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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)

#191

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

squigz wrote: post #176
hudon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? We don't need to build literally everything ourselves, that's a reductionist argument, we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now…

Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?

Yes, it was a severe and acute issue.

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

#192

Post by KerrAvon »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #93
tmpz22 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Is that what you dream of for your children? This feels like a justification for slavery and slave-like conditions. I assure you the conditions and salary in most manufacturing countries would cause riots in the US; but as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, who cares what happens to their children. Imagine if I used this argument for 1850s plantations (the conditions in many factories not being much bette…

Two things can be true:

- you shouldn't want that for your children

- you shouldn't want that for their children

In a geopolitical context, those are separate discussions. It's not really fair to accuse someone of promoting slavery when they did no such thing.

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

#193

Post by 9283409232 »

Teever wrote: post #116
analog31 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a finer point on it: How's basing the US economy on advertising looking? I went to college and eventually got a PhD in physics. I've built specialized machine tools. Yet I'm considered a schmuck because I didn't go into software development, and the software developers are considered schmucks if they didn't go into financial services or advertising. And none of that was about emphasizing college. Becoming a pr…

The west coast is in for a rude awakening when they realize that they can't win a war against china with code, and they don't have jobs because they don't have chips to run their advertising code on anymore because China took Taiwan. Manufacturing is what builds up strong economies and it's what saves lives by preventing wars as long as possible and minimizes casualties on your side in war by fielding troops with mor…

Sucks that Trump is considering trying to repeal the CHIPS act then huh

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

#194

Post by olyjohn »

squigz wrote: post #176
hudon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? We don't need to build literally everything ourselves, that's a reductionist argument, we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now…

Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?

I think so, isn't that why they brought in all the KN95 masks? The K meaning "Korean."

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

#195

Post by jmward01 »

tharne wrote: post #177
xienze wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? It’s important to be at least somewhat self-reliant as a nation, especially when the country we are VERY reliant on is not a friendly one.

> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instea…

These cherry-picking arguments are a huge problem and we need to acknowledge that they are. So, we focus on one problem and ignore all the benefits that helped us in that time? The world-wide effort to understand the disease and rapidly develop a vaccine? The world-wide talent pool that feeds our hospitals and clinics? The supply chain that did kick in to fill the holes eventually? An economy that always 'makes its own masks' is not going to be able to do everything because everything is simply too much, even for the mighty US of A. It is easy to point at one thing that didn't go well and ignore the reality that the world that would have gotten that one thing right would have gotten so many other things terribly wrong.

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

#196

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #189
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch. 1) They don't know how. Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing. 2) They…

So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods tha…

> the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale

Or about 12% of the US labor force. Meanwhile the 12th percentile US income is ~$22,000, i.e. less than the $32k median in China, and half of the jobs there are above that median.

Obviously these numbers are all useless napkin math and none of it really works like that, but the premise isn't inherently absurd. If China is subsidizing manufacturing in order to capture manufacturing jobs and those jobs pay more than what many in the lowest quartile of the US are currently making, there are people who could be made better off by having those jobs back, and they'd still only be paid about what we're currently paying to China.

And this before considering the general arguments about advantages to proximity of manufacturing, e.g. being able to talk to the people in the factory in your timezone in your language assists in product development so the location of the factory has an easier time developing new products. Which allows not just the manufacturing jobs but the whole rest of the company to be there, instead of those jobs starting to get eroded going forward.

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

#197

Post by KerrAvon »

didericis wrote: post #114
jajko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... not how things will roll out. Sure it looks nice on some paper diagram my 5 year old son could pop out, but reality is way, way more complex. Also, here its US who is doing massive 'violations of international order'. You know which order I talk about? WTO for example, US is founding member, an org specifically designed and accepted to handle this. Various international agreements between close allies. And…

The USA already dictates the direction of much of the world economy through its position in the WTO, and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities. I also realize how incr…

Dictated, past tense. As a result of these tariffs. And that part's not coming back even if everything got magically reversed tomorrow. That level of trust is gone, forever.

If capital doesn't get very mad and do something fix the fallout immediately, it will get very bad. You can't wait for things to work themselves out; they will not. It's as stupid as it appears on the surface. These people are sociopathic, vengeful idiots, they're mad at anyone smarter than they are, and they're going to destroy everything that's good and replace it with much, much worse.

There is no logic behind it, no matter how badly everybody wants there to be. Trump's brain is stuck in the early 1980's when he first had a subliterate fixation on tariffs, and he's never let go of the idea. I'm sorry that's it not more complex than that -- it would be reassuring if there was an actual plan that anyone not MAGA-infected would thought would work! But there isn't. This is them destroying America and taking down as much of the global economy as America can reach.

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

#198

Post by alabastervlog »

didericis wrote: post #112
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intentionally blowing up international trade agreements now allows the USA more time to rebuild strategic supply chains to counter further violations of the international order. Sources? >If the USA doesn’t have a secure industrial base and can’t reliably enforce the international order then there is no international trade. The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now. Source where this is an i…

The current international situation as understood by a lot of people in republican circles is outline in detail here: https://youtu.be/vDBZeHhx3YE > The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now Yes, which is why many believe now is the time to revamp our industrial capacity while we still have strategic dominance. The war in Ukraine has illustrated the importance of mass drone production, and we…

You can improve all those things, even fast, without doing… this.

Tariffing close allies at the same time as likely or actual foes especially doesn’t make sense. And rather than this weird roundabout approach, the government can just… pay for things to happen. Like, they used to run weapons factories. If that’s the actual reason for this, it would have been a ton cheaper to just fire up a few government factories, continue and expand the chips act, and maybe ramp up some targeted tariffs and other controls, which would have been way more effective with allies on board. Or, they can start placing drone orders and handing out r&d contracts with specifications that they be entirely made in the USA.

You may be presenting a real perspective, and it could be entirely correct, and this still would be extremely stupid.

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

#199

Post by supportengineer »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #189
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch. 1) They don't know how. Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing. 2) They…

So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods tha…

It should be easy to reduce our consumption, the average American is consuming an enormous amount of useless junk.

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

#200

Post by manwe150 »

hudon wrote: post #186
squigz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...

Both yes and no. It was a brief lack of available local stock from suddenly unexpected demand, followed by a lack of factories willing to stop doing well paid work to switch to making cheap masks, while we waited for even cheaper masks to get made and imported from countries with cheap labor, followed by a surplus of masks (source: a brief chat with a factory manager in my social network who was considering whether he could at least break even on costs and labor if temporarily switching to making masks)
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