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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#611

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Start by realising this is going to take decades to reverse. Given the timescale any solution will require cooperation across political parties. You can’t start something that will get undone in four years. Then accept it won’t make much difference to the inhabitants of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their jobs. Start at the top of the food chain and gradually work down. If America can make cars but not car tyr…

If it doesn’t make sense to make t-shirts, why does it make sense to make tires? They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.

Tyres were just an example I plucked out of my arse, I wasn't suggesting they were important.

>They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.

Which is an argument for consuming less tyres. It doesn't really have much to do with where you make them other than perhaps it is better to make them in a country with stronger environmental regulations.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#612

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Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether they'd fall back relatively gracefully like (Western) Europe, now with multiple countries ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether they'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life. It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with…

The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.

The fall of the Soviet Union was anything but graceful. Within months of the dissolution of the USSR Russia had children becoming prostitutes in order to get money for food.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#613
post #466

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Not only will it take years to get operational, there is no way it would ever reach the scale and reach of Chinese manufacturing, not in six years, not in sixty. Even if they throw trillions of investor money at it. China and others are clearly demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support. The US is too busy infighting and keeping capitalism and politics separate (small government, let the market decide e…

> demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support This is actually an excellent reason for tariffs. If we can't beat them at their game because it goes against our principles, then just don't buy their stuff.

So rather than competing when a more efficient innovation seems to have come about, just put our hands over our eyes and pretend it doesn't exist to our markets?

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#614

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The thing is also that absolutely nothing about the overall situation changed meaningfully over the last 50 years or so. People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain that China did, and they started losing a lot of the industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see with China => Vietnam…

Seeing it as a "rip off" is indeed delusion, but turning a blind eye to the dangers of becoming (ever more) dependent on a foreign country is an even worse folly.

If the dependencies go both ways, it's probably a good thing.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#615

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If a college allocated a minimum of 20% of their jobs to whites, would you still say it wasn't too bad?

These are statements, not quotas. Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids, will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment, etc… There is no requirement on the race of the applicants.

These statements are performative bullshit, and everyone who writes one knows it.

> Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids

Do you really feel today's university professors need to write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?

> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment

Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?

It's absolutely makes sense to me that a university has policies in place to ensure classrooms are inclusive and that discrimination does not occur. But these statements are nonsense.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#616
post #451

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CHIPS incentive funding is way bigger than just Intel, so it’s a bit disingenuous to write off the whole program just because of one (or even several) high profile bad actor. We should have a nuanced discussion and fix the shortcomings of our programs, but at least assess things in a balanced way. If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing for the current Commerce secretary, practically every Senator bra…

R&D is a cost center that can no longer be written off of a company’s taxes. I don’t believe that cost centers are a good example of returning manufacturing onshore. Or an example of a state using federal funding well. Cost centers are not a good investment for federal funding, without a clear path to paying back our taxed dollars.

This entire post is so wrong, it is difficult to know where to start. The first sentence about taxes is wrong. The second statement is an entirely unsupported opinion. The final statement miscategorized "cost centers" as some sort of federal investment? As for "clear path", the road US exceptionalism is paved with the gold derived from sensible investments in R&D and tech advancement. There was no clear path to paying back our investment in the federal highway system, but it did pay back indeed. There was no clear path to paying back our investments in basic physics, chemistry, and biology, but it did pay back indeed.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#617

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#618
post #338

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> making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless. Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments. > ideological purity tests like required DEI statements Example? There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst examples of student-politics excess in these regards and then carefully conflates it with university policy. A…

At UC Berkeley, over 75% of faculty applicants were rejected solely based on reviewing their diversity statements: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi... Rather conspicuously, Asians had the highest rate of rejection, followed by whites. Latin applicants had the second highest pass rate, Black applicants had the highest. The diversity statements were not anonymized (as in, the reviewers could…

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#619

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> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used…

The candidate who opposed Trump during the primaries would have done something very similar to what you said. But then she was born with ovaries so the Republican Party wanted nothing to do with her as the top boss.

NO candidate should get a free pass. They should _all_ _always_ have to primary. That would have likely sorted out Biden earlier in the cycle and we might have had real choices other than Harris to replace the incumbent who flubbed that debate so badly that it was clear they were not going to get elected.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#620
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actu…

Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise? It would be foolish for an employee to let someone else handle career growth for them as their interests aren't aligned (or even known). If you want help with career growth then find a mentor , don't rely on your manager. Managers should facilitate training to improve employee productivity and help…

> Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise?

On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly recent.

Edit - added source (1993): https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-no-...

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