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The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

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Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#41

Post by ty6853 »

ryandrake wrote: post #15
jackyinger wrote: post #4

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full…

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage.

It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#42

Post by potato3732842 »

jackyinger wrote: post #37
hwillis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists, they are designed by engineers. Machinists do not know how frames deflect or resonant modes or overconstraint or the other things that are critical in machine tool design. Machine tools are inherently dynamic systems where moving cutters cause…

Skilled machinists are very well aware of deflection and resonance. Operating a machine tool is not static in the slightest.

The average software engineer is working on A to B plumbing code to confer more privacy violating javascript onto webpages, not novel implementations of algorithms at scale.

Likewise the average machinist is not "skilled" in the way that most here are implying.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#43

Post by xigency »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #6
jackyinger wrote: post #4

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full…

I have plenty of stories of programmers being lazy knuckleheads. The industry is full of them.

Well, that's a bit different. Laziness is a virtue in our field in ways that it is not in other fields. Math is a good example. Mathematicians are even more lazy than programmers. That's how they end up with shorter proofs than our programs and end up able to work lying down as well as just sitting on a computer.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#44

Post by vpribish »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #29
jackyinger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a friend’s defense of the service focused economy: “I’ve got a PhD in economics”. Sure services may be great when things are going well, but you can’t ONLY have services, and then go and blow up international trade and expect to have a good time.

Quit the hyperbole. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-manufacturing-scor... > Manufacturing constitutes 27 percent of China’s overall national output, which accounts for 20 percent of the world’s manufacturing output. In the United States, it represents 12 percent of the nation’s output and 18 percent of the world’s capacity. In Japan, manufacturing is 19 percent of th…

thank you. the catastrophizing that makes up so much of this site is such a dead-end. seems people rather engage in sensational fantasy instead of understanding. cheers

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#46

Post by 1970-01-01 »

AI will be a better at manufacturing than any human ever. It will do the best machining ever. It will never need to rest or slow down. It will be able to build and rebuild parts to nanometer tolerance 24/7/365. It simply cannot fail at any job once it learns how to do it. If you don't believe me, go watch the latest keynote at Zombo.com

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#47

Post by neogodless »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #24
ryandrake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

This is the eternal evolution of individual labor.

But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution?

Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television!

It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society as labor gets replaced by automation, and even knowledge work gets replaced by machine learning.

But I still think great minds (and also the minds that get put in charge) should look forward and try to build a good future, rather than cling to a dying past.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#48

Post by whimsicalism »

jackyinger wrote: post #8
jackyinger wrote: post #4

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full…

And this isn’t going to change overnight. You know what I’m talking about. Most of the good machinist knowledge in America has retired, if not already literally died. And mechanical engineers in the US largely don’t have the hands on skill to really understand making these machines. Not that that can’t gain it. But to achieve truly high precision (the pinnacle from which all other percussion is derived) is an extreme…

things used to be made better because of baumol cost disease and far fewer people having those things.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#49

Post by walterbell »

ty6853 wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage. It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

Currency rates are also a factor.

https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump...

> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”

https://archive.is/uvL5w

> The deepening trade war is raising speculation in financial markets that China may resort to aggressively devaluing the yuan against the dollar in a break of their policy of pursuing a stable currency.. A weaker yuan would make Chinese goods cheaper abroad, offsetting some of Trump’s tariff impact, and make it costlier for local consumers to buy US goods.. One big consideration for Beijing is the risk of foreign investors pulling their money out of China if the currency sinks.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#50

Post by pjc50 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #36
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Manufacturing takes time and money to setup. Trump has 4 years if he survives that long. He's an old man. The trade war can't possibly last long enough for manufacturing to be forced to restart domestically. Even if this was his first term and he got a second, by the time the second rolls around everyone would just hope to wait it out until the Democrats retook the White House and they could import everything from…

IMO if Trump is serious about bringing manufacturing back to US, his No.1 job is to remove all middle-high managers from all government agencies. The whole government has been bathing in the globalization alcohol for so many years that there is a huge interest group rooted for it to go forever. You can't do much without removing this group. There is no "legal", "orderly" retreat from the current situation IMHO. It's…

> There is no "legal", "orderly" retreat from the current situation IMHO. It's going to be messy.

.. so what's the point of this again?

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