271–280 of 469 posts
The American cost of living is too high to reindustrialize on a large scale. Medical costs are high, rent is high, transportation costs are high, personal debt is high. Industrial capitalists can’t shoulder all those costs for their workers and remain internationally competitive.
Ain't gonna happen. US businesses are incapable of thinking long term. If the US wants to build a ship industry they must invite Chinese shipbuilders to kickstart it just as they invited TSMC to build a factory here. But that doesn't seem likely does it?
This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago, but now Chinese shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than ours because of their success in civilian shipbuilding. The proposed measures in this aricle are too little too late. The only logical course of action at…
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Another alternative would be adopting South Korea and Japan into closer orbits the way we unconditionally support Israel. South Korea and Japan have strong commercial shipbuilding industries, which are just in the past few years going idle because China is subsidizing theirs more aggressively.
Good luck with that after Nippon Steel controversy
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> Not just politicians in general, but people, of course, are always surprised how expensive housing is, but then reject any kind of streamlined mass-manufactured option. You can build a tract of homes in 90 days (or less) using stick frame. They won't be fancy, but they'll be up to code (and with a little extra cost ( A crew of 4-5 guys (plus some subs) can build a custon home in 80 days: * https://www.youtube.com/w…
It's not just the cost of building the house. Utilities and infrastructure (and the taxes to pay for it all) add up. Now, if you were to build smaller, densely, and close enough to amenities that residents could walk or bike to their daily activities, or to public transit that can take you farther away, you save a significant amount on initial AND recurring costs. And what's better, people WANT that! Or, a least, the…
Nobody is going to spend $x on a brand new house without having some say in it, and so those houses tend more and more toward "high end/luxury". After all, why go through the hassle of all the paperwork and building and NOT sell for the highest price you can get?
Same thing happens with cars; the market for car buyers is much larger than the market for new car buyers, but only new cars ever get made. Nobody is making used cars, or even the absolutely cheapest possible, which affects the whole supply.
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Another alternative would be adopting South Korea and Japan into closer orbits the way we unconditionally support Israel. South Korea and Japan have strong commercial shipbuilding industries, which are just in the past few years going idle because China is subsidizing theirs more aggressively.
Biden considered Nippon Steel a national security threat so the Japanese are going to raise an eyebrow when the US Navy begs them to work on actual military ships
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No it is people who have no idea how mass produced a conventional house is. They think there is something for a factory to do. Then they go elsewhere and complain how houses all look the same these days.
Yeah a competent framing crew can bang together a 2-story 4000 square foot home from sticks in 2 weeks.
The manufactured ones only win when it's very tiny (think: trailer) or when you do an entire development with them, and even then you often need a rail line or something to make it work.
Even the "put together on site" kit ones run into problems that the stick-built basically avoid, like things not lining up exactly right.
We're building houses, maybe not enough, and almost certainly not exactly where some people want to live, at the price they want. But they're being built.
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I think the unfortunate end state from that line of thinking, is that the US as a country is a 'zombie', a hollowed out shell, where there are no industries left. The US can't compete purely on cost. We don't have the numbers of people, or education to keep up with the world. We'll end up being just a few financial and IT companies that only have corporate headquarters here, and the bulk of the work is off shore. Of…
> I think the unfortunate end state from that line of thinking, is that the US as a country is a 'zombie', a hollowed out shell, where there are no industries left. An article from 2016, "Think nothing is made in America? Output has doubled in three decades": * https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outp... Manufacturing share of GDP has declined, the number of jobs has declined (due to automation),…
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Honest question, is it at all possible for us to have an industrial revitalization given that we have the highest average wages in the world?
Probably. The original industrial revolutions were happening in nations that quickly became wealthy, and the US was doing pretty well with high wages vs. Asia for most of its industrial period. Higher wages in theory should be linked to higher productivity and output per worker in the US due to deep skillsets - otherwise where do the high wages come from? But something might have broken that link. The issue looks fro…
And yes China did what most industrializing nations do, sacrifice their environment and burn natural resources at prodigious rates to super charge and grow their economy. It's a horrible place to be long term and even China is starting to implement some environmental protections because that kind of pollution is terrible long term. They're even seeing their neighbors do the same thing that drove so much of US production to China, cheaper labor and fewer government hurdles, it's a cycle many countries have followed.
[0] In any meaningful capacity, have to say it or the pedants will mention Pearl Harbor or the tiny number of attacks from things like balloon bombs etc.