Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do not have to do shit. But you do not live in the vacuum and unless you take interests / complaints of the other parties into considerations sooner or later you would face problems. Karma.
We're not all in this together. If there are any problems that arise naturally, I'm not personally averse to working out something mutually beneficial. But if that were a threat, then I'd like to see some other country make good on it.
The US is building factories at a fast rate
221–230 of 309 posts
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. One belt and one road is now considered a failure with Italy, the most prominent member, dropping out of it this year. Most of the countries that took on the debt are unable to pay it back, and China has had to forgive a lot of the loans recent…
>You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. I don't really care what Putin says but I do think they are thinking more long-term. Only here and in Europe do people think in terms of election cycles. Don't get me wrong, I am not a Xi fanboy, and I definitely don't want to the US to be like China in general terms, but I just disagree with you. I think they…
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We'll just design things and have people elsewhere do the building" is one of the dumbest ideas. How do you think you learn how to build things without building things? Who's going to build the next big thing? Oy!
A great litmus test to see if an educational administrator is knowledgeable on STEM is to see if they regard woodshop/metalshop/autoshop as purely "vocational". Bare in mind, vocational still means "not college bound" == "useless" == "doesn't look good in the US news rankings" Ive talked to superintendents and they just give me a blank stare when I told them that a great way to get kids to understand the cartesian co…
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#224> 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 suspect that the reliance on China for manufacturing combined with what sort of sanctions would be enacted when they attempt to invade Taiwan, would encourage the US and its European allies to insure they had a good manufacturing base to rely on. We have seen a number of things from the war in Ukraine but two that I think have been really impactful were the challenges of ramping up munition production in the US and…
I think supply chain risk through peak COVID is also a huge factor giving this shift momentum. Supply chain shocks were comprehensible and visible to most Americans and impacted practically every business owner. It kickstarted renewed calls for localism and reassessments of worst-case scenarios for business continuity. Bringing up the home industrial base is a necessity for shortening those supply chains and bringing that risk under control.
Reducing risk from suppliers based in countries where government policy is less predictable or west-aligned was also highlighted by the pandemic. Shanghai locked down in May 2022, for example, and I am sure many Americans were surprised and annoyed at the time.
The one-two of COVID then the Russia-Ukraine war seems to have knocked us into a new alignment. Remains to be seen how it plays out against our current, difficult social backdrop.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#225Not to mention that also means that we will hold more power and ensure longer stability...why buy from China that could go to war with our allies and restrict our access to their manufacturers when we can just ask a factory in the next state over to make it?
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#226Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#227I hope this trend is real and will continue. Manufacturing is so important to a country. It creates jobs. It builds talent. It stimulates innovation. It improves the lives of millions of people. It keeps a country's defense strong and sustainable. Without a robust and comprehensive manufacturing sector, I don't know how the US can proper in the future. I pains me to see that BYD could produce millions of masks in day…
Today factories in the US are built automated. No jobs, not for anybody but an accountant, an administrator, a couple of engineers.
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mexico stands out to me as a country that hasn't lived up to its potential in that regard. Certainly there's no shortage of potential cheap labour, given the number of refugees making their way across it. And regional security and ability to get hold of necessary skilled workers shouldn't really be an issue, when you have the US right next door. It's hard not to see why it wouldn't be significantly to the US's benefi…
>so I do wonder what the primary forces working against it might be. Extreme corruption, lack of rule of law, extreme violence to name a few. Mexico is basically a failed state: the government doesn't even control large parts of the territory it claims, ultra-violent drug cartels do. How is that a good place to build factories? Other central American counties are at least as bad. El Salvador has a higher death rate f…
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#229Earlier 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…
> the highly skilled tradesmen I've met in the last 5 years make at least what I do, often more, and have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses or real, meaningful slices of other ones. _This_. A lot of software developers think they are the only high earners out there. Skilled tradesmen are making a killing in europe as well. And unlike software engineers, the path to starting an actual business is muc…
Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today. idk, Japan seems like it thought the party would go on forever, whereas China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics (eg. long-term investment in the rest of Asia and Africa). > We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy…
> China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. One belt and one road is now considered a failure with Italy, the most prominent member, dropping out of it this year. Most of the countries that took on the debt are unable to pay it back, and China has had to forgive a lot of the loans recent…