial
| robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts
| out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that
| assembly lines used to operate.
|
| https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html
| criddell wrote:
| Wow - super automated and they still employ 11,000 people?
| helltone wrote:
| The goal of automation is not necessarily reduce
| personnel, it could be increased reliability, reduced
| risk to life, reducing waste from scraps, faster lead
| time, etc
| Closi wrote:
| > Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a
| fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as
| possible!
|
| Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of
| money] automating production.
|
| The trick to automating something that 'isn't a car' is often
| to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that
| can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we
| are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive
| automated sites at huge expense, but there aren't the
| skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of
| production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the
| AMR companies don't want to talk to you, and there isn't
| really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an
| integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will
| wipe out the benefit, and we don't have the skills within
| most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR
| working without external integrators - but a one-AMR
| deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I was thinking the issue might be its much better for
| factories to automate sections of production over time.
|
| It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new
| factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the
| market expectation for the product exists and the
| automation is as good as planned.
|
| Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have
| a massive advantage as they can automate out sections
| ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this
| also as they go.
| youngtaff wrote:
| They're automating the production of many items not just
| cars
|
| https://archive.ph/DuZGe
|
| >The overall number of robots added in China last year was
| 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US
| and just 2,500 in the UK.
| Closi wrote:
| I know, that's not what I was saying :)
| mbesto wrote:
| > In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see
| manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still
| believe this is how most factories operate.
|
| Not really, American manufacturing is _already_ automated.
| Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output
| has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the
| early 2000 's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation
| for this -> automation.
|
| While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their
| manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that
| companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
|
| IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back
| to the USA is because you can't convince people who are
| already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go
| back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said
| differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has
| spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to
| work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do
| the reverse.
|
| [0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-
| falling...
|
| [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
| yibg wrote:
| Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost
| competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only
| a few ways to resolve this in my view:
|
| 1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
|
| 2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove
| cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize
| it
|
| 3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of
| imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to
| do, at least officially
|
| 1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial
| countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden
| on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if
| the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add
| a lot of jobs.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| 1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given
| that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be
| serious for this to work.
|
| As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be
| automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost
| of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at
| least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an
| environmental sense)
| yibg wrote:
| Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services
| and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways.
| That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus
| on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the
| lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
|
| They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some
| national protection via tariffs on some types of
| manufacturing, while investing in automating some other
| types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those
| offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a
| much of a strategy.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| The USA and the west in general is 40 years deep into
| this crisis and recent developments have not actually
| made a shift in that trajectory.
| yibg wrote:
| It seems like the US in particular isn't able to pick one
| path and stick with it. The shift towards services has
| already happened. But investment in silicon, renewables
| etc is on again off again. There now seems to be a desire
| to bring all manufacturing jobs back to the US, although
| it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually
| wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
|
| So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't
| seem to have an overarching goal.
| trollbridge wrote:
| A great deal of investment in renewables just meant
| importing solar panels and wind turbines from China that
| will wear out in 19 years. Outside of a few jobs in
| trucking to moving parts and a few jobs to install them,
| it does not create a solid labour base nor good careers.
|
| I certainly want clothing manufacture back in the U.S.
| with a focus on using renewable (ie. not microplastic
| based) textiles to make articles of clothing that don't
| wear out in a year or two. I have a handmade pair of
| pants I bought at a local thrift store that were locally
| made from domestically produced denim. Got them for $4.
| New ones from the person who makes them would be around
| $40-$75. They are custom fitted to you, although I got
| lucky and the thrift store had one in exactly my width
| and height.
|
| So far they don't have any rips, years, and the cuffs
| aren't fraying.
|
| My brand new Levi's and Wrangler's have fraying cuffs and
| are much more prone to getting tears because of the
| thinner fabric. They also seem to stretch after washing
| or wearing them a long time and then don't fit as well.
|
| Toys? I want toys for my kids that aren't full of lead or
| cadmium, and are something besides battery operated
| beeping rubbish or something with a screen. I'm glad to
| pay $25 for a wooden toy. I bought one locally made in
| Chico, CA at a store called "Chicomade" where everything
| was locally made.
|
| I don't see why fast fashion with clothes you need to
| throw out sooner due to planned obsolescence and plastic
| trash toys.
| yibg wrote:
| If we can make the same product domestically better
| (cheaper, higher quality etc) then that doesn't require a
| barrier in theory. Just make it and sell it for cheaper
| or sell it for the same but with higher quality.
|
| Problem is for the most part that cannot be done. There
| is a market for made in USA, where people are willing to
| pay more for higher quality, more sustainable, local etc,
| but it's still a relatively small market.
|
| Just like airline tickets. People complain about lack of
| space and bad food, but when presented with the choice
| most people still pick the cheapest option.
| antonvs wrote:
| > it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually
| wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
|
| Politicians who are optimizing for votes from a large and
| ignorant base that hasn't thought through any of this.
| coliveira wrote:
| # 3 is not a solution because it will only make American
| production more expensive and impoverish the population. It's
| a full disaster.
| wrp wrote:
| Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a
| century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged
| consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high,
| which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The
| Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example
| where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can
| find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure
| whether they would work well in the current global
| environment.
| trollbridge wrote:
| They also became experts at automation and at producing
| high quality goods.
| coliveira wrote:
| Import substitution can only work when you have a
| government that is investing in labor and industrial
| infrastructure, while keeping the local currency cheap.
| This is not a combination of factors you don't have in
| the US.
| tim333 wrote:
| US manufacturing keeps going up in dollar terms (see first
| graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_Unit
| ed_St...)
|
| but employs less people as it automates.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was
| high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks
| propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2
| months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university
| (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly
| functioning alcoholics.
| gsf_emergency_4 wrote:
| This was a family owned biz? Somehow, I imagine, I'd feel
| better slogging for an SME than in an "externally-funded"
| place.
|
| I'm guessing that US needs a similar nation-wide service to
| connect gig-workers of all sorts to factories specifically.
| trollbridge wrote:
| My sister has been at a family owned small factory for 30+
| years now. Eventually loyalty to family becomes a thing,
| especially when they're loyal to you.
|
| They are gradually not replacing staff as they retire or
| the occasional person quits on the factory floor due to
| automation. Their biggest challenge is who will own it in
| the future - the son and grandson have fully taken over
| from the founder, but nobody else in the family is really
| interested.
| al_borland wrote:
| I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on
| the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week
| was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on
| the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever
| worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as
| well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor.
|
| While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing
| knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who
| aren't going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
|
| I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much
| more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I'd rather
| see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have
| yet another drive-thru window in town.
|
| I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized
| factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people
| coming out or high school that didn't know what else they could
| do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they
| could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting
| other local businesses. Now they're both closed and the city is
| hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law
| is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more
| jobs opportunities. I'm sure if there was a local factory gig
| he'd probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention
| getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
| baq wrote:
| The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the
| floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately
| the same. There's no economic sense to build a factory in the
| states... which is where all the government subsidies enter
| the stage, but the budget is already running a war time
| deficit. It's going to be so much worse for those small used-
| to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and
| then there's no guarantee it's going to be any better after.
| al_borland wrote:
| Tariffs are used all over the world for this exact reason,
| which is what is being attempted now. It will take time for
| it to pay off, more time than the current administration
| has, which is likely why business will drag their feet.
|
| I think economic benefit goes beyond just having the lowest
| price. Having good jobs for people in the country means
| they have money to spend. If people make next to nothing,
| all they can afford is Temu quality. This is bad for the
| citizens, bad for US businesses, and bad for the
| environment. The only winner is China.
| lesuorac wrote:
| But there is a good jobs in the country. His brother has
| to travel 100 miles to work it.
|
| Tariffs won't resolve this issue. Either the goods
| becomes too expensive to import and are made here or the
| aren't.
|
| In the case that they're made here then some other good
| will no longer be produced (if you could magically make
| both then you would've in the first place). And so your
| citizens are worse off because they produce the same
| amount (or less) and pay more for it.
|
| In the case that they're not made here then you just pay
| more in tariffs and are worse off.
|
| The problem with global trade is that when you trade 10
| apples for 10 bananas it doesn't need to be distributed
| to your citizens equally. So if you go from an economy
| producing 5 apples and 5 bananas where everybody gets one
| of each to one where 3 people get 8 apples and 10 bananas
| the other 2 get 2 apples the GDP still grew from 10 to 20
| but people are worse off. Throwing in tariffs to get back
| to the 5 apples 5 bananas will cause a recession.
|
| The better solution is to increase the top tax rate and
| redistribute 2 additional apples and bananas to the
| bottom 2 and then everybody is still better off.
|
| I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out
| why Trump & Republicans want tariffs as opposed to a
| higher tax rate.
| nova22033 wrote:
| If you're building a new factory and the factory needs
| steel, they'll have to wait for the steel plant to be
| built before they can start construction. Trump has
| imposed tariffs on steel imports.
| 15155 wrote:
| > minimum wage there pays for 10 people
|
| More like 2-4 at this point, if we're talking about China.
| bluGill wrote:
| > There's no economic sense to build a factory in the
| states...
|
| That isn't how it works. Details matter.
|
| A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be
| more just in time - you don't have to build excess because
| of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of
| money for a local factory).
|
| The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly
| reliable, but close enough). If your production line is
| mostly automated (or could be) the states are cheaper -
| there isn't much labor anyway.
|
| Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings
| because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to
| testing faster.
|
| there are lots of other factors, and most are not in the
| favor of local production but there are several that are.
| Where you fall is an optimization problem and there is no
| one right answer for everything.
| danans wrote:
| > The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not
| perfectly reliable, but close enough).
|
| Industrial electricity rates are pretty much the same in
| China and the US, from 8-9c/kWh. In both countries,
| however, electricity is going to face upward price
| pressure from AI datacenters.
|
| > Production close to engineering makes for a lot of
| savings because when a part is designed you can get a
| prototype to testing faster.
|
| This already exists in the US. In California, for
| example, there are many specialty prototype manufacturing
| companies that focus on this problem specifically. They
| are adjacent to the r&d firms designing the products.
|
| That's not the type of manufacturing that the recent
| debate over reshoring is about. It's about production
| scale manufacturing - creating an American Shenzen with
| an equivalent amount of jobs - and very soon. But any
| such capability will be heavily automated, so it won't
| produce the equivalent jobs.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Asian factories particularly China are deploying robots at
| a rate that puts the rest of the world in the shadows
| parineum wrote:
| Something that I hadn't considered before I heard it being
| discussed by someone who studied the phenomenon of factory
| off shoring is that a huge factor in the off shoring has
| nothing to do with labor, it has everything to do with ramp
| up time.
|
| Compare the build time between Tesla's battery factories in
| the US and China and consider how many batteries they can
| sell during the time difference.
|
| Building a factory loses money until the factory starts
| making products. Good or bad, regulations that cost _time_
| are the biggest issue. Labor costs matter but they affect
| the margins that can be somewhat compensated for by
| products not needing overseas shipping. A company,
| especially a new one, can go out of business in the years
| it takes to build a factory in the US.
| croisillon wrote:
| i get what you're saying, and i'd probably quickly hate it too,
| but somehow industrial bakeries seem to still work this way
| kranke155 wrote:
| Let's do the easy thing, even if it is a geopolitical disaster
| for the West?
| runnr_az wrote:
| Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return
| when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money
| to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are
| winning.
| madhacker wrote:
| Instead of industrial base for national security priority,
| Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content
| once these AI are done ingesting.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It all drives ads
|
| All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for
| advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it
| does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now
| NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling
| slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
| gretch wrote:
| I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going
| to be huge for national security in a a few years.
|
| Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone
| swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and
| you'll lose the war.
|
| It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content.
| Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-
| headed by porn sites.
| lm28469 wrote:
| "we're all pursuing Ai to prepare ww3" isn't the argument you
| think it is
| leptons wrote:
| Hallucinating "AI" is going to take friendly fire to a whole
| new level.
| mNovak wrote:
| The article is implying throughout that these two things are
| mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense
| (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1]
| doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at
| the expense of industrial investment.
|
| [1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for
| inflation"
| niek_pas wrote:
| I'll admit I have not read this article incredibly thoroughly,
| but I don't see what you're claiming. The article is
| contrasting the growth of the AI industry with the slump in
| manufacturing. I don't think it's positing any causal link
| between the two.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the
| Bureau of Labor Statistics
|
| That's 0.3%.
| Kapura wrote:
| down is down
| some_guy_nobel wrote:
| You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything.
|
| Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job
| gains/losses!
| pessimizer wrote:
| The reason the percentage was included was to take the number
| _out_ of isolation. What can mean anything is when people
| tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean
| anything.
|
| > Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job
| gains/losses!
|
| You first!
| some_guy_nobel wrote:
| > You first!
|
| In any honest conversation, the person presenting the
| numbers will provide this, but I'll bite:
|
| How many years are cumulative negative in this table?
|
| https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=n
| e...
|
| (I guess the correct way to model this would be as the
| difference of Poissons between hires and separations, but a
| student-t should do just fine since we don't have
| separations)
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Feels like Milton from Office Space: _I was told there would be
| a manufacturing boom._
| bluGill wrote:
| There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a
| trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the
| US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people
| in manufacturing now takes less than 200.
| deadfoxygrandpa wrote:
| thats not true. in most manufacturing industries we produce
| fewer units than we did 20 or 30 years ago, and in most of
| those industries the total value produced has been pretty
| flat. this is something a lot of economists have known
| about all along. you can read about it here:
|
| https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/10/03/how-gdp-hides-
| indust...
| pchristensen wrote:
| Hardly a boom.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy
| to a service economy, deliberately.
|
| Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers
| about trade deficits, which _ignores revenue from services_. Yes,
| there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term
| strategy because services were a superior investment.
|
| Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're
| planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear
| superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-
| the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay.
| Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
|
| So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and
| trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It
| absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway.
| There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the
| carefully crafted service sector as well.
| jasonsb wrote:
| A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't
| have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said,
| maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in
| the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
| coliveira wrote:
| That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't
| force the world to do things forever because there is a
| dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this
| decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy
| can work.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money
|
| sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed
| rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn
| website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on
| infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that
| value money over power, we call them decadent.
|
| If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse
| that's a possible route to go down but it's important to
| understand that the world will belong to countries that focus
| on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some
| competitors who have the good sense to understand that the
| material world matters.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you
| less money than running an ad or porn website
|
| Airlines and high speed rail systems are also services. Heck,
| even Tesla's real value isn't in manufacturing, it's in the
| (delusional, but nonetheless) belief that they're going to
| make an absolute killing on services at some point in the
| future. They could probably sell off their manufacturing arm
| and their stock price would increase.
| crote wrote:
| > Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
|
| So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend
| _literally_ hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining
| a conventional military when you already have nukes?
|
| And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke
| Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a
| cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When
| a small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When
| they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When
| they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When
| they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from
| the missile fields? When DC falls?
|
| What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards?
| If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution
| breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of
| innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country
| is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke _yourself_?
|
| Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the _US
| itself_. The US isn 't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are
| you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical
| materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the
| Middle-East for oil before, but _nukes?_
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet?
|
| Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even
| though Ukraine is.
| coliveira wrote:
| Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.
| beeflet wrote:
| clearly they do
| lossolo wrote:
| Exactly this. If you do not have the capability to produce as
| much conventional weaponry as your enemy (especially if that
| enemy also has a nuclear arsenal) then you've lost.
|
| Sitting in the Whitehouse facing the red button, you ask
| yourself which city are we willing to trade by pushing that
| button? Millions in New York or Los Angeles? That's why they
| will never use nukes. To retain world hegemon status and
| protect your interests, you need conventional military
| strength. Because if your aircraft carriers are sunk and the
| vast majority of your fleet is disabled or destroyed, what
| will you do? Your shipbuilding capacity is so low that you've
| basically already lost, you can't project power overseas
| without a fleet and you can't reproduce it fast enough. What
| are you going to do then nuke them? They will retaliate, and
| every decision maker knows that. No one will choose to kill
| millions/tens of millions of their citizens because they lost
| a fleet thousands of kilometers from home.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Can they even use nukes if they don't have any control over
| any nearby land or sea? I feel like they can't rely on just
| ICBMs.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| The other comment said "for survival." But yeah there are
| still nuclear powers fighting conventional wars, or posturing
| against each other with conventional weapons.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing
| jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job.
| These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an
| assembly line all day physically busting their asses and
| sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous
| environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful
| chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises.
| Sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive work. This work sucks! And
| we should be happy that as a country we managed to transition
| our economy away from depending on this kind of work! Why on
| earth are we trying to bring it back?
| Stephen_0xFF wrote:
| Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could
| buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays
| home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself
| is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2
| baby booming economy.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all
| possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th
| century that meant either still agrarian (China) or
| rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique
| moment and it's never coming back.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is
| dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other
| countries of the world were weak and agrarian and
| rebuilding after war.
|
| What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro
| speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.
| joomla199 wrote:
| They were talking about economic boom, not manufacturing
| dominance.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s,
| and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very
| short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.
| thuridas wrote:
| Without post WW2 taxes.
|
| Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends
| invested in the house market. This increases the cost of
| terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very
| productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it.
| ( There is value in handling the rent, building or
| reforming and old house).
|
| The urban land is limited and requires government
| infrastructure to connect it.
|
| Another big cost is the university.
| dustincoates wrote:
| You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need
| an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could
| buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely
| accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates
| today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the
| 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
|
| I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_
| lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few
| percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to
| imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach
| for the majority:
| https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
| Bratmon wrote:
| Manufacturing jobs are mostly unionized and service jobs
| aren't.
|
| Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union
| propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into
| thinking they want manufacturing jobs back
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Conservatives don't want unionized labor - they want 1890's
| style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant
| exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory
| of any sort - dark factories end to end. There's little
| room in the conservative morality for people not working,
| or for people who are working.
| adabyron wrote:
| Can we not call those people "Conservatives". There is
| very little conservative about them.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always
| had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is
| something else carrying the mantle of conservative,
| cowing the conservatives to silence.
| shawn_w wrote:
| Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on
| the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These
| days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with
| that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back
| to the good old days.
| nxm wrote:
| Back then before manufacturing jobs were sent overseas
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went
| to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear
| power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at
| home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional
| elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the
| writing of these characters and the world now.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2Ey0H7OUE
| nikanj wrote:
| My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most
| zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a
| car project in the garage et cetera
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Yes absolutely! I was never too much into Married with
| Children as a kid hence I jumped straight to the simpsons
| but the idea of a shoe salesman having all of that today?
| Not possible.
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| That guy did retail shoe sales too. I've known some
| people to survive off those type of jobs, but they sure
| as hell weren't living with a sitcom family in the burbs.
| chasd00 wrote:
| you guys understand that was a fictional comedy show
| right? It had no resemblance to reality on purpose.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| They don't realize that making good money in a factory was
| due to a particular tech/economic environment and the US'
| position inside it.
|
| People thinking they can go back to making good money in a
| widget factory is like thinking because you had an
| ascendant economy in 1836 exporting wood before global
| electrification, then that lucrative job is always waiting
| for you even in 2025.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| What's missed in that nostalgia: the house was crap; the
| appliances, if any, were crap; the car(if you had one, and
| only one), was crap. On and on.
| F35Machinist wrote:
| That crap house hasn't been updated and is worth 200x
| currently in California. Houses that sold for 10k in the
| mid 70s are selling for 2 million or more in 2025. Cars,
| appliances and everything else is just a rounding error
| by comparison.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| That's a condemnation of zoning laws artificially
| restricting the market for housing, which ironically only
| came about after that period of relative abundance
| starky wrote:
| >Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
|
| The main argument would be if you are relying on other
| countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you
| need to rely on other countries being good trading partners.
| If the relationship with those trading partners fails your
| economy is in trouble.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| What does that actually look like, though? And at what
| cost?
|
| No single country can produce everything it currently
| imports much less compete globally on every product.
|
| Does the government just prop up every industry with
| subsidies? Or use tariffs to make everything as expensive
| as domestic goods?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| It isn't the jobs, its the economic power of having unions
| that people really want.
| rglover wrote:
| National security
| yibg wrote:
| I hear people (media, politicians) talk about bringing
| manufacturing jobs back to America, but I haven't heard too
| much well articulated reasons for why.
|
| There are issues with national security, reliance on less than
| friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own
| food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely
| aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs.
|
| Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high
| skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous
| manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
| nradov wrote:
| Global supply chains seem to be gradually breaking down due
| to a mix of politics, demographics, and armed conflicts.
| Everyone has become accustomed to the post-WWII system of
| global free trade but historically it is an aberration and
| everything will eventually revert to the mean. I wouldn't be
| surprised if China disintegrates into another civil war
| within the next few decades. We can't necessarily rely on
| foreign countries to make stuff for us anymore so if we want
| to have stuff we might have to make it ourselves.
| anonymars wrote:
| > China disintegrates into another civil war within the
| next few decades
|
| I'm curious about your reasoning on this. China was not the
| one at the top of my list of "Major world powers likely to
| have a civil war sooner than later"
| lossolo wrote:
| Agree. At this point, a civil war is more likely in the
| United States than in China.
| nradov wrote:
| China has had major internal violent conflicts many
| times: in 1967, 1960, 1937, 1916, 1856, and so on.
| Another civil war probably isn't imminent but based on
| historical patterns it's entirely possible in our
| lifetimes. There could be an external shock in terms of a
| severe disruption in food or energy imports, or an
| internal power struggle between CCP factions. Xi Jinping
| isn't immortal and no one can predict what might happen
| when he leaves power.
| mainecoder wrote:
| It is highly unlikely because the government has an
| explicit goal of bringing harmony, and the people have
| had such a uniform upbringing that even their discussions
| of politics is around policy effectiveness, economics of
| implementation and metrics where as here in the US it is
| republican vs democrat and the topic is about Transgender
| issue or something that is not policy but a belief or
| some intangible thing that does not make a material
| difference for the majority of people.
| nradov wrote:
| Nah. You could have said the same thing about China's
| government at many other times throughout history --
| right up until the violence started. Nothing has really
| changed. How much "harmony" did the people in Tiananmen
| Square have in 1989?
| yibg wrote:
| Problem is if we (any country really) tried to build
| everything ourselves while other countries engages in trade
| then we are at a major disadvantage.
|
| Of course some things are more sensitive and should be made
| domestically even at lower efficiency / higher cost. But if
| that's applied to everything then we are just shooting
| ourselves in the foot. Plus the opportunity cost of not
| doing something else that we are more uniquely positioned
| to excel at.
| ap99 wrote:
| It's about leverage, which you mentioned.
|
| If you have no leverage during a negotiation and your
| counterpart has can say 'no' without having to give up
| anything then you're screwed.
|
| America doesn't have to be the best manufacturers, but we do
| need to have the ability to say, "fuck it we'll build it
| ourselves" when the other side of the table says something we
| don't like.
|
| And anyone living in the fantasy utopia where the whole world
| agrees on everything and there's peace all the time... read
| more history.
| lesuorac wrote:
| But you don't have to build it yourself.
|
| If China wants to play hardball then Vietnam can make the
| goods. This is the great system we had until Trump decided
| he'd piss off every country. We had a very much you vs the
| world when doing diplomacy as USA but now it's just you vs
| USA which is a much weaker position.
| ap99 wrote:
| There won't always be a Vietnam or an India.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Chinas been around for a few thousand years, what's
| something they can do that nobody else has been able to
| replicate?
|
| There's always a Vietnam.
|
| Even now with all the talk about "rare earth minerals".
| They're not rare, everybody has them, its just nobody
| else wants to pollute their rivers mining and refining
| them when China is willing to.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Thank you, absolutely agree.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing
| economy to a service economy, deliberately.
|
| I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than
| individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor
| countries because they were allowed to import the products of
| that labor back into the country cheaply.
|
| > Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out
| numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from
| services.
|
| This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and
| grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for
| 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for
| investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy.
| Reversing the trade deficit _will not be enough._ It 's not
| that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is
| debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign
| imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and
| exclusive franchises.
|
| But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be
| able to move to a country that isn't broken.
|
| I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing
| in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring
| manufacturing to the US because _we need to produce something
| in order to be paid._ We have no advantage in services, we only
| pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import
| talent _and who are themselves immigrants._ We are not only not
| working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think
| that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever.
| What we 're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures,
| and pretending like everything is just fine.
|
| And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are
| like, yup, nothing's wrong.
| trollbridge wrote:
| The U.S. is still a leader in agricultural, although that's
| heavily dependent on oil and cheap oil. Note that a place
| like Brazil is also a leader in ag... and one of the reasons
| they got to that position was through heavy protectionism to
| develop their own industries.
| culll_kuprey wrote:
| > unless it just wants to cosplay
|
| Do not underestimate this as a real population.
| hedora wrote:
| The crazy thing is, due to coordinated propaganda campaigns,
| people don't realize that the Biden administration got people
| to invest in US factories at an unprecedented rate. Trump's
| already managed to scare off a lot of that investment,
| presumably because he wants to protect the trade deficit.
|
| Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into
| factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
|
| I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like
| forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?)
| That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking
| office.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Biden was a relatively mediocre president (which I sure
| miss), but his administration was amazing for America. They
| laid the foundation for long-term prosperity, which is
| entirely squandered now. Such a shame.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| "Services" are actually fake and it turns out you need to be
| able to make things to survive. Not for ROI or for trade
| deficits, but because the world manufacturer sets the rules.
| lallysingh wrote:
| My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing,
| and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton
| of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
| amelius wrote:
| It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing,
| it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a
| complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
| ares623 wrote:
| But for 20 sweet minutes just before the entire thing
| collapses, someone will get crowned the winner
| bgwalter wrote:
| They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company
| Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself
| (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m):
|
| "Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of
| manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do
| so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture
| their phones."
|
| In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like
| it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash
| cannot come soon enough.
| justin66 wrote:
| They orchestrate partners!
| rubberband wrote:
| This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@
| trollbridge wrote:
| In other words, a middleman trying to extract big markups,
| which seems to be a lot of businesses these days (like W09
| AirBNB).
| bhewes wrote:
| We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more
| effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do
| see output increases.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Weird that it doesn't translate to any visible growth, everyone
| became a 10x employee, but if you exclude Ai companies
| themselves the GDP barely moved in 3 years.
| bhewes wrote:
| There maybe a lag we are talking 12-24 month projects on our
| end. But right AI spending is driving everything we will see
| how long application shows up.
| fair_enough wrote:
| Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff
| Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can
| bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he
| would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor
| causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.
|
| I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he
| owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose
| scale to protect his business interests.
| profsummergig wrote:
| It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never
| interfere with WaPo and then he did.
|
| "We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would
| never... Hey! What're you doing!"
| nxm wrote:
| When the ship is sinking the captain has to intervene
| pessimizer wrote:
| He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent,
| thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys
| who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to
| quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT,
| my previous job, and actual physical production.
|
| The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing
| _anything_ was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause
| jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few
| times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the
| job, and possibly losing customers.
|
| The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers
| with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in
| months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short
| sighted to me.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in
| months
|
| What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled
| between 5 and 8 years.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and
| "worth using" for modern tasks?
| hansmayer wrote:
| The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3
| years.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools
| given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that
| are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool
| I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same
| manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was
| highlighting
| jaggederest wrote:
| We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for
| at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept
| is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much
| younger than that.
|
| Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very
| early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware,
| and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you
| include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and
| computer hardware being the new parts.
|
| A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for
| semiconductor fabs, which are _only_ about 70 years old
| and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
| menaerus wrote:
| Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can
| represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the
| saturation point we need to be able to define a system up
| to the point where there are almost no more unknowns
| (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't
| possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
| bluGill wrote:
| Are those tools functional? Have you ever checked? I'm
| not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely
| some of them are measurement tools and they can seem to
| work perfect while giving the wrong measurement. Other
| might be cutting tools that cut, but they are a bit dull
| and if you don't know how to check you won't realize the
| cuts are not as good as new anymore (or maybe you have
| sharpened them and they now cut the wrong profile...).
| There are many ways a tool can seem functional but be
| wrong.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > but likely some of them are measurement tools
|
| where and why did you come to this conclusion?
| bluGill wrote:
| When someone says machine tools I assume it assumes the
| measurement tools. It doesn't have to, but you can't do
| much work without measuring. (unless you build to fit -
| which works okay but there is a reason it went obsolete
| 100+ years ago)
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Why the but? Measurement tools are tools
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Yes, and yes.
|
| They are things like: -Measurement tools that can be
| checked easily against Measurement standards (its taught
| as good practice to check this anyway each use) -files
| -transfer punches -feeler gages (again, easily checked)
| -bore gages -gage pins - 123 blocks - on and on...
| hansmayer wrote:
| > I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but
| likely some of them are measurement tools
|
| If you don't know something for sure, it's best to not
| make assumptions. We're not LLMs and don't need to spit
| out something confidently without understanding it.
| bluGill wrote:
| I have enough of a machinist background to know that
| either he has measurement tools, or he has no clue what
| the tools are. there is a tiny chance they onlp made
| parts to fit each other without measuring sizes - but
| that seems very unlikely and can be discounted without
| even knowing them.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| No they don't. The 3 year number came from some random
| person on the internet who claimed to be a Google
| employee and was denied by Google, as you can see on any
| of the articles about this claim:
|
| > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware
| utilization and service life expressed by an "unnamed
| source" were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize
| Nvidia's technology, and do not represent our experience.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common
| anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still
| very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster
| GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular,
| representing a good balance between cost, performance and
| efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being
| much more expensive).
| rmoriz wrote:
| I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value
| left in "not modern" tasks, like video
| encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect
| is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's
| server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and
| running, you just need to find appropriate
| payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
| trollbridge wrote:
| We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in
| they're getting rid of, along with hardware we're
| throwing out that we don't need anymore.
|
| It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for
| any task: they use way too much power, have a large form
| factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need
| extra power cables, lack driver support on modern
| operating systems, and in return for all that don't have
| as much power as something much better you could get for
| $100.
|
| Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for
| people with a retro computing hobby or people removing
| semiconductor components for other purposes.
|
| An obsolete data centre isn't worth much either. (We have
| a small one made from equipment being liquidated from
| local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power
| consumption is too high and it is not set up for
| efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw
| workloads.
| rmoriz wrote:
| The key is to calculate right and go for the mainstream
| hardware. If you are a hosting company with diversified
| use cases, you have plenty of room to downcycle hardware
| until it breaks. If you are operating under limited space
| in a field with bleeding edge/performance targets, doing
| this is not viable. There are many solution provides that
| will buy your outdated things. I'm not saying that old
| hardware is great or a cash cow in general, but the
| lifetime can usually be doubled or tripled if the right
| use case can be found and when you are the owner.
|
| Side quest: Virtualized instances at cloud providers
| never get upgraded unless recreated. I bet there are
| millions of VMs running for years on specs and prices of
| 2018-2020.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3
| year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a
| Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all
| the journalists publishing that claim with this response.
|
| > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware
| utilization and service life expressed by an "unnamed
| source" were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize
| Nvidia's technology, and do not represent our experience.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years.
|
| The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a
| bunch of companies, where they were saying their
| accountants are extending to 5 years.
|
| Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by
| tax reasons) with service lifecycle.
| mr_toad wrote:
| A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were
| outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed
| a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven't
| changed.
| mbesto wrote:
| And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is
| the standard _warranty_ and typically gets extended to 5
| years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is
| consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc.
| servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely
| could be different terms, but idk because they are not
| typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make
| server hardware purchases.
|
| Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review
| their contracts as part of diligence.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Nobody in this thread has mentioned warranty periods. The
| original comment was about the hardware lifecycle,
| claiming the hardware was only commercially viable for
| months. The 3 year number that people are tossing around
| came from a discredited interview that made the rounds on
| social media a while back:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/gpus/datacenter-g...
| mbesto wrote:
| You're proving my point. Hardware's lifecycle is based on
| warranty - that's it.
|
| The parent comment was:
|
| > Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
|
| That comment is actually referencing the standard
| warranty period (which is indeed typically 3 years),
| which may or may not be consistent with the useful life
| of server hardware (which is much more subjective and
| varies based on appliance).
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Not that immediate parent comment. This original comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575908
| boroboro4 wrote:
| Data centers might be, GPUs not really. No one needs GPUs
| from 8 years, and hardly even 5.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| A100s are over 5 years old and still widely used for HPC.
| 8 year old V100s are still available on cloud providers
| for low-intensity workloads.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If GPU demand growth continues to outpace GPU production
| growth, that is necessarily going to change. Older GPUs
| may not be cost competitive to operate with newer GPUs,
| but when the alternative is _no_ GPU...
| numpad0 wrote:
| So like, up to 100 months.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months
| you're doing extremely well.
| nvader wrote:
| I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.
|
| However, the hardware situation you described sounds very
| brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained
| and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of
| tinkering, exploration or innovation.
|
| Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware
| manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are
| hanging on by a thread.
| noosphr wrote:
| You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the
| root account either.
|
| There are general purpose machines that you can make new
| parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to
| experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-
| phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of
| tinkering, exploration or innovation."
|
| This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those
| things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative
| to a well known production process for complex parts.
|
| After years, that process has been refined to basically the
| limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize
| cost vs speed.
|
| There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it
| would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done
| until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is
| done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would
| test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-
| running process.
|
| Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some
| things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly
| better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for
| everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be
| worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you
| want customers to use your new thing, you have to support
| their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.
|
| This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know
| (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the
| 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't
| understand.
| nvader wrote:
| This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the
| world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your
| perspective.
|
| Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt
| to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or
| old materials going out of supply.
| simmonmt wrote:
| It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage:
| https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155
|
| Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by
| the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap
| alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're
| probably not making or selling very many of them. But
| they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock,
| and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make
| new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case
| I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does
| sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any
| engineering time evolving that design. The input
| materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it
| is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the
| name of the game becomes how do you make that specific
| thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same
| tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need
| a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp
| out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you
| need it again.
|
| There are many many manufactured items that fall into
| this category.
| bluGill wrote:
| For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of
| quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay
| the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good
| enough, but often they have minor usability issues such
| that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon
| alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't
| be used at all.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked
| out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with
| other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered
| to sort.
|
| I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and
| the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good
| enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator
| is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap
| Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate,
| but one is obviously far better made than the other.
| NegativeK wrote:
| > How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new
| materials becoming available, or old materials going out
| of supply.
|
| That's very unlikely. New materials would require the
| company requesting the part to reengineer it, recertify
| it, or at least retest it. But even still we're not
| coming up with materials that are a significant
| improvement in most fields. Aerospace, sure. It can be
| worth it to iterate and improve. Most things, a part
| that's worked for 50 years will keep working and will be
| happily profitable in maintenance mode. Those customers
| want reliability, not to test some improvement on a part
| that has negligible impact in the overall system.
|
| And the common metals (gears are typically steel, maybe a
| yellow metal) are made in such large amounts that new
| materials are going to cost a heck of a lot more. So the
| customer is going to wreck their profit while the machine
| shop probably isn't going to have to change their process
| that much.
|
| There definitely is innovation in machining. New
| processes are making tighter tolerances more achievable
| or material removal faster. But to the top commentor's
| point (who showed me how to use a benchtop lathe over a
| decade ago), the capital investment for a new machine
| plus the labor of duplicating all of your work plus the
| unknown maintenance costs, etc etc etc just don't make
| sense when Moore's law doesn't apply.
| ragebol wrote:
| 'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the
| knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus
| factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.
|
| If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the
| machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery
| because the knowledge is gone.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When
| you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that
| set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL
| when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things
| willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of
| understanding and interacting with the way that your
| factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just
| don't know when.
| zbentley wrote:
| > not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some
| things are just done.
|
| For sure, but how do you know?
|
| If it's only via:
|
| > The experimental part is done until a new machine might
| provide some benefit (Often this is done by the
| manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it
| out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running
| process.
|
| ...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure,
| manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch
| with what _consumers_ want ( "Everyone is buying lamb now,
| buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's
| under the assumption that _manufacturers_ never improve
| /iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive
| because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-
| protein diet increases birth dates").
|
| Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-
| manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that
| many manufacturing improvements have been driven by
| marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
| tclancy wrote:
| Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and
| still does the job, it's close enough to done. Something
| going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical
| machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a
| jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he
| was the one person on the floor who still had all his
| fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas
| about good Developer Experience.
| greedo wrote:
| Improvement is usually done via competition. Sometimes
| the competition is price based, and sometimes quality
| based. In the best of worlds, both.
|
| For example, there are a ton of cheap crappy woodworking
| tools. Think Stanley etc. They barely do the job if at
| all. Then there are a group of vendors like Wood River
| that constantly create newer tools that are much more
| expensive than what you find in a big box tool store. And
| then farther up the food chain are vendors like Lie
| Nielsen who craft luxury tools that are amazing to use.
|
| This market segmentation extends to most tools; someone
| like Woodpecker comes up with a ton of clever tools for
| marking/measuring etc for woodworking, then others copy
| them. Oldest story in capitalism.
|
| The manufacturing improvements in this process are non-
| stop. For some really good examples in consumer
| electronics, read "Apple in China" to see how China
| transformed into a power house in a relatively short
| amount of time.
| overfeed wrote:
| > For sure, but how do you know?
|
| In actual engineering, one can work out the theoretical
| limits (strength, expansion, etc) and measure the current
| product's performance against the limits. A new widget-
| making machine or process cannot imbue widgets with
| physics-defying properties. Any fundamental improvements
| can only be made on the outside, auch as new alloys; but
| that would be an entirely different product, nor the one
| you've been selling for 40 years that your customers
| trust and love.
| zevon wrote:
| If you don't have a very good marketing department, I'll
| still kick you out of business if I can double or triple
| the amount of widgets I can make because I started with
| the same machines you did - but I upgraded them with
| better controls, attached a few robot arms and now run a
| lights-out widget factory tended by a fraction of the
| workforce you employ while you reminisce about the good
| old times...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
|
| The ecosystems are an approximation of the people that run
| them. The ecosystems want to get rich quick and cash out
| with no regard for economic sustainability in the medium or
| long term because that's what the people who run them want.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-
| phobic
|
| Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things?
|
| > capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the
| point where things are hanging on by a thread.
|
| You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not
| being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional
| just in case is very expensive insurance policy.
|
| Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as
| aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on
| the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where
| having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap
| events, but the premium on this options contract is never
| worth it on average.
| roenxi wrote:
| > However, the hardware situation you described sounds very
| brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained
| and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space
| of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
|
| The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of
| perspective on just how weird the software people are that
| they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and
| dangerous.
| WJW wrote:
| I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our
| tools. For software people, experimentation _is_ cheap and
| easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If
| you do break something, completely rebuilding the
| application from scratch is something that happens dozens
| of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives
| with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the
| only price is a few person-hours of work.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective
| there.
|
| It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent
| innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more
| modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could
| see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software
| engineering and this is probably to be even more true in
| the year to come.
|
| Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology,
| easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot
| conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and
| cheap CNC machining with precision which were until
| recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly
| getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated
| short run is both manageable and cost effective provided
| you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers
| able to put it in place efficiently.
|
| I think that when people talk about bringing back
| manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in
| 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like
| pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in
| South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an
| uneducated workforce than many expect.
| helltone wrote:
| Do you have some references for the pick and place and
| other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out
| of this space for a while but last I checked these were
| still incredibly challenging things to get right.
| zevon wrote:
| I'd also like more comprehensive write-ups on such topics
| but either I haven't found the right sources yet or all
| the people who know how to set up and keep modern
| fabrication infrastructure going are too busy raking in
| the cash and making stuff. ^^
|
| If you like visual media, the "Strange Parts" YouTube
| channel is an interesting source for glimpses into
| modern, mostly Chinese factories:
| https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeParts/
|
| Since you're asking about pick and place specifically,
| https://www.opulo.io/ is an interesting example of how
| far/cheap you can push such machinery (and the design in
| and of itself is interesting from a manufacturing point
| of view). Not all that relevant from a mass-production
| point of view, though.
| zevon wrote:
| That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further
| inspection. People mucking around with machines and
| processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes,
| steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-
| machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have
| available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in
| developing those things further.
|
| I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine
| shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and
| even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop
| and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take
| the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines,
| CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly
| has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
| overfeed wrote:
| Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their
| mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation
| that takes fown the production line is like Google or
| Meta going partially or fully offline - which has
| happened - but is also financially painful, so they do
| all they can to avoid it.
| zevon wrote:
| Sure - I guess this is generally true for most work
| domains, not just machine shops and serious software
| shops. However, the argument I was responding to was that
| there is no mucking about in the "real world" and that
| there is this difference between mucky software people
| and the serious creators of real stuff. Which I don't
| agree with.
|
| btw: If we understand "machine shop" as a mass production
| environment with modern, integrated production lines, it
| is my anecdotal experience that there is a _massive_
| amount of muckery and fuckery involved in getting such an
| environment to run (usually called "integration" or some
| such which probably looks better on business cards).
| There's also a good chance that over the years - or
| decades - different people will engage in further
| iterations of the muck-pile to modify the system for new
| requirements from high on up or weird edge cases, to
| replace components that are no longer available with
| other stuff or to do whatever else the day might call
| for.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > However, the hardware situation you described sounds very
| brittle to me.
|
| It is very britlle.
|
| The situation described is what happens when there is
| significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve
| productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear
| changing things because you doubt you would be able to get
| back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag
| because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a
| very difficult situation.
|
| That's why someone mentioned _process knowledge_ in another
| thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup
| a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and
| that 's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.
|
| But the original commenter is also right that volume is key
| here. If your volumes are so low that short time
| unavailability or a small amount of failures is life
| threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to
| properly operate.
| scott_w wrote:
| > If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-
| phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of
| tinkering
|
| For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the
| desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react
| quickly to changes.
|
| There are factories that work to order and can change to
| adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between,
| and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able
| to take advantage of economies of scale.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-
| phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of
| tinkering, exploration or innovation.
|
| for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0,
| often by a large amount.
|
| making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red
| hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands
| around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in
| volumes that could hurt or cripple people.
|
| if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories
| aren't so simple
| lbhdc wrote:
| I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I
| expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a
| very different perspective about this.
|
| I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of
| industrial automation and technological advancement about
| 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making
| mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were
| a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls,
| hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.
|
| Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of
| plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable,
| or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we
| worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than
| corporate world I work in now.
| janalsncm wrote:
| That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people
| who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now.
|
| By contrast, the Chinese have mastered _process knowledge_ ,
| transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete
| with them, it's worth knowing what doing well looks like.
| subscribed wrote:
| Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
| spiresofagartha wrote:
| what's it?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Probably this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0
| ssonal wrote:
| Likely this one on the tooling & die industry, and the
| process knowledge that has evaporated from America over
| time. https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52
| ffsm8 wrote:
| They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs
| though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within
| a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
| simgt wrote:
| How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost
| perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to
| highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization
| started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a
| lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints
| imposed on China through embargo.
|
| We're not even getting _back_ to that level, we 've never
| reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| It would also require a degree of consensus and quality
| of leadership which is completely lacking.
| varjag wrote:
| The leadership in democracy does what the population
| wants, even more so in the past couple decades.
| simgt wrote:
| Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting
| systems are far from being the best we can come up with
| in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants
| to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live
| in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting
| for these days.
| kakacik wrote:
| Yet people actively decided as they did, while almost
| fully knowing where it leads. It could also have been
| worse given progressing senility, attempt to overthrow
| government etc. We are not in a new territory after all,
| just continuation. Tariffs are new mexican wall.
|
| At least accept how your nation thinks on average, no
| weaseling around simple fact of today's reality.
| darepublic wrote:
| In fairness while people do obviously want them they also
| want all the current conveniences of modern life and
| more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum
| of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term
| environmental effects. Essentially I think the average
| joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging
| climate concerns just like the gov does.
| varjag wrote:
| I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear
| that political participation was never more direct and
| organized than now in the age of social media. The fools
| and resentful who always were numerous have found a way
| to unite and bypass the establishment and educational
| filters which were effectively restraining politics
| before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe
| dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who
| are being elected squarely and fairly represent the
| people who voted for them.
| simgt wrote:
| I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current
| US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics
| that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they
| are selected by a system that was designed to estimate
| the preference of a population (more likely the
| preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic
| system designed differently would have a different
| outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the
| system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not
| at the same scale.
|
| [0] https://democracy-
| technologies.org/participation/consensus-b...
|
| 1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_
| Climat...
| Thlom wrote:
| Yet somehow the desires of the population is fulfilled to
| a higher degree in authoritarian China than in the beacon
| of democracy USA.
| varjag wrote:
| This uh valiant defense of China misses my point
| entirely. People in democracies have no excuse hiding
| their personal responsibility behind flawed leadership.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| By the same token, hiding comprehensively broken and
| undemocratic governance behind "it's the publics' fault,
| because they get to vote for one of two candidates owned
| by wealthy donors every 2 years" is the opposite of
| useful.
| varjag wrote:
| This phenomenon is not limited to the United States, the
| trend is global including many parliamentary republics.
| mattlutze wrote:
| A degree of consensus and unity in leadership which is
| foreign to current American culture.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| bollocks. there is profound unity and direction in US
| leadership, and has been for years -- it's all written by
| the Heritage Foundation and funded by a few oil and tech
| billionaires.
|
| it's been like that since before George W Bush was lock-
| step with Fox News and a GOP led Congress.
|
| the only difference is in 2025 the billionaires funding
| these things are as foreign as they are domistic
| gregw2 wrote:
| Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished
| goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in
| America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at
| least, per a factory engineer:
|
| "The main function of this site is to produce our
| standard Starlink kits. Right now, we're producing 15,000
| a day straight out of the factory.
|
| Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and
| we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right
| out to the customer zones."
|
| https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-
| factor...
| bdbdkdksk wrote:
| So they form the plastic (already processed) using
| machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated
| PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly
| soup to nuts manufacturing.
|
| I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America
| where we populated some of the board components in-house,
| but they were etched in batches off-site.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant,
| it's a typical Musk exaggeration.
|
| The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that
| domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping
| costs because the dishes do take up volume.
|
| But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're
| making and assembling the PCB in house, but the
| components originate from _a lot_ of suppliers and there
| are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I 'd guess
| the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty
| novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to
| be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having
| to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of
| PCBs from China.
|
| [1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-
| supplier-t...
|
| [2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-
| dish-x-ra...
| ux266478 wrote:
| It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were
| essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the
| mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and
| process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao
| and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things
| for China. The vertical integration you mention was
| basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as
| part of the New Development Pattern (Xin Fa Zhan Ge Ju )
| for the Inner Loop (Guo Nei Shuang Xun Huan )
|
| China today _is_ virtually unrecognizable compared to
| even 10 years ago, though.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| I remember when there was a big push to make ball point
| pen tips, and how a but less than 10 years later they
| succeeded in making them domestically.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Rings a bell. Sounds simple, but being able to reliably
| make huge numbers of tiny little metal spheres with tiny
| tiny tolerance is a serious feat; being able to do that
| brings knowledge and experience that unlocks an entire
| level of the tech tree.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's
| possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that
| we want to independently of a physical conflict, before
| someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not
| advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.
| downrightmike wrote:
| ~~~~~we could just hire them and buy their knowledge if it
| weren't for trade wars~~~~~~~
| delfinom wrote:
| No the point is "overhead". You don't disturb working setups
| because you will cause engineering time to update the setup,
| that engineering time is added to the cost overhead of a job.
| Time is literally money, even if the employee(s) are
| salaried, their time is factored into the cost of a job.
|
| The knowledge is still there, but American labor is expensive
| as hell compared to overseas competitors and so any shop in
| the US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs
| to remain competitively priced.
|
| When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the
| cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as
| a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to
| customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent
| orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on
| subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any
| existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones
| because you decided to change shit on a whim.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Modern shipbuilders know all about that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The knowledge is still there
|
| Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the
| knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on
| how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the
| bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when
| someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small
| contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went
| away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.
|
| There is always, _always_ undocumented steps and unknown
| implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process.
| No matter how good the documentation is, you need the
| practical experience.
|
| And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much
| military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war
| with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a
| massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a
| shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be
| rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh
| recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there
| were no experienced personnel.
|
| [1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-
| disappearing-hole...
| RataNova wrote:
| It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now
| we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
| wongarsu wrote:
| Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation
| schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last
| decades, but because the next generation is so much better
| that your total costs for the next three years are lower if
| you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.
|
| And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also
| because servers are expensive to run relative to their
| purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining
| tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping
| an old machine around is small
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Did we, though? I am just not convinced.
|
| A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not
| made to last. I had _paper dolls_ as a child. So did my
| mother. Probably her mother too - I 'd ask, but she's dead.
|
| How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km),
| at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at
| 100k.
|
| They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were
| cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very
| highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More
| realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts
| they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things
| that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but
| that's no different now.
|
| Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs,
| and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds.
|
| Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to
| last? How about an ink pen?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I think a lot of people conflate "built to last" with
| "ability to be repaired by yourself."
|
| To continue the car analogy, I could replace almost any
| part easily, with simple tools I have at home, on my 1990
| GMC 1500 truck. Parts are plentiful and cheap, plenty of
| room to work on the engine, nothing is hidden inside black
| boxes. It's got 280k miles on it and still running great.
|
| To contrast that with my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek hybrid, is
| much more difficult to work on, can't even fit my hands to
| access anything that's not on the top of the engine, other
| repairs requiring full engine removal and specialized
| tools. There's more electronics and more completely sealed
| systems.
|
| Same can be said about some household appliances, and even
| computers. Not only were things, generally more repairable,
| but repair didn't require specialized tools in most cases,
| we didn't have to first melt glue, resolder SSDs, etc.
|
| My old compaq Armada may not have been built to last at the
| time, but it was certainly stupid easy to repair and
| replace every single component in it.
| nosianu wrote:
| Good furniture was inherited and lasted a very long time
| even across generations.
|
| For a while I still used a wonderful and thick winter
| (loden) coat originally owned by my great-grandfather, from
| the early 20th century.
|
| Dishes and silverware. Toys, books. Tools. A modern hammer
| looks much more fancy but it works no better than an
| ancient dwarven-made one that gives you +10 strength when
| used. Musical instruments. Some kitchen utensils,
| especially ones used for traditional cooking and food
| preservation methods.
|
| Boots and shoes! They were repaired repeatedly (that also
| means they were easily repairable, not so easy with current
| shoes and their materials and layers).
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have a 4790k based machine standing unused by my desk
| (going to get the data off it and then get rid of it).
| Today's processors are so much better that if you used this
| one you'd be losing money on power.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| We still do. I think the Service Life of a Toyota Landcruiser
| is still 25 years. As a software developer, I've written
| control code for instruments that are expected to be on the
| market for at least 15-20 years from initial release and we
| have to plan Support and spare parts accordingly.
|
| It's just that the fast-paced, built to last 6 months stuff
| gets all the good press.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Deregulation and firms like Bain capital (Romney) parted out
| all those corporations to china.
|
| You see the same process that destroyed Toys r Us and Sears
| more recently.
|
| This was all on purpose to extract whatever could from the
| corpse or USA manufacturing
| ForHackernews wrote:
| The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today
| https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...
| tclancy wrote:
| There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the
| replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are
| horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older
| folks are thinking (I imagine) "if the tools have lasted that
| long they must be well-honed and very good".
|
| Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone
| turning 50 this year.
| fidotron wrote:
| I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost
| everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the
| tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from
| before and noticed that they really were built much better,
| or at least heavier, back then.
|
| I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's
| short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as
| reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made
| everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving
| heavy stuff around when we might need to.
|
| Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or
| monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let
| alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
| nradov wrote:
| Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse.
| Battery packs are quite heavy.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the
| inclusion of more structural safety features and creature
| comforts.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil.
| crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't
| making things heavy.
|
| e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/0
| 3/new-ve...
| kenhwang wrote:
| That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's
| comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with
| the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.
|
| The 2000 Accord sedan is 2,712lbs, not 2,987lbs (which
| would be the wagon).
|
| The 2019 Civic sedan is 2,743-2,923lbs depending on
| equipment/trim.
|
| So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar
| size _did_ get heavier.
|
| The Miata proves that cars don't have to be heavier, but
| the Miata also took advantage of much more aluminum
| compared to the older models. Maybe mainstream cars
| should also switch to use more aluminum to keep weight
| down, and you're right that the reason they don't is
| because oil is cheap enough where weight isn't a priority
| enough to use more expensive aluminum instead of steel.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's
| comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with
| the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.
|
| Good to know.
|
| > So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar
| size did get heavier.
|
| If the minimum is 1% heavier and the maximum is 2%
| lighter then I would not say " _did_ get heavier ".
| kenhwang wrote:
| You can only make the argument that the Civic is "2%
| lighter" when it is being compared to a wagon; apples to
| oranges comparison that invalidates the whole comparison.
|
| They picked that specific year Accord because it's the
| same size as a sedan as that specific year Civic sedan,
| so it makes no sense to then compare the weight to the
| much larger Accord wagon variant. You might as well
| compare the sedan to a crossover to argue that the sedan
| didn't get heavier.
|
| The range is 1% heavier to 7% heavier comparing the sedan
| to the sedan. Both ends of the range are heavier, so "did
| get heavier" is an accurate statement.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay I misread you then, but you're saying the 2000
| Accord sedan only has one weight, while the Civic has a
| several percent range? If that's right then do we know
| which Civic trim is equivalent to the Accord?
|
| If we know that trim is worth _at least_ 6%, and we don
| 't know how to align the cars, then the confidence
| interval around "1% to 7%" extends far enough to overlap
| some negative percents.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| A 2000 Honda Accord and a 2019 Honda Civic have nearly
| identical dimensions. Car models generally get bigger
| with each generation over time.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Another thing not mentioned by this poor article
| (everything forbes does these days is hot garbage), is
| that vehicles which are heavier do damage quartically
| proportional to their weight -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
|
| So the ever increasing weight of cars, trucks, SUVs, and
| especially semi-trucks is also responsible for our roads
| being shit, full of potholes, and expensive to fix.
| avn2109 wrote:
| Surely they do damage proportional to the fourth power
| _of the contact pressure_ on the tire contact patch, not
| the fourth power of the overall vehicle weight, right? So
| adding axles or wider tires etc mitigates this.
| nradov wrote:
| Exactly because of the fourth power low, almost all of
| the road damage comes from the heaviest vehicles: class 7
| and 8 trucks as well as buses etc. Even the heaviest
| passenger vehicles are negligible by comparison. And the
| weight of semi-trucks hasn't been "ever increasing":
| normal maximum weight has been fixed at 80,000 pounds for
| decades.
|
| In some areas the roads are shit due to weather
| conditions, mainly frost heaves. This has little to do
| with vehicle damage.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| It's also due to the size of the vehicles that are
| popular today. SUVs and pickup trucks(used as family
| vehicles).
|
| However the increase has also been offset with weight
| savings in other places.
|
| - The use of aluminum in suspension components and body
| panels
|
| - Long ago the move to unibody over body on frame for
| small cars
|
| - smaller engines, V8s weigh more than an inline 4
| cylinder and require heavier suspension components.
|
| For example a 1989 Lamborghini Countach 25th weighs
| around 3200lbs which is slightly heavier than a 2022 VW
| Golf GTI (3150~)
|
| I see comments that blame safety technology (electronic
| components) for increasing the weight of a car but a
| blind spot monitoring system probably weighs less than
| 5lbs. A rear camera is also around that.
|
| Structural safety and airbags do add to a cars weight but
| these changes have made cars extremely safe.
| fidotron wrote:
| Almost like changing the energy source causes a step
| change in energy optimization priorities . . .
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car
| inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at
| least 2 strong people
| dunham wrote:
| I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80
| lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to
| hold all of the wires in front of the screen.
|
| They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they
| would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct
| into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the
| monitor after that).
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Right. Bought two out of a University lab and lived in an
| apartment six stories high with only stairs. Moved out
| those monitors even and they were more difficult to get
| down than the couch...
|
| Don't let me get started about fixed frequency, X11
| modeline guessing (wrong of course) and needing a second
| monitor to even get back to the original config.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The weight from a CRT is mostly about the amount of glass
| required to keep the atmosphere out, as it's essentially
| a vacuum bottle with better marketing. On that 21"
| display, you've got about 6000 pounds of force trying to
| push the face inward, not to mention the sides, neck,
| etc.
| dunham wrote:
| Yeah, these monitors were a bit heavier than most
| consumer 21" monitors at the time. We also got Viewsonic
| monitors for PCs, which were lighter. At the time, I had
| assumed the additional weight was from extra shielding,
| but I later read that some of the weight difference was a
| metal frame holding the wires. The trinitron had a bunch
| of vertical wires instead of a grid of holes on the front
| - If I remember right, they'd shimmer a little if you
| smacked the side of the monitor with your hand.
|
| It's possible they also had more glass than typical for a
| 21" monitor, I don't recall if they were any flatter than
| the Viewsonics or not.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I don't know where I fit on that spectrum, my first thought
| was there's probably nobody around anymore to replace these
| fifty year old tools, and/or they'll price it at a level that
| would wipe all profits for the next 10 years when replacement
| will be needed.
|
| Our field also have these IBM AS/400 or older running for 30+
| years in a server room at the back of an office floor. They
| are more feared than revered.
| dijit wrote:
| To be fair, a lot of the tools _we use as developers_ have
| 30-40 year heritage 's themselves. The things that most
| people depend on and are in the background.
| __loam wrote:
| Relational databases are from the 70's
| ACCount37 wrote:
| My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the
| fuck are you replacing it with".
| rglover wrote:
| A shockingly rare question to be asked. As best as I can
| tell, the biggest threat to civilization isn't AI, it's our
| culture of "that's not my problem" leaving otherwise patch-
| able holes in critical systems.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| The biggest threat to civilization is, in fact, AI. It's
| a new problem, and one with an utterly ridiculous
| lethality at its limit. It makes the atomic bomb look
| benign.
|
| "That's not my problem" is something humans have been
| dealing with since before they mastered the art of
| sharpening a stick.
| myko wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment shared before and I just don't
| get it. What is the logical progression of "AI" to "more
| dangerous than the atomic bomb"?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Humans are dominating the environment by hopelessly
| outsmarting everything in it. Applied intelligence is
| _extremely powerful_.
|
| Humans, however, are not immune to being hopelessly
| outsmarted themselves.
|
| And what are we doing with AI now? We're trying to build
| systems that can do what human intelligence does - but
| cheaper, faster and more scalable. Multiple frontier labs
| have "AGI" - a complete system that matches or exceeds
| human performance in any given domain - as an explicitly
| stated goal. And the capabilities of the frontier systems
| keep advancing.
|
| If AGI actually lands, it's already going to be a
| disruption of everything. Already a "humankind may render
| itself irrelevant" kind of situation. But at the very
| limit - if ASI follows?
|
| Don't think "a very smart human". Think "Manhattan
| Project and CIA and Berkshire Hathaway, combined, raised
| to a level of competence you didn't think possible, and
| working 50 times faster than human institutions could".
| If an ASI wants power, it will get power. Whatever an ASI
| wants to happen will happen.
|
| And if humanity isn't a part of what it wants? 10 digit
| death toll.
| card_zero wrote:
| This hierarchy-of-intelligence concept is meaningless.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You might as well have said "intelligence is
| meaningless". Obviously false.
| card_zero wrote:
| No, I might not as well have said that. Let me ask you
| this: _huh?_
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Even if LLMs don't become AGI (and I don't think they
| will), LLMs are potentially superb disinformation
| generators able to operate at massive scale. Modern
| society was already having difficulty holding onto
| consensus reality. "AI" may be able to break it.
|
| Don't think "smart human". Think about a few trillion
| scam artists who cannot be distinguished from a real
| person except by face to face conversation.
|
| Your every avenue of modern communication and information
| being innundate by note-perfect 419 scams, forever.
| myrmidon wrote:
| The logical progression to me is AI acting in its own
| interests, and outcompeting humans much like humans
| outcompeted every other animal on the planet.
|
| This is particularly threatening because AI is much less
| constrained on size, energy and training bandwidth than a
| human; should it overtake us in cognitive capabilities
| within the next century, I don't see a feasible way for
| us to keep up.
|
| You might argue that AI has no good way to act on the
| physical world right now, or that the current state of
| the art is pathetic compared to humans, but a _lot_ of
| progress can happen in a decade or two, and the writing
| is on the wall.
|
| Human cognitive capability was basically brute-forced by
| evolution; I think it is almost naive to assume that our
| evolved capabilities will be able to keep up with
| purpose-build hardware over the long run (personally, I'd
| expect better-than-human AGI before 2050 with pretty high
| confidence).
| bogdanoff_2 wrote:
| > "That's not my problem" is something humans have been
| dealing with since before they mastered the art of
| sharpening a stick.
|
| Yes, and that's why civilizations have kept rising and
| falling throughout history.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Nah, it's global warming.
|
| Because fossil fuel is stupid useful and there's no way
| we're going to stop burning it. And then we get to the
| climate scenarios that aren't compatible with our current
| sophisticated civilization, even with the currently
| accepted climate science (that always seems to
| underestimate what actually happens).
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Global warming just isn't harmful enough to pose a
| credible extinction risk.
|
| The damage is too limited and happens far too slowly.
| Even the unlikely upper end projections aren't enough to
| upend the human civilization - the harms up there at the
| top end are "worse than WW2", but WW2 sure didn't end
| humankind. At the same time: the ever-worsening economics
| of fossil fuel power put a bound on climate change even
| in a "no climate policy" world, which we are
| outperforming.
|
| It's like the COVID of global natural disasters. Harmful
| enough to be worth taking measures against. But just
| harmless enough that you could do absolutely nothing, and
| get away with it.
|
| The upper bound on AI risks is: total extinction of
| humankind.
|
| I fucking wish that climate change was the biggest threat
| as far as eye can see.
| ux266478 wrote:
| You machine a new part.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Exactly: the new process becomes the lowest bid, new NRE
| goes forward, and the old process finally gets to drift
| off into the sunset. It happens all the time and people
| (sometimes the same people) complain about that too.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Something newer. The reason that 50-year-old machine tools
| are still around isn't that they can't be replaced. It's
| that there's often no reason to.
|
| To use OP as an example, in a lot of places, you'll find an
| ancient milling machine or a lathe that's dedicated to
| running a single job a few times a year. The machine was
| depreciated decades ago, but it can still do that job and
| there's no reason to get rid of it.
|
| What modern tools give you is speed and flexibility. Many
| shops need neither.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> What modern tools give you is speed and flexibility._
|
| Many of the modern tools can also be grafted onto the old
| tools. Not just CNC conversions but the biggest
| productivity boost when I worked in a shop was converting
| everything to a zero point clamping system.
| deanputney wrote:
| I had not heard of zero point clamping. This video I
| found is extremely cool, I can see how that would save a
| lot of time and money in the shop!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrLri_RdgK8
| zevon wrote:
| What do all these machine shops without any need for
| modern machinery and processes actually _do_?
|
| Seriously though, of course you can make a living with
| old tools - however, even the village metal workshop
| around here has at least one big-ass laser cutter and a
| CNC mill next to all their old(er) lathes, mills, brakes,
| presses and other toys. Many oldschool fabricators I
| spoke to over the last few years are quite interested in
| what laser welding brings/will bring to the table.
| Basically all smaller fabrication companies I've seen
| (the long tail of the car industry and other bigger
| industries, mostly) are continually upgrading their
| infrastructure with all sorts of robots and other
| automation widgets. And so on.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| No one said that they had no need for modern machinery.
| It's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. If
| you have a manufacturing process that was dialed in
| perfectly 20 years ago, and your customer(s) is still
| buying those parts, made on that machine, there is no
| benefit to moving them to another machine that now has to
| be set up just right, have the new parts coming off it
| QC'd to make sure that they are identical to what came
| off the old one, etc.
|
| It's work that you don't need to do and that you won't
| get paid for. If the old machine breaks, then maybe it
| would make sense to move the job to something newer.
|
| I used to work with someone whose entire business was
| retrofitting old machine tools with modern controllers
| when the decades-old electronics failed. You'd be amazed
| how much of this stuff is still out there.
| fragmede wrote:
| Sourcing via eBay.com
| bluGill wrote:
| As an older folk, I perceive 50 year old tools as likely worn
| out and in desperate need of replacement. However often
| nobody makes the tool anymore and so we are willing to spend
| a lot to maintain them instead. (I drive a 25 year old car -
| this is only possible because I can get a rebuilt
| transmission, but my maintenance costs over the last 10 years
| would have bought much newer/nicer used car, and I'm getting
| close to where I could buy a new car)
|
| The other possibility is the tool isn't used much and modern
| accountants would never allow you to buy it in the first
| place because of all the cash tied up. (that is the work the
| tool did over those 50 years wasn't enough to pay for the
| cost of the tool and the space to store it)
| technothrasher wrote:
| I was recently talking to the head clockmaker at the
| Chelsea Clock Company, one of the very few, if not the
| only, remaining original New England clock companies still
| operating. He showed me some pictures of clock making tools
| being used during WWII, and then the very same tools in
| perfect shape still being used today. He also had one tool
| that dated back to when they were the Boston Clock Company
| (circa 1894) that was still in active use. In this new
| world of disposable tools, it was pretty neat to see.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| > What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea
| of fifty year old tools
|
| My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're
| basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use
| scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language
| for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that
| Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have
| been done with any other language, no complaints, I love
| Python, but its just amusing to me.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to
| learn that finds a good balance between structure and
| brevity. It has very good support for the data structures
| you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people
| love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and
| eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and
| scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant
| scientific computing environment that almost anyone can
| get into.
|
| I tried out most of the scripting languages out there
| (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python
| just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to
| worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In
| comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend
| for those with typical automation needs.
|
| In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward
| development. There have been plenty of other tools that
| may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could
| have done this, but by that time nobody was going to
| build out massive libraries for something expensive and
| partly closed off.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Python is one of my all time favorites, it is quirky, but
| nowhere near as quirky as JavaScript.
| torginus wrote:
| For Fortran, I have the concept of 'immortal code' - code
| that is generally hard to write, is compatible with
| everything, and implements an algorithm in a way that's
| impossible to improve on - or at least doing so would be
| celebrated as a minor breakthrough.
|
| A lot of numerical optimization code is this - it
| conforms to a strict 'C' ABI - taking (arrays of) simple
| floats and ints and outputting the same, so binding it to
| another higher level language is trivial, so rewriting it
| makes little sense. If the same algorithm were written in
| Java, most people would not want to bring in Java as a
| dependency for their Python/C++/whatever project, but
| since this is just a tiny C object file, it's happily
| integrated into everything.
|
| They also tend to be very tricky to get right, I remember
| reading a paper where the author was adamant that
| changing the order of a multiply and an add (a
| mathematically invariant operation) would cause the
| algorithm to blow up due to the different scales of
| floating point values involved causing a major loss of
| precision. I'm sure there's tons of stories like this.
|
| This is the sort of code which took PhD's who studied
| this exact topic years to get right, even though the
| actual code often looks unassuming, I would dread the day
| when I was required to touch it (but I never do - since
| it always does what it says on the tin)
| __loam wrote:
| Fortran has been a research language used by people like
| physicists and mathematicians that know what they're
| doing and have been developing that tool for decades and
| Python is perfect for people who have no idea what
| they're doing.
| sharadov wrote:
| I found R a better language for Data Science, somehow
| Python won out.
| Scarblac wrote:
| NumPy was pretty early, and it hit the sweet spot for
| science: free, fast, with a quick and dirty scripting
| language around it.
|
| Then the whole ecosystem that Python has nowadays was
| built on NumPy, and sending data from one library to
| another was trivial because of it.
|
| That's it.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| No one uses scipy for anything serious anymore in AI
| research or on any type of modern models.
|
| You're setting your students up for failure if this is how
| you are teaching neural networks to them. You should switch
| to pytorch or at least something like tensorflow or jax or
| you are actively doing intellectual disservice to them and
| leading them to be actively noncompetitive both in AI
| academic paper writing/grad school and in the job market.
|
| Similarly, use of sklearn considered harmful in a world
| where CuML/CuPY/Nvidia RAPIDS exists.
|
| And also, knowledge of conda/pip/poetry considered harmful
| in a world where UV exists.
|
| Teach MODERN tools please.
| fifilura wrote:
| Oh my. Teach something that lasts please.
|
| In 2030, pytorch and uv will be so 2025.
| jacobolus wrote:
| It sounds like a fundamental education failure and/or an
| extreme failure of tool design and training in workplaces
| if new employees with relevant degrees don't have the
| basic knowledge to pick up new tools on the job. A
| liberal arts education is for teaching basic
| transferrable skills, and is not a narrowly tailored job
| training program.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the
| replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people
| are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the
| older folks are thinking (I imagine) "if the tools have
| lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good".
|
| It's like when someone wants to choose a brand new web
| framework that isn't battle tested over one of the most
| battle tested web frameworks. You can hire way more
| developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding
| edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You can hire way more developers with battle tested
| tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it
| can even scale.
|
| There's a crucial difference!
|
| You can hire expensive developers on battle tested
| tooling... or you can hire a shit ton of juniors that want
| to work on $BUZZWORD for cheap in exchange for the CV creds
| of "worked on $BUZZWORD".
|
| Resume Driven Development...
| sokoloff wrote:
| This is known as the Lindy Effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| yxhuvud wrote:
| I rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change
| anything - not cause the existing system is good but because
| there are no people left that understand the whole thing.
|
| But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views
| will change.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This happens in tech as well. It's called COBOL and it
| refuses to go away, despite lots of people's best efforts.
| loire280 wrote:
| Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5
| years old had major features that nobody understood
| anymore, even features that were core to the product.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The gear cutting machines almost never had mechanical
| failures. As long as they keep them lubricated, and
| occasionally muck out the sumps, the machines should still
| be going in the year 2100.
|
| The other thing about gear cutting is that hobs only cut
| one size/profile of tooth. Some of the cutting tools I was
| using dated from before WW1, for odd sizes that didn't get
| used much.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My
| dad said it's older than him!"
| mikewarot wrote:
| Ask that question in language arts, and you'll get some
| very weird looks.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That's pretty much what I told the student, along with
| "everything you're studying in every other class is also
| older than your dad, and that's why you study it."
| Fergusonb wrote:
| Roller coaster tycoon is good.
|
| The business software I have to work with from the 80s is a
| straight up nightmare. And I'd say most old software is in
| this camp.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, most new software is a nightmare too. And recently a
| lot of it started to try to do the wrong thing by design,
| what's an extra step into nightmare scenario beyond
| anything from 80s.
| chii wrote:
| The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be still
| good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more
| efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use (say,
| compared to a lathe).
|
| This is the whole idea of industrialization - moving away
| from having skilled artisans, into machines that encode the
| skill to reproduce the article.
|
| The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in
| operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the
| production methods remained static (of course, if the
| production machines are good enough already, then investment
| into new machines don't bring in new profits).
| wslh wrote:
| I think it is not always about an age gap. A friend has a
| distribution company with many trucks and many times they
| need to use a manual machine, and soldering for fixing
| truck issues.
| MisterTea wrote:
| As someone who grew up in a machine and wood working shop
| and now builds, repairs and retrofits machinery, I can say
| that 50 years old is nothing and absolutely fine.
|
| > The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be
| still good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more
| efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use
| (say, compared to a lathe).
|
| I assume you are referring to manual operated machinery vs
| CNC machinery? Otherwise there is little to no efficiency
| gained from a new CNC machine. I've run both and the setup
| of a CNC for simple jobs that can be done on a manual isn't
| worth the effort. CNC's really shine at high production and
| very complex parts.
|
| > The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in
| operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the
| production methods remained static
|
| If the requirements haven't changed, e.g. machining flanges
| that meet ASME B16.5, and the production methods are
| already optimized, why even bring this up?
|
| > (of course, if the production machines are good enough
| already, then investment into new machines don't bring in
| new profits).
|
| Right. If the specs didn't change then why bother investing
| in pointless upgrades?
|
| The ONLY reason companies toss out machinery: it's no
| longer useful to the company, or so hopelessly broken that
| it cant be fixed. And there is very little that can render
| a machine scrap unless something catastrophic happened. And
| there is very little preventing old machinery from being
| retrofitted with new controls.
| micro_cam wrote:
| People here also don't understand machine shops.
|
| My dad ran a job shop focused on small jobs and the economics
| are different.
|
| A lot of his work was keeping other local shops / industrial
| equipment up and running. So there is a lot of variety of
| work but very low throughput and kind of by deffintion you
| have the capabilities to fix your own machines.
|
| Programing a CNC machine makes it east to make a lot of the
| same part but if you only need one it may be quicker to just
| knock it out manually.
|
| A 50 year old mill or lathe is easy to keep up and running,
| can be upgraded with a Digital readout or even CNC controls
| if desired. A tool in a shop like this likely won't see the
| cycles one on a factory floor constant uses sees but may be
| worth keeping around since it offers a unique capability...he
| had a large ww ii surplus lathe for jobs that wouldn't fit on
| the smaller more modern machines for example.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Less interested in America's expensive and slow manufacturing
| than in Chinese processes. They can retool faster, handle far
| more volume, and except for specialized industries (medicine,
| aerospace) their quality is better.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| How old are you? Do you not understand business cycles?
| Life cycles? 'Baggie pants are the future, anyone wearing
| tired out old non-baggy pants, it's over grandpa, for we
| have, for the first time, discovered baggie pants are cool
| and modern'
|
| It's all fun and games when everything (your trains, your
| new bridges, your manufacturing process) is the brand new
| cool version. I went through that cycle (starting family,
| brand new house, new cars, new boat, high paying tech job
| working on early 2000s cutting edge tech). Our house was
| the cool house for a bit. Then is was just another house.
| Then is became a burden with maintenance expenses on top of
| the mortgage. I became a grey beard with legacy tech
| skills.
|
| For China, what happens when things settle more? The market
| flushes out half the companies making the tools (there's
| tons of companies during the 'fill out' cycle, but at some
| point that slows/industry consolidates), or new product
| lines replace the old, now your factory is on borrowed time
| until the machines break down, you aren't the new hyped
| cool kid (I'm talking about you USA as a country/Ruby on
| Rail devs/Angular devs). Like with a new home, slowly your
| mortgage gets supplemented with appliance repair bills and
| other maintenance, what was cool and new is outdated and
| replaced with 'better'. China is doing good with robots,
| but what happens next gen when roboto/AI interaction is
| native built in. Does China scrap their entire 2025 robot
| infra and replace it with 2030s? Or does someone else gain
| the advantage of not having those 'legacy' slower to
| retool, slower volume Chinese 2025 robots/infra?
|
| It's wild how smart people don't seem to understand basic
| cycles anymore. China is in a growth cycle and everyone is
| going to their 'new home party' and saying man this is all
| great (it is awesome. It is amazing how China went from
| poverty to current success, so many improved lives I love
| it) and we are acting like this is the first time someone
| bought a new home ever and the home will always be perfect
| and new and cutting edge.
|
| Let's just celebrate that so much poverty and suffering has
| been eliminated in China, and wish them well and continued
| improvements especially as they transition from the
| generations that suffered to their newer generations
| without all that trama. That is also tricky to navigate for
| a society as life expectations become wildly different.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I'm a nearly 50 year old tool myself.
| egberts1 wrote:
| They can stop using the screwdriver, wrench, and hammer and see
| how far they can get.
|
| Or keep changing those tools to better fit the job.
|
| Progress continues with continual process improvements.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers
| with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured
| in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite
| short sighted to me.
|
| There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or
| economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes
| of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often
| ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where
| we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our
| mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or
| two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern.
| We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in
| 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's
| overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into
| infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
| kipchak wrote:
| Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional
| feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are
| able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the
| bill is due the downside falls on the general public or
| taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon
| Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all
| generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.
|
| There's also a element of lost collective memory via
| generational change providing a new supply of optimists.
| dcchambers wrote:
| > The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers
| with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured
| in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite
| short sighted to me.
|
| The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is
| with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced
| regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia
| (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they
| make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
|
| If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only
| way to continue to increase profits is to have more people
| buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at
| least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
|
| Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have
| their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what
| we're running into.
| manquer wrote:
| Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or
| now. People value longevity and quality only when the
| innovation pace is slow.
|
| Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid
| changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just
| poor quality.
|
| In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built),
| nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft,
| today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
|
| The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone
| updated their phones almost every year standing around the
| block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is
| very little reason to. The incremental changes are not
| meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged
| and of course expensive.
|
| We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
| walkabout wrote:
| > In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built),
| nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft,
| today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
|
| Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely
| a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure
| that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-
| than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still
| in wide use in 1975.
|
| Any big shift around then was probably because of the
| development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much
| driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet
| engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines
| will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use
| in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had
| "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with
| some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered
| those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3,
| a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what
| caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the
| '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
| manquer wrote:
| DC-3 was an exception[0]
|
| The point was not on any specific technical or economic
| factor. It was to illustrate that rapid evolution in
| comfort, or speed and also safety[1] means people will
| prefer adoption of newer tech quickly and not be concerned
| about longevity and actively devalue slightly older
| products.
|
| When the improvements start becoming marginal only then
| longevity start to matter. The planes developed from 90s to
| now have lot to offer operators but not much new[2] to
| passengers, we are still designing(not just operating) new
| 737 variants after all. Most people cannot tell the age of
| the plane if the cabin has been refreshed.
|
| This preference for newer generation of tools has little to
| do with previous generations having different values as
| nostalgically some like to ascribe to, but simply to
| technology maturity was my point.
|
| ---
|
| [0] As impressive the 100 year history and the longevity of
| a pre-war design has been. We have to keep in mind the
| dynamics of unpressurized plane operating at less than 300
| knots with a service ceiling of less than 25,000 feet is
| hardly comparable to that of any modern passenger aircraft
| cruising at 0.90+ mach for 12-15+ hours daily at 37,000
| feet going through tens of thousands pressurization cycles.
|
| [1] Airframes perhaps were not a popular safety concern
| directly, pressurized and reduced noise in cabins were
| major selling points.
|
| Air safety regulations were famously said to be written in
| blood. It is undeniable that was massive drop in fatalities
| in 80-90s from 60-70s after safety became concern and
| everyone held both operators and manufacturers accountable.
|
| [2] Improved range or better engine reliability that meant
| we can do longer ETOS on twin engine etc do benefit
| passengers indirectly.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you
| might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups_
|
| I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants.
| Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to
| do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre
| precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where
| parts are effectively custom-tuned for _this_ machine only,
| allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for _this_
| machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop
| within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting
| these systems actually working.
| classified wrote:
| And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into
| manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical
| opportunity cost
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Why is that the case?
|
| If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so
| much?
|
| We're not talking super intelligence here, just human level
| intelligence.
|
| OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in
| the game.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| My argument is based on
|
| 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude
| of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to
| task on
|
| 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another
| is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by
| basically helping every employee at that company do better at
| their job)
|
| 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model
| will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that
| can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip
| design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock
| market, etc
| thundoe wrote:
| Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not
| sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human
| history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by
| their lifespan, they didn't solve every problem, and each
| discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the
| same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance
| to copy and stay in the race
| mkl wrote:
| All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-
| improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local
| maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap
| or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be
| months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge
| devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it
| may not even be possible without inventing and mass-
| manufacturing better hardware). Another company achieving a
| slightly different form of AGI within a few years will
| probably be at least competitive, and if they have more
| resources or a better design they could overtake.
| ahoka wrote:
| These companies already have access to the best meat-brains
| in the world and what tasks do they work on? Advertisement
| mostly?
| jimbohn wrote:
| The AGI argument assumes there is a 0 -> 1 moment where the
| model suddenly becomes "AGI" and starts performing
| miraculous tasks, accompanied by recursive self-
| improvement. So far, our experience shows that we are
| getting incremental improvements over time from different
| companies.
|
| These things are being commoditized, and we are still at
| the start of the curve when it comes to hardware, data
| centers, etc.
|
| Arguing for an all-in civilization/country bet on AGI given
| this premise, is either foolish or a sign that you are
| selling "AGI"
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Wait, but why would an AGI be better at improving itself
| compared to an AI researcher doing it?
|
| AGI is not super intelligence.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| The argument is something like AGI or its owner wouldn't want
| other AGIs to exist. So it would destroy the capabilities of
| other AGI before it could evolve(by things like hacking,
| manipulation etc.).
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Oh, so the goal is to create an insane and predatory piece
| of software that is out of the control of its creators?
| Sounds wonderful.
| agubelu wrote:
| Even assuming that's the case, everyone's acting like throwing
| more GPUs at the problem is somehow gonna get them to AGI
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the
| problem.
|
| GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL,
| architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate
| of improvement we're seeing now.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| The very idea that AGI will arise from LLMs is ridiculous
| at best.
|
| Computer science hubris at its finest.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Why is it ridiculous that an LLM or a system similar to
| or built off of an LLM could reach AGI?
| saubeidl wrote:
| Because LLMs are just stochastic parrots and don't do any
| thinking.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the
| numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like
| stochastic parrots.
|
| The same arguments are always brought up, often short
| pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems
| silly that despite this argument first emerging when
| LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's
| have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is
| still being made with little interrogation into its
| potential faults, or clarification on the precise
| boundary of intelligence LLM's will never be able to
| cross.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Which novel idea have LLMs brought forward so far?
| leptons wrote:
| Call me back when LLMs stop "hallucinating" constantly.
| leptons wrote:
| If AGI is built from LLMs, how could we trust it? It's
| going to "hallucinate", so I'm not sure that this AGI
| future people are clamoring for is going to really be all
| that good if it is built on LLMs.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Because intelligence is so much more than stochastically
| repeating stuff you've been trained on.
|
| It needs to learn new information, create novel
| connections, be creative.. We are utterly clueless as to
| how the brain works and how intelligence is created.
|
| We just took one cell, a neuron, made the simplest
| possible model of it, made some copies of it and you
| think it will suddenly spark into life by throwing GPUs
| at it ?
| alsetmusic wrote:
| We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything
| right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like
| vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and
| cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the
| 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't
| on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless
| your family owned the company).
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would
| have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI.
|
| There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved
| by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10
| years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the
| past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition.
| Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the
| multitude of trends which show no signs of stopping, it seems
| naive in Anno Domani 2025 to discount it as a likely
| possibility.
| dax_ wrote:
| It's just as possible that they need to invest more and
| more for negligible improvements to model performance.
| These companies are burning through money at an astonishing
| rate.
|
| And as the internet deteriorates due to AI slop, finding
| good training material will become increasingly difficult.
| It's already happening that incorrect AI generated
| information is being cited as source for new AI answers.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > There are far more signals that AGI is going to be
| achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the
| next 5-10 years
|
| So agi before autonomous tesla? "Just two more years guys I
| promise", how can people keep falling for these lol
| peterdsharpe wrote:
| There is a beautiful irony in your misspelling of Anno
| Domini as Anno Domani, for the Italian speakers in the
| room.
| saubeidl wrote:
| There is no proof "AGI" is a real thing. Any GDP put towards
| that goal is a huge gamble and the US is all-in, with
| potentially ruinous results.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It really shows how desperate some people are, sacrificing
| everything, present and future, in the quest of a digital god
| that might not even exist.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed
| technology can possibly achieve AGI.
|
| If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company
| with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the
| most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we
| assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere,
| I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how
| they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce
| useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life
| SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, _at best_ ,
| functionally useless.
|
| AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be
| --- science fiction.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Whoever gets AGI first will just be another biobattery to power
| the matrix.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Thats a nice assertion, but do you have any facts?
| saubeidl wrote:
| The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided
| belief in something that'll never happen.
|
| The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to
| make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive
| it.
| nxm wrote:
| EU regs will ensure that never happens
| saubeidl wrote:
| EU regs will ensure that happens. They are a power projection
| tool. We've bent Apple to our will, we've made the whole
| world follow GDPR.
| beeflet wrote:
| The world will bow down to mandatory cookie banners
| saubeidl wrote:
| Cookie banners are ePrivacy directive, not GDPR. GDPR is
| a lot more.
|
| See here for all the rights it grants you:
| https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/i...
| t1E9mE7JTRjf wrote:
| zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on
| ahead. I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters.
| Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of
| working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth
| since services/product aren't antithetic.
| gartdavis wrote:
| Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now.
|
| I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based
| business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern
| capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that
| manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower,
| was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to
| on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin
| Germany.
|
| Three factors made this very difficult:
|
| -- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital
| equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US
| economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an
| entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward
| and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial
| equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy
| is optimized for, or even understands or has models for.
| Confusion about this is nearly universal.
|
| -- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest
| component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others
| have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people
| love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy
| successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially
| more efficient work.
|
| -- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two
| categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued
| at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to
| 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones?
| The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you
| have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to
| create an auction market for your equity.
|
| In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to
| exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same
| very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have
| done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is
| sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely
| and having survived.
|
| This would be much harder now.
|
| Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a
| global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter
| disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be
| fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day.
| These days the threat to supply chains is existential.
|
| Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted,
| access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or
| fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI,
| that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but
| nothing has yet.
|
| A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for
| manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs
| that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded
| by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.
|
| I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and
| while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle
| any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
| shunia_huang wrote:
| Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments
| mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation
| tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive
| benifits in manufacture industries.
|
| No, it's not.
|
| It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality
| for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to
| degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to
| involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
|
| It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural
| products have better quality from imported sources, it is the
| growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have
| newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or
| event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are
| designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the
| customer both willing to upgrade in the future.
|
| Excuse my language/grammer.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Here in the west it is common sense that between products made
| in China and in the West the main difference is that the later
| category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly
| unaffordable prices.
|
| If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course
| you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to
| increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything
| but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese
| manufacturers if wanted to.
|
| The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing
| is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous
| place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything
| you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
| mtrovo wrote:
| > It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural
| products have better quality from imported sources
|
| Can you name a few items that you feel that way?
|
| My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China
| nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think
| is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the
| manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why
| they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed
| with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in
| China.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| > It's actually because China is lowring the
| requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the
| comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers
| has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for
| newer/better products.
|
| Isn't the requirements set by the company outsourcing to China?
| Because as far as I can tell in China you can produce with all
| ranges of quality so it feels a bit too simplistic to blame
| "planned obsolescence" to China alone as the whole chain
| profits from it (besides the end-user of-course).
| karel-3d wrote:
| This feel true 15 years ago, but now _everything_ is from
| China, both lower, mid and higher end market.
| throw-10-13 wrote:
| America will get what it deserves soon enough.
|
| The AI crash will be a catalyst for general instability and chaos
| with a fascist at the helm.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past
| 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private)
| developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing
| paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to
| a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely
| more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling
| this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more
| stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the
| BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more
| time doing the things that produce value.
| dluan wrote:
| My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn
| process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job
| was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory
| made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after
| lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from
| Google's AI division.
|
| I don't really know what the lesson here is.
| ronbenton wrote:
| Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go
| away--be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don't
| think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come
| back but rather to find something else.
| RataNova wrote:
| It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical
| world to process engineering in the digital one
| dluan wrote:
| From China to America, where those original factory jobs went
| from America to China, and maybe AI at some point is destined
| to head there too.
|
| Also, I was born in that factory town and I'm currently
| writing this in Shanghai, where I'm trying to relocate to in
| hopes of better career/entrepreneurial opportunities lmao.
| The world is funny sometimes.
| dron57 wrote:
| Do you think Shanghai has better career opportunities?
| the_gipsy wrote:
| America will retire after AI?
| RataNova wrote:
| What's worrying is that this "AI gold rush" feels eerily similar
| to past tech bubbles: lots of capital, lots of hype, and unclear
| long-term value
| syntaxing wrote:
| I'm a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical
| engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always
| felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority
| was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally,
| America wants manufacturing back but doesn't give it the respect
| it deserves.
| defraudbah wrote:
| do you still create stuff for fun?
|
| As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to
| average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by
| mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era
| syntaxing wrote:
| I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But
| designing something for one or two pieces is very different
| from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even
| thousands.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in
| semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior
| google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior
| engineers easily
| tim333 wrote:
| I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some
| great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some
| in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while
| manufacturing moves to Asia.
| closeparen wrote:
| Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to
| increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of
| spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay,
| benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-
| scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a
| manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.
| grafmax wrote:
| It's a rent extraction economy not an industrial one.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or
| workflows/automation that will create value long after the
| generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots
| and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines.
|
| Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to
| other humans or machines) is just so wrong.
| usrxcghghj wrote:
| So funding research education and renewable energy would be the
| move as a country right .... ?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Do we even have people to work in the factories? I know a guy who
| started as a worker and is now a plant manager and he says their
| biggest problem is finding qualified people (high school or
| equivalent) that are willing to show up every day. Many get their
| first check and then suddenly stop showing up and then return 2
| or 3 weeks later looking for work.
|
| A lot of younger people it seems like value flexibility over
| higher pay. They'd rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At
| the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within
| a year you're promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you
| can put 5 responsible years in you're certainly recruited to the
| management development path. These skills are highly transferable
| between companies.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Pretty weird that our society doesn't want immigrants if we
| could use more workers.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Instead of blaming the workers, they should figure out how to
| make workers want to show up and find out the incentives they
| need.
|
| Here's a start: daily pay (there are a bunch of fintechs out
| there that will do this for you). My buddy who does
| construction does this. It filters out people who need a quick
| fix of cash on day 1 instead of wasting two weeks on them.
|
| View labour unions as a friend, not an enemy, who will figure
| out where to get more workers and how to keep them willing to
| show up to the job.
| erichocean wrote:
| AI labor fixes this.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| also a literal gold rush
| notfed wrote:
| underrated observation
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Actually which has added more market cap in the past 2 years,
| gold or the entire tech sector?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best
| blue collar investments the country could make right now
|
| Industries in the US are at an inflection point, with govt /
| global market giving conflicting signals. For example car
| manufacturers need to decide whether to invest in EVs, which is a
| huge capital investment they won't see return on for maybe a
| decade. If they dont invest, they won't be relevant outside the
| few markets clinging religiously to ICEs
|
| Do you layout a billion dollars to try to stay relevant outside
| the US? Or stick to reliable, if soon shrinking, domestic
| internal combustion engine business model?[1]
|
| Contrast this with AI where signals are unambiguous from
| government and investors.
|
| 1 - As an example, this $1.6B charge GM is taking
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-tak...
| nickff wrote:
| > _" Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the
| best blue collar investments the country could make right now"_
|
| People have been saying this for 20 years, and it seems
| plausible, but it hasn't really worked out (so far).
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Investing in AI infrastructure seems very risky to me. With how
| short of a lifecycle computing hardware generally has, does it
| make sense to blow billions on hardware that will need to be
| replaced in a few years? AI companies have been burning billions
| on hardware. Will the costs of that hardware be covered by
| profits before the hardware lifecycle is up? That's a big gamble.
|
| We used to talk about AI as having no moat (easy for other
| players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made
| that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on
| laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM
| requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive
| algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more
| personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs
| then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable?
|
| There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes
| it that much more volatile.
| lysace wrote:
| Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).
| epolanski wrote:
| Pretty much it, albeit I think very few appreciate how high's
| the risk of leaving with nothing in their hands.
| lysace wrote:
| Valuation models probably begin to break down when the
| potential payoff is control of our solar system as we know
| it.
|
| OTOH it seems like mere single billions can buy control
| over the US if you're brazen enough, so perhaps these stock
| market suckers are overpaying with their trillions.
|
| I wonder how expensive it would be to buy control of PRC in
| a similarly creative (but very different) way.
| musebox35 wrote:
| While I agree with the general sentiment on throwaway compute
| infra, the generated know-how with large scale experiments is
| not thrown away. I think a lot hinges on the scaling laws and
| whether you will hit the jackpot at a certain scale before
| everyone else. This is hard to guesstimate so someone has to do
| it in the spirit of empiricism. This might sound a lot like
| gambling or exploring depending on your sentiment. So, I think
| it is more justified to criticize the scale and the risks than
| the spirit of these investments.
| whatshisface wrote:
| While scaling laws are only empirical curve fitting and
| extrapolation, none of them predict a discontinuous "jackpot
| effect."
| deadbabe wrote:
| Once you can run a GPT5 level LLM locally on a device, it's
| over. All this mighty infrastructure is no longer any more
| impressive than a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro in 2025. I think
| we're 10 years away from that.
| lysace wrote:
| Have you tried the reasoning mode of Gemini Pro 2.5?
| https://aistudio.google.com/
|
| It gives me the chills, thinking about when it has 1000x
| cheaper ~GPU compute.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| This a hosted model with closed weights, though.
| lysace wrote:
| Yes. Not the point.
| gmadsen wrote:
| 10 years from now, the capabilities of gpt5 will be as
| relevant to AI as Atari is to modern gaming
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Unless GPT 5 is more like the PlayStation 5 and not the
| Atari 2600.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| So people will be paying money for the nostalgia of ChatGPT
| after it dies? That tracks.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I doubt it. Newer state of the art models might be a little
| better, but not enough to justify paying $1000/month for
| the average person or employee.
|
| If you can get a GPT5 level AI, locally and privately, for
| just the cost of electricity, why would you bother with
| anything else? If it can't do something, you'd just
| outsource that one prompt to a cloud based AI.
|
| The vast majority of your prompts will be passing through a
| local LLM first in 2035, and you might rarely need to touch
| an agent API. So what does that mean for the AI industry?
| hadlock wrote:
| Consumer devices are already available that offer 128gb
| specifically labeled for AI use. I think server side AI will
| still exist for IoT devices, but I agree, 10 years seems
| pretty reasonable timelie to buy a GTX 5080-sized card that
| will have 1TB of memory, with the ability to pair it with
| another one for 2TB. For local, non-distributed use, GPUs are
| already more than capable of doing 20+ tokens/s, we're mostly
| waiting on 512gb devices to drop in price, and "free" LLMs to
| get better.
| robocat wrote:
| Are we constrained by RAM production?
|
| RAM Price per GB Projected to decline at 15% per annum.
|
| That's quite a few years before you'll get double the RAM.
|
| For mobile I'm guessing power constraints matter too.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms
| changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal
| computers.
|
| This is classic jevon's paradox. As efficiency increases so
| does demand.
| Rover222 wrote:
| Each datacenter iteration that increases the size and power
| consumption is a stepping stone towards (possibly) recursive
| self-improvement in AI tech. I think that's the way to frame
| the absolutely massive bets being made by (only a few)
| companies. There aren't many companies or nation states in the
| world that can marshal the resources and talent needed to keep
| competing on this path.
|
| It's a race to the the most powerful and transformative
| technology in history.
|
| Or it might all collapse like a house of cards. But worth a
| shot.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| > But worth a shot.
|
| Worth betting the entire US economy on it?
| Rover222 wrote:
| Only a significant portion of it.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| No. Nothing is but is that what's happening?
|
| Huge bets were made on the Internet technology in the US
| and it paid off even with the dot com bubble bursting.
|
| If we don't stay on top of technology then we will simply
| be passed by China.
|
| People also said the Internet was going revolutionize
| everything in the 90s and it did. AI is already pretty
| impressive and we are just in the infancy of the
| technology.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| The thing is, China seems to be able to keep up with much
| less invested. I don't know how much it took for them to
| create DeepSeek and their other power efficient models,
| but it sure doesn't take much to run them. Meanwhile
| American AI seems to have a limitless hunger for energy.
| Rover222 wrote:
| China is doing what they have done best for decades -
| lean on western tech, and improve it's efficiency.
| They're still clearly behind on SOA developments in AI.
|
| But they are obviously rocketing ahead in energy
| capacity, which will be the real bottleneck as data
| centers continue to scale.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Then we should become more efficient. I do get your point
| that the amount of money available as investment could be
| responsible for inefficient growth (because the focus is
| only on the goal).
|
| A solution could be competition locally by a more
| efficient implementations. There might also be push back
| by local populations if it causes energy prices to rise.
| codyb wrote:
| Considering we're two years in and everyone's still... talking
| about chatbots pretty much. Yea, I'd say that's a hell of a
| gamble.
|
| Of course the hardware can probably be repurposed towards
| crypto mining afterwards, so hey!
| the8472 wrote:
| The chatbot focus may be a news/accessibility bias. Take a
| look at deepmind's research blog to see applications in more
| areas.
| codyb wrote:
| There's definitely some cool stuff coming out of it!
|
| Is it going to be as world upending as some folk were
| making it out to be? I'm not sold on that yet.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| You're assuming that gold is going towards infrastructure. I
| don't think a lot of it is. I think it's a money grab while the
| getting's good.
| conradev wrote:
| Well at least energy infrastructure is useful for both data
| centers and factories.
| Animats wrote:
| Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has been visiting factories in
| China.[1]
|
| "Ford CEO Jim Farley said Chinese cars have "far superior"
| technology, lower costs and great quality."
|
| Ford is working on fixing this and getting a $30,000 EV out the
| door.[2]
|
| [1] https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-
| humbled...
|
| [2] https://archive.is/kUbEW
| jszymborski wrote:
| Very different tact from GM, it seems
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7...
| rednafi wrote:
| So far, the ROI has been much lower than expected. The hype
| certainly attracted a ton of investment, but aside from some code
| generation and summarization, I've yet to see any meaningful
| yield.
|
| The narrative claims that AI will make everyone far more
| productive, but in reality, I see people working harder than ever
| and burning out while maintaining this slop in production.
|
| AI search and summarization have been a flop, and most people I
| know hate them. LLMs are undoubtedly useful, but despite all the
| supposed productivity gains, I'm not seeing any measurable
| impact. I used to spend hours reviewing human-written PRs, and
| now I spend even more time because of lazy AI-generated garbage
| creeping into the codebase.
|
| Some AI parrots will say, "Oh, I never push code I don't
| understand," but that doesn't stop others from doing it, and now
| you have to be extra vigilant during PR reviews.
|
| The gist is that everyone claims to be more productive, but the
| numbers say otherwise. Even so, LLMs are genuinely useful, just
| not nearly as much as the investment would suggest.
| toephu2 wrote:
| What many Americans don't realize is that China has already
| surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing
| country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both
| are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier
| 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1
| cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts.
|
| source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Beijing, Shanghai,
| Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only
| lived in the West.
|
| And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China:
| cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets,
| no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in
| Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major
| city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities),
| wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in
| the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at
| every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the
| tracks) etc.
| therealpygon wrote:
| What are some examples that might blow my mind?
| augstein wrote:
| Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor
| cities are connected via a high speed rail network.
|
| The latter probably will never happen in the US.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread
| out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the
| continental US probably not. It _might_ be possible to have
| high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line
| following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it
| 's a lot of nature to overcome.
| basisword wrote:
| I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be
| ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel
| through the mountains.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, nobody in the US is working on that at all...
|
| https://www.boringcompany.com/
| Orochikaku wrote:
| I'd strongly recommend that you watch this video: "The
| Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid".[1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g (22:05)
| loire280 wrote:
| There's a lot of population centers in the US that could
| be better connected without crossing the Rockies.
|
| Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as
| Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5
| hours vs 22 hours.
|
| Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!
| integralid wrote:
| So like in (parts of) Europe?
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| >clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime
|
| The US regressed on this heavily in the last generation.
| postflopclarity wrote:
| no it didn't. crime rates have been steadily declining for
| over 30 years
| mcast wrote:
| I agree, but a lot of petty/non-violent crime isn't
| enforced or reported anymore.
| nradov wrote:
| The only crime rate data which is really reliable is the
| murder rate. This peaked in 1991 and has been generally
| stable (not steadily declining) since 1999, with a spike
| during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all murders do get
| reported and counted.
|
| https://www.consumershield.com/articles/murder-rate-by-year
|
| I don't trust the statistics for lesser crimes because so
| many of the victims never file a report. In many cities the
| police now subtly discourage people from filing reports
| because they don't want to deal with the paperwork or have
| their statistics look bad. But I think we can generally use
| the murder rate as a proxy for the overall level of
| criminality.
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| Surely your graph shows it declining dramatically? If you
| zoom out a bit
| [https://crimeforecast.substack.com/p/explaining-the-
| crime-de...] we're currently at almost an all-time low,
| you have to go back to the 1950s to find similarly low
| numbers.
| jjice wrote:
| Just got back from a trip to Japan and I found that Tokyo and
| Kyoto also met most of your criteria.
|
| Cash is still pretty common there and definitely can't go
| cashless (nor would I personally like to), and there's no
| delivery drones that I'm aware of (I also don't particularly
| care for that, personally).
|
| I'm not even sure it's that they're ahead, I think we've just
| fallen behind in a lot of those cases.
| Knork-and-Fife wrote:
| I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's
| development and the lack of awareness of that from people in
| the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is
| more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there
| too.
|
| Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what
| it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip
| into homelessness because there aren't reasonable options
| available to many people to live anymore.
|
| In China they still have a huge amount of their population in a
| developing stage so they still have ample tools and options and
| knowledge for how to maintain a reasonable life in a less
| developed state. So it's easier to fall back to a cheaper
| lifestyle, and culturally it's easier too.
|
| But in the US were generations removed from these other ways of
| life, so there's no options or cultural acceptance of not
| living a highly developed way of life. So people just go
| straight from a nice house or apartment with modern stuff to
| being homeless with little to no tools to survive.
|
| Just my probably naive thoughts. Would love to hear others
| takes on this.
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| i agree with that. It's as if they tried to outlaw poverty. i
| mean look at all the insane housing regulations (zoning laws,
| regulations, permit costs, land usage policy) that prevent
| low cost housing from being built.
|
| I've seen in thailand, how even the poorest can just build a
| small hut on a piece of land they own and actually live in
| it. You'd be risking jail time if you did that in the US.
| danaris wrote:
| I think your assessment of homelessness in the US misses some
| things, though (or at least leaves them unstated):
|
| First, that it's not just that people "don't know how to live
| more simply", and thus cling to their homes too long when
| they "should" otherwise be downsizing and cutting expenses.
| For a lot of people, the fall is sudden--some medical
| emergency drains all their savings and leaves them unable to
| work (at least for a time), and there it goes.
|
| Second, what are they going to downsize _to_? We don 't
| _have_ whole rural villages in the US that are living,
| essentially, pre-industrialized lives (except with the Amish,
| I suppose, but that 's a whole other kettle of fish). (Also,
| I don't know for sure that such places exist today in China--
| I know that they did not _too_ many years ago, but my
| information is not current.) There isn 't really anywhere you
| can _go_ in the US to live securely, but simply, on $100 a
| month or whatever. And even if there were, that would involve
| leaving whatever job you had to begin with, which removes the
| "securely" part.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many
| points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a
| good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea.
|
| With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the
| dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there
| are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse
| conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime,
| it's that the crime is from the state, the mafia, and there is
| a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there
| is no free press.
|
| I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing,
| and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the
| world as the Americans did, soon.
|
| But let's not pretend it's some kind of utopia.
| fspeech wrote:
| I think you over estimate the control and under estimate the
| need for flexibility for any society to operate. Let's just
| say even in China, identity can be a commodity. For example
| scammers are known to buy bank accounts by paying poor people
| in remote areas. The system needs flexibility otherwise a
| majority of people will run into problems all the time.
| nradov wrote:
| China has made amazing progress and the rate of extreme poverty
| has fallen a lot. But it's also easier to limit the homeless
| population in cities when they have the _Hukou_ internal
| passport system to keep many of the poorest people out, as well
| as forced institutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
| basisword wrote:
| >> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every
| single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the
| tracks)
|
| I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is
| brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost,
| platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc)
| and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention
| various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD
| for first emergency workers + the disruption to public
| transport.
|
| If we can't invest in simple things that would make a
| meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big
| infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed
| many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.
| itchyouch wrote:
| As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn't
| accomplished great things.
|
| While I can't speak directly to this, but from watching The
| China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is
| that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has
| been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the
| receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences,
| if not fatal.
|
| Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that
| look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.
|
| Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren't
| built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak,
| leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down,
| sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like
| someone detonated a bomb.
|
| Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people
| in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is
| causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.
|
| And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1
| cities.
|
| I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up
| and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it
| does.
|
| Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin's
| business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare
| accident.
|
| He broke his back in China when his rental car's front wheel
| popped off the car.
|
| Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very
| weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as
| high as it ought to be.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| US manufacturing hit an all time high of 2.9 trillion dollars in
| 2024, and is up year over year. Yeah totally failing.
| judahmeek wrote:
| According to Google:
|
| "Slower growth: Despite the record output, some analyses
| reported that the overall growth of U.S. manufacturing output
| was modest, at just 1% in 2024. This reflected a lag between
| announced investments and new operational capacity coming
| online."
|
| So record output, but practically zero growth.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-14 23:02 UTC)