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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#661

Post by maxerickson »

runako wrote: post #656
glitchc wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Even the creepy business terminology "human capital" implies something that a business actively wants to grow. That is in stark contrast to how most businesses manage their people today.

Not entirely. Businesses don't try to grow things like buildings and inventory, they try to manage them at levels that make sense for their present and projected sales.

(So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees get)

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#662

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

digikata wrote: post #580
roenxi wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make that sound like it was emanating from the business community - the US has had a pretty significant period in there of 0% interest rates determined by a central committee. Return on capital doesn't really matter in a low interest rate environment, the important thing is access to the lending markets. Investors making sensible investments would have been eaten alive by those focusing on companies that were liv…

Maybe, but 0% interest should have make it easy to invest in capital intensive endeavors that would have turned into great protective moats when the interest rates inevitably bumped up. Did that happen with factories and manufacturing? I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.

> I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.

This is the one upside of chaos monkey crashing the economy. They aren't going to be able to drive rates back to zero in the next four years.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#663

Post by Teever »

mr_toad wrote: post #642
Teever wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't just ego. This is an impending existential issue. America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace. China will soon have the ability to take Taiwan and Korea and Japan. If that happens it's game over for any American interests and perhaps democracy as a whole. Wargames[0] paint a grim picture of an upcoming conflict between China and America over Ta…

> America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace. This argument is based on experiences in WWII, i.e. the previous war. You need to be cautious about basing military doctrine on the previous war. I’m not sure the next war will be won by churning out aircraft carriers.

Regardless of what economies will be churning out to fight war, it will more than likely be the side that churns out more stuff that wins.

If not aircraft carriers then what sort of physical objects do you think will critical in winning the next major war?

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#664

Post by catlover76 »

Kirby64 wrote: post #654
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.

[dead]

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#665

Post by jayd16 »

like_any_other wrote: post #163
pjc50 wrote: post #35

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China. Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. > If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will a…

> 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…

Was it absent? The "Green New Deal" was hitting on some of that. You can't beat " is going to pay for it" and "Coal jobs are going to come back", especially when there's no accountability or fact checking.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#666

Post by anon7000 »

This article was a really interesting take on this too: https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/11/america-is-missing-the-n...

The tldr of that post is: - To be really good at making robots, you need to iterate fast

- To iterate fast, you need all component manufacturers nearby (or you’ll be wasting weeks shipping parts from somewhere else)

- To be really competitive at manufacturing, you need to be good at robotics.

- If you’re missing all of these pieces, it will be hard to catch up with (say) China, which has been exponentially growing in every possible aspect of manufacturing for decades. Not only do we not have strong manufacturing, but we don’t have strong robotics companies, don’t have many of our own robotics components companies, and don’t even have much in terms of raw materials. Whereas China has been investing heavily in every single one of these areas.

Bringing manufacturing back means investing in all aspects of the supply chains which lead to technical innovation in manufacturing, which is really hard to do when the supply chain is set up to pull from our current competitor.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#667

Post by nemomarx »

fleek wrote: post #503
kamaal wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would interesting to know what percentage themselves or their own children wanted to work at a factory. Can tell with a huge degree of confidence for all practical purposes thats 0. Its always easy to expect other people to make sacrifices working these jobs, while imagining you and your kids working office desk jobs.

Is everyone on hacker news so entitled and privileged they cannot even imagine an American citizen wanting to work for a living? I absolutely would work a factory job if it paid 100k+ and meant owning a home someday. Instead I got 100k student loans and make 60k at a desk and I'll never have a life outside of work because I simply can't afford it. I'll be 35 this year after 12 years of working and just starting to ha…

how would a 40k a year manufacturing job help though? (real salary of someone I know in the field right now)

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#668

Post by mbgerring »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #555
rtkwe wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were getting the slow and steady version at least for chip manufacturing with the CHIPS Act but Trump has a major need to get credit for everything so that's being torn apart too. The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population…

>The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there…

People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think.

I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.

There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.

It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.

tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#669

Post by danvoell »

"incentivize, subsidize" - yes. There should be less incentives and tax breaks for "holding an asset" and more incentives for making things that improve human lives. Most of the laws are set by the incumbents who stand to lose what they have built and who have the money to pay the lawyers to set the tax code. Real estate should not get incentives unless its getting someone in a home. Private equity, same. Venture capital, after a certain point, same. If you are worth a bazillian dollars, same. A lawyer with balls needs to take on the tax code. I'm kind of hoping the whole Harvard escapade awakens a few legal idealists out there.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#670

Post by NoTeslaThrow »

epolanski wrote: post #610
NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

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…

> We just don't want to employ people I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics. There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc). That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put. But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd exp…

> I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.

I don't see a difference. If we want local industry, we must address the global geo economics.

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