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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#881

Post by greenie_beans »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #326
PaulKeeble wrote: post #9

Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible. It processes all the raw materials and the recycling/reuse of off cuts through every possible way to turn those raw materials into components and then into goods with very little need for import from other countries. Its the complete system for a huge variety of goods. To compete with that the entire pipe…

This is true, and at the same time, this article is absolutely rife with unsourced, unserious points. However insane Trumps plans, the fundamental "facts" presented here are largely a joke. > Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard w…

scrolled too far to see criticism about all that

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#882

Post by greenie_beans »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #184

I think most people have a very confused understanding of money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, not money . Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy, you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to accommodate high value workers. Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes is not high value work. Th…

now do marx's labor theory of value

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#883

Post by ozmodiar »

chii wrote: post #871
strict9 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people." Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the futu…

> Business culture is eating its own young it's not eating its own young. It's externalizing the costs. And it's understandable, because the cost of employees are perhaps the largest line item in the budget.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say capitalist culture is eating its own young, due to its fixation on business culture. And I'm saying that as basically a capitalist. Not sure where we go from here.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#884

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

themaninthedark wrote: post #704
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's no painless answer. China is not a democracy. They can force millions of people to endure terrible working conditions, pollution, corruption, and abuse, and take a very long view. The US can't do this.

Why do the working conditions need to be terrible? Why does there need to be corruption and abuse? Why do they have to expose their workers to pollution? As far as I know, none of those things are required for manufacturing.

No, but like so much in life, doing it correctly is always more difficult and expensive, so people that “shortcut” the process, often win.

That’s why strong regulations are actually important (not something that businesses want to hear -until a “shortcutter” starts to eat their lunch).

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#885

Post by fleek »

y-curious wrote: post #550
fleek wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A 100k factory job and you're calling others entitled? This is the equivalent of the famous Arrested Development skit, "what does a banana cost, $10?"

Every tradesman I know makes north of 80k, granted it's backbreaking work. I assume working in a factory such as semiconductors pays 6 figs, as an engineer or foreman of some kind.

If they are literally stamping parts together on an assembly line then I guess yeah it's not going to pay 100k.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#886

Post by snarf21 »

mjevans wrote: post #626
snarf21 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and the same people do a lot of their shopping at Amazon/Dollar General/Wal-Mart where low price goods are only possible because they are made off shore for much much lower wages. Bringing that manufacturing back here would destroy their buying power. I do find it interesting that a lot of these same people are against raising the minimum wage because "it will bankrupt all the businesses" but somehow think tha…

Offhand, I believe that trick started with tribalism (generally, the 'other' is the most obvious scape goat), became racism in various forms (they look different / go to a different church it's /their/ fault), and has shifted to classism with thinly veiled racism included. It's not much different than how a young child will blame anyone else for something that's gone wrong / they got caught doing. Maybe our society s…

Othering has driven a lot of the hate and derisiveness of the 21st century. A lot of the political messaging and advertising tends to specifically focus on othering.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#887

Post by BatmanAoD »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #516
jghn wrote: post #117

The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan. In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-…

Everyone wants more manufacturing in the US, but nobody wants to be a factory worker. People would rather starve or go homeless than work in a factory. Until Americans overcome their pride, this is going to make building manufacturing in the US very difficult.

If 20% of people really think they'd be better off as factory workers, that's actually kind of a lot. Can you imagine if 20% of the working population really did work in factories? That's an enormous number.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#888

Post by hattmall »

apercu wrote: post #869
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…

> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year. What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary per…

The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.

It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#890

Post by tobir »

The litigiousness point should have been at the top of the list. You can build roadways, but if you constantly have stories in the news of people striking it rich by suing someone, and half the billboards you see in your town is of people telling you they'll help you do it, then it's going to be extremely expensive to employ folks.

It'll be easier to teach folks hard work, it's very difficult to change a culture when 1. A huge sector of our legal system geared towards it 2. People can easily get rich off of it.

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