America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

Post by darth_avocado » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675

glitchc wrote: post #589

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…

To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that. A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when…

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 10:26 PM UTC

runako wrote: post #676

maxerickson wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Inventory is part of working capital. Companies generally understand that they want to expand working capital. Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital at all.

Post by yunwal » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

charlie0 wrote: post #810

korse wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for industrial/mining/agricultural customers. 'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years, The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly…

Lol, $25hr. McDonald's entry-level wage is $20hr in CA. The $5 premium is not enough of an incentive to move to the middle of nowhere for a job.

Post by Bender » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

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…

Post by selimthegrim » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 11:42 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #769

nneonneo wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importing immigrants directly into the military sounds like a bad idea. I’m guessing many would be less likely to want to lay their lives down for the new country, so drafting them seems like a great way to end up with a bunch of disloyal troops.

Both the Romans and the US had success with immigrants in the military, provided that they were thoroughly mixed . A unit with 35 ethnicities in it usually does not rebel "like one man". The Roman way started to fail when they moved to the foederati model, where there would be units of, say, only Goths under a Gothic commander. That proved dangerous.