Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 1001 posts

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#931

Post by user777777 »

runako wrote: post #674
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.) However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees. I am ambiva…

> If paying domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in manufacturing. We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items. This notion that we should move Americans from high-producti…

This is spot on. To add, it won’t even matter the outcome of upending our entire society and economy this way (tariffs) if the wealth distribution remains unequal. Nor will these types of jobs equalize wealth distribution (which is never mentioned because that probably sounds like communism) Look at the poor factory workers in china! You want to bring that here? Insanity.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#933

Post by x-complexity »

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-…

> In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this.

Misinterpretation of data.

> 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.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/a-look-at-manufacturing-jo...

Compared to the current percentage of people employed in manufacturing (9.9% - 12,759,129 / 128,718,060), there are **more** Americans that would like to move into manufacturing, not less.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#934

Post by ta20240528 »

nickff wrote: post #904
ta20240528 wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally patents. But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies. And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.

What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.

1) The alternative is for millions of local-currency patents in Lesotho to automatically be valid for two decades in USA, EU, and Japan.

2) An of course it doesn't prevent IP violations - Eurocopter (now Airbus helicopters) had to spend millions to enforce their patents against the thieves* at Bell helicopter.

https://www.bananaip.com/intellepedia/bell-helicopter-v-euro...

* not my preferred choice of words, but its the tone on this forum.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#935

Post by thedougd »

owlstuffing wrote: post #708
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.…

Outside of government, this shift also coincides with the decline of pensions and the rise of the 401k. Career growth has always been a shared responsibility between employees and employers. In white-collar fields--especially medicine and engineering--education has long been frontloaded, with formal schooling as the main on-ramp. Blue-collar jobs, by contrast, have relied more on trade schools, mentorship, and hands-…

I would point to the emergence of Milton Friedman’s school of thought that the only thing a company should care for is delivering “shareholder value.”

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#936

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

greenie_beans wrote: post #880

> 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 work and education that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t h…

I'd guess the source is stuff he has personally witnessed, which means even if it's true (would somebody just go on the Internet and tell lies?) it says nothing about prevalence.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#937

Post by sorcerer-mar »

chii wrote: post #928
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholder supremacy is the problem. We can go back to stakeholder capitalism.

What's the difference? Unless a stakeholder can become a stakeholder without putting in risk capital of course.

Do you have a stake in whether your water supply is full of arsenic?

Yup!

Do you have a stake in whether the people in your community work unsafe jobs for poverty wages?

Yup!

From Claude:

"Stakeholder capitalism is a model where businesses focus on serving the interests of all parties affected by the company's operations - including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. The core belief is that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just investors.

Shareholder supremacy, on the other hand, is a model where a company's primary or sole purpose is to maximize returns for its shareholders. This view, popularized by economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s, holds that businesses have no social responsibility beyond making profits for their owners while following the law."

Shareholder supremacy is a recent meme and it's wildly, obviously antisocial.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#938

Post by fendy3002 »

9rx wrote: post #578
myrmidon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens…

well, if the first step to prepare for WWIII is threatening to annex nearest allies with their own sovereignty (Canada), I'd say it's a very very bad preparation. Secondly, imposing tariff for raw materials and tools while you don't have all the groundwork domestically to do the manufacturing, is also a very very bad preparation. If this is the best US can get, I'm disappointed.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#939

Post by vlovich123 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #703
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…

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat. I think R&D for tax reasons n…

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up.

I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the ones putting the upfront capital so early). Google also has the X moonshot lab that is trying to do similar things to Bell Labs. I think there’s just a lot of romanticism of the golden age when developments were relatively easier because we hadn’t exhausted the low hanging fruit of applied quantum and material sciences.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#940

Post by klooney »

runako wrote: post #755
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items. But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? That's the real test, and whether foolish or not that's what they are trying to do with tariffs. > Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for work…

> But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive. > Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? No, I…

> A person could QA a T-shirt or QA the Netflix app

Netflix famously fired all their QA people and requires their devs to do test automation.

Post reply on HN