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The US is building factories at a fast rate

businessinsider.com

201–210 of 309 posts

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite all these cherry-picked numbers, China's economy will grow by 4-6% this year vs. USA's 0-2%. https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-growth-gdp-china-economy...

One government sponsored number, vs multiple numbers pointing to China's economic decline, which multinationals check in order to gauge the real health of China's economy. Multinationals know the real numbers, which is why they're all leaving. What other numbers don't lie? 20.4% youth unemployment rate https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/29/record-youth-unemployment-st... . 22% drop in daily home sales in 2023 vs 2022 https…

Those numbers are from the IMF and CBO, not CCP.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#202
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the smart people leave, are the remainder really going to be more effective at toppling shitty governments?

I dont think smart people ever toppled a government. Dictatorships usually rely on many, many, not smart people. They collapse when these people became hungry and desperate. If they are well fed and entertained they will happily “eat” the smart people. So if you want dictatorships to collapse it’s best to let the smart people leave, so no one can run the country, and the not smart people get angry at their government…

>"and the not smart people get angry at their government."

They will just kill bad dictator and install "good" one

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#203

Perhaps I'm just bad at economics, but it always seemed to me that the countries making all the stuff would eventually hold all the power (and I say this as someone working in tech who produces nothing tangible). The fact that it costs exorbitant amounts to construct new buildings, railways, etc. in the U.S. and how our cities almost look antiquated or frozen in time compared to Asian cities shows that we missed a ge…

We’ll think about it from the tech perspective: the companies that control marketplaces and access hold all the power. Sure you have companies like apple that make $$$ from hardware, but most HW players in tech get slowly replaced offshore. Silicon Valley was silicon valley because of hardware. Now it’s mostly software, and HW is increasingly a commodity. It’s the same thing elsewhere in the economy… it’s easier to s…

What's stopping software from becoming a commodity?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#204
post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

It doesn't matter. In 5-10 years all those jobs will be entirely automated by autonomous robotics.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What're you making?

Dietary supplements. Mixing up raw materials and encapsulating them. Pretty chill job

I shudder to think of all of the "materials", documented materials and undocumented bonus materials, going into these completely non-FDA-regulated supplements.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#206
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

My dad ran a robotics engineering company after being vp of engineering for a company Siemens bought that did factory automation (conveyors first, then of course robots). Playing doom in his office while he overworked into the night is when I learned about computer networking mostly...I follow in his footsteps in the overwork)

Anyway, in automotive manufacturing right now frequently the industrial automation firm is told they will be paid net 240. This is insanity. It leads to unnecessarily long projects as the firms have to figure out how to cash flow enormous expenses.

In the meantime, inexperienced competitors regularly fixed bid quote something that cannot be safely and timely built for the quoted budget, ignoring profit. They win the project and they're worn down to a nub and either go under or deliver to avoid being sued into oblivion, so it's a horrific race to the bottom.

The latter behaviour I witness regularly in the software consultancy industry and it's a bothersome thing.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 million babies for a population of 1.2 billion? Woah. Back of the envelope, that's something like half replacement rate.

Not sure where he got his stats from, but 9.56 million sounds about right. https://news.sina.cn/gn/2023-01-17/detail-imyanfvn6707213.d.... (Figure 3) 2017 - 17.23 million 2018 - 15.23 2019 - 14.65 2020 - 12.00 2021 - 10.62 2022 - 9.56 Note that this is official Chinese gov statistics. Their numbers are known to be untrustworthy.

Falling in half in six years? Again, woah. Any idea what's driving that?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#208
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

You can get into the field! It's growing fast. There is a ton of pure SW involved.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

It doesn't matter. In 5-10 years all those jobs will be entirely automated by autonomous robotics.

These are jobs that either aren't even yet on the spectrum of automation (carpentry, plumbers, industrial HVAC & electricians) or as I referenced in more detail, folks who work on the robotics that "replace the jobs" or are otherwise augmenting the spectrum (in the outlier instance, its medical industrial systems stuff. I think they make surgical robots)

Unless the robots are either going to become good at swinging hammers or designing, maintaining, and install themselves, I think these are some of the safest jobs you can have, if there is such a thing

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not surprisingly, the real money in this field is in maintenance and ensuring uptime. The robots are cool to develop too but its really hard to get a job doing that directly unless you're a startup with funding from a VC or have an incredibly good resume, but there is a cottage industry of people (businesses or business units usually) that make lots of money maintaining deployed fleets and developing patches /…

Maybe it's different where you live, but here in California you don't need a degree to do industrial robotics. It certainly doesn't hurt , but unless you're in controls people aren't too picky. You would make more in webdev or ML though.

Not all of industrial robotics, but what they do, which is maintain and develop software for robotics in critical settings and oversee maintenance related to, I believe did, or at the very least, they are highly incentivized to get them after getting hired.

The one outlier example I gave is specifically tailored for medical equipment.

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