America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

> I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on more.

When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the change.

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.

I wonder if we could reproduce the magic of Bell Labs by basically re-creating some Ma Bell style businesses: grant a profitable, but regulated monopoly that had the financial security to think long-term and be willing to fund out-of-the-box research to service internal needs or hypotheticals.

It's deep hubris in our leaders that assumes existing capital/values/structures/motivations are sufficient to allow newcomers ( & new generations) to contribute..

  However. Bell Labs did it, so what sort of humility existed then that (mostly) does not exist now?!?

("Unintentionally moderate"[1-2] business thinkers like PG/YC partners do it all the time)

  Wonder if hubris is necessary for continued survival of the economy.

>Have to be an asshole or something

[2] https://archive.today/latest/coralcap.co/2022/02/why-japanes...

But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..

Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.

Corporate research spending is nearly $1T/yr. Yes, corporations have a lower risk tolerance than the government, but that's not always a bad thing.

> you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.

Because it would be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - in the company's estimate - and then force them to stick around for years.

"But nobody made them agree to that!"

Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.

What you’re describing already exists and are aptly named TRAPs (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions). Companies already abuse these and in fact are illegal in California. Here’s an article covering it from a few years ago: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-us-companies-charging-...

> 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.

And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.

Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service.

50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.

Isn’t that simply the inherent risk associated with business ventures? Not every investment will yield a profit. I recall reading about Ward Parkinson, one of the founders of Micron Technology. During his tenure at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company paid for his Master’s degree at Stanford. However, upon graduating, he promptly left to work for Reticon.

If more employers gave raises such that an existing employee in a given role was paid the same or more as what they would pay a new hire to fill the same role, I don't think we'd see the level of job hopping that we currently do.

This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.

That’s sounds like a functioning free market. Either they find the quality of labor they require at that rate, or they don’t. Either you take such a job at that rate because you have the required skills and knowledge and that’s your best offer, or you don’t.

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.

If you don't upskill for free with no additional comp, how will they continue to cram down labor costs to make their quarterly numbers? You are, broadly speaking, treated as an asset to be sweat until you can be replaced.

> 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-...

My bestie works in sales and marketing. Events, promotions, audience engagement. Long time experience with national brands, loves helping local businesses (side hustle).

A huge part of her job is recruiting and hiring. Part of her pitch is proactive career development.

Paraphrasing: I want you to join our team. I also understand that this job is just one stop on your journey. While you're here, what can I do to help you get the skills and experience you want for your next job?

Consequently, she has a HUGE network, built over decades. Something comes up and she knows just the right person. She has her pick of new opportunities.

Wouldn't you love to have her as your boss?

I've had precisely 2 bosses in my career that had any impulse for nurturing, mentoring, career development. Whereas I've tried to be that kind of boss, given the limits of our current system.

> If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager.

Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.

> How can it be otherwise?

It was otherwise. And is IS otherwise in many other rich countries, as well as not-so-rich ones.

In these places, the employer-employee relationship is more of a relationship and less of a transaction to be reassessed every morning.

If you don't believe it, because you've never seen it, then you are probably American, probably young. And seeing other possibilities is a good reason to study (modern!) history, and to travel.

Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.

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.

Preach. How long does it take train someone to get them to $45hr level of experience? The truth is that it doesn't. Companies love using yoe as an excuse to pay newer workers less. Manufacturing is not like software engineering where you have to constantly be re-educating yourself.

> It's pay. It's always pay.

Indeed.

I attended an injection molding conference and one of the panel discussions was about the poor state of hiring and retention. I stayed expecting to hear the standard complaints about the fact that injection molding was considered "obsolete" (really?), the pipeline was too weak so wages were out of hand and there was too much churn. I was interested in which companies were hiring off the people so much that it warranted a panel session.

Then I heard the complaints of what their primary competitor was: Amazon warehouses. They were losing injection molding workers to freakin' Amazon floor jobs!

I lost it and lit off on an absolute rant about how if a company couldn't keep their employees from joining one of the objectively worst employers in the country then they absolutely deserved to go bankrupt.

I, very suddenly, made both a bunch of friends and a bunch of enemies that day.

In Norway skilled trades generally require a 2-year education and an apprenticeship. After education you start the apprenticeship for which pay starts at like $5-7.5 an hour but every 6 months it increases until you finish the 2 year apprenticeship.

This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice program so it's very cheap to train young workers.

The people who choose this path generally end up pretty well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like mid to late twenties and make even more later.

You make a good point about the Lean/Kaizen/JIT philosophies + headcount.

I've always been associated with mid-size (< 500 million/yr) where much of that 'wisdom' sounded good but didn't work out so well in practice. Sadly for the consulting folks, it isn't actually possible to lean out an entire supply chain and still maintain the ability to respond to market fluctuations. Being lower on that food chain, if you lay off reliable operators/maintenance during something like the COVID slump then you are screwed when business comes back because you can't rehire/train fast enough to fill orders that are needed 'next month'.

Adjusted for cost of living, this could be double the wage.

$5 plus lower cost of living might be depending on the employee and on what you mean by “middle of nowhere”

Will your pay gradually increase to $45 or more at McDonald's?

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Can you share the link? I’d like to watch that.

> 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.

As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.

Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers reiterating their political affiliation to their posts regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in dogmatic bubbles.

I couldn't agree more and worry that even if the country makes it out of this period in one piece the well will have been poisoned on a lot of these topics. We should have big initiatives to make government more efficient, and reduce the national debt, and get back to merit-based processes. But after so much bloviating and fake initiatives that claim to do those things, but actually do the opposite, it's going to be a tough sell to make a real push in the foreseeable future.

You’ve been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive way? Of course. But it wasn’t anything that was going to lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks who can’t just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of realizing that they themselves probably weren’t all that special.

> and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism".

You can't stake out a position without getting called some name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome to modern politics on the internet.

I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs. By bypassing investment in US manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the sidelines for the ability to build, staff, and supply modern low, medium and high infrastructure factories.

It's not impossible to build back, but it would require long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than just tariffs.

The problem is ecosystem effects. High-tech industries evolve from and depend on low-tech ones. There is a limit to how much they can be separated.

Moving the low-cost jobs offshore was fine until automation filled a lot of those jobs. Now the high skilled automation skills and infrastructure (production lines and robots) are also offshore. I have done my fair share of western factory tours and the number of people on the factory floor is soberingly low... they are simply not needed, as they line runs like a vast, complicated machine.

Trump et al. really run a motte-and-bailey argument here. They woo reasonable people who agree that critical industries: food, energy, defense-adjacent, metals, etc. - must have substantial capacity on-shore or at least very near. They then flip to what amounts to massive handouts for his rust belt base, basically saying we should make everything here.

The obvious answer is this:

1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in Bangladesh.

2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation (china).

3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost disease.

4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment in automation and manufacturing technology for decades, which will be painful to undo.

The sensible outcome of these facts is

1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap countries with reasonable levels of human capital.

2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.

3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.

4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have reliable power for this new industrial build.

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The administration is probably aware of this and doesn't care. A huge portion of his base were rust belt voters who want what are essentially handouts, which trump intends to achieve by forcing the American consumer to pay $30/hour for el cheapo goods that could be made elsewhere and have no tangible security impact.

You're mistaking the rhetoric he uses to sell this idiocy to the rest of the country for a good-faith argument.

> Thing is, manufacturing in America is up.

I'm looking at the first chart, "Manufacturing Sector: Real Sectoral Output for All Workers" [1]. It grew until Q2 2000, when it was at 97.2. In Q4 2024 it was at 98.6. And let's not ignore how almost all leading semiconductor manufacturing (which are in and required for nearly everything) has moved to East Asia.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

> we focus on the high-value stuff.

agreed but Trump just gutted the CHIPS act for no other reason than because it was enacted by Biden (the typical "undo everything the last prez did" just like Trump 1.0).

You can argue that Intel is a badly run company, not worth saving etc etc, but if want to save US manufacturing, then Intel, and its ecosystem, would be the first place to start. Otherwise, TSMC, Samsung and China (still playing second-fiddle but investing billions to catch up) will dominate. Certainly better than trying to keep coal plants open.

Ideology aside it's really hard to find _any_ rational thought behind these moves.

> because vibes, basically

This may be more accurate than you realize. Both Democrat and old Republican party rhetoric and policies were pro-globalization/offshoring, with the occasional exception such as CHIPS (and corn subsidies). It's not surprising nobody believed they were changing direction, if for every "we're bringing semiconductors back", they heard ten "your car is German your phone is Chinese your tacos are Mexican, how dare you interfere with glorious Free Trade!"

As someone watching EV & battery plants break ground in my state (GA), this is absolutely my take.

Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely aligned with this goal as well.

I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster response to actually prosecuting criminality in the outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are markedly too corporatist in general).

But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US. There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take credit for them (incl Trump).

>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 had come from farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment, how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that translated right back into mnufacturing there these now older men were familiar with "making things". They could do actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do on the assembly line?

>if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave.

If we could bring back manufacturing, then we would need to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser/menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The people who set this in motion aren't even just retired, they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone can do about what's coming.

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/Indonesia/... nowadays.

I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system is actually supposed to work from my perspective; describing that as "ripping off the American people" is completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.

Not only that. Renewable tech is also a major export sector for China. Most batteries and solar panels bought elsewhere are Chinese. And they are dominating EV manufacturing and manufacturing of pretty much everything else. China has invested and is now getting enormous returns on investment. The rest of the world has divested and is now missing out. Not investing enough was a mistake that needs to be corrected.

It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.

The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh. Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.

> Original article definitely said "per person".

Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare absolute production.

> China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption

Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US residential is more than 2x of China's residential power use, but that's relative to the much larger production use. In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not that different actually:

CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)

US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)

Now, on a per-capita basis the difference is staggering, as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...

I did some quick research on this. McKinsey has a pretty slick-looking web-facing report titled "Global Energy Perspective 2024" report [1] has a table [2] showing breakdowns by industry.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...

[2] SVG...! https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/energy%...

Hmm how is it different in the US do you not get back in the sales tax that you paid for your input. Here the middle man pay tax on the buying price and then collects on the sell price. Then has to pay the government minus what they paid as input sale tax. So all increments on the price gets taxed till the end user. But the tax itself is not taxed again.

Im fairly certain VAT is collected at point of sale in the EU.

Does the US charge sales tax on B2B transactions? Really? Well no wonder you have problems with domestic manufacturing.

At an individual level, it’s not more complicated: it’s reimbursed instead of exempted. And if you’re charging it, it’s easier, since you simply always charge instead of maintaining your list of exceptions.

Do you think that global hegemony by force is long-term (centuries) sustainable at all?

What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over the years unless there is a monumental, continuous difference in spending (like what the US military did since WW2).

But I see no indication that you can keep that situation stable over the long term, and I honestly think that attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one bit in the long run while having massive harmful side effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft power/productivity).

That is not an existential issue; many former hegemons, such as the United Kingdom, continue to exist. Coalitions exist to ward off hegemons.

Genuinely, USA as of now is threat to both peace and democracy - both at home and abroad. Whether it manages to bring back manufacturing is irrelevant to that.

> 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.

I don't know why people keep thinking that China will attack Taiwan. It took HK and Macao without a shot. I think China is following Sun Tzu.

"subduing the enemy without fighting," is the epitome of strategic thinking in his book, The Art of War. This means achieving victory through cunning, deception, and maneuvering, rather than through direct confrontation and bloodshed"

They are increasing their military knowing that US military costs 4+x as much. It might be 4x better so don't fight. Just bankrupt the US. Trump wants a $1T military budget next year.

Why would China want to conquer the West? Buying what it wants is cheaper than an uncertain military battle fought with Nukes.

Hello slippery slope how are you doing?

I was a few drinks in on a sunny Tokyo day when I wrote it, my bad. But yeah, sorry, that’s what I meant. Basically since gaining the “leadership”, which you’re completely right about.

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 should do a better job promoting responsibility and allowing parents to offer oppertunities for children to be responsible; instead of infantalizing everyone entirely until some magical number has passed and suddenly they're an adult who was never previously empowered to be responsible.

The control and status they've had is diminishing, and they are taking it out on the rest of us. Regardless, it will be lost. People are tricky. Onward.

> 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 workers

Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? If that's true then fantastic. But I'd like to see evidence that what they are doing now is somehow more productive.

> Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich" western EU countries.

Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?

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.

Arbeit macht frei.

This poll is being propped up as evidence that people don't actually want to work in a factory, yet more people voiced interest in doing so than are currently, by an order of magnitude. If you believe there's a disconnect between perception and reality, that's fair, but it would have to be off by an order of magnitude on the positive side to support the premise, and an anecdote about a Chinese factory is very weak evidence of that. I would posit that many people would be happier and more fulfilled working in a factory than being stuck doing gig work or packing foreign products for Amazon or even bullshit desk work, but I'm not elitist enough to pretend to know what blue-collar workers in stagnant towns actually feel, let alone argue that they actually want the opposite of what they say. Personally, I wish I had the chance to work in a factory at 16 years old instead of a call center.

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?"

> if it paid 100k+ and meant owning a home someday

That is not going to happen.

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

Bringing back factory jobs isn’t bringing back the American dream. It’s just replacing the shitty gig work you have to do to barely get by with a shitty factory job that you have to do to barely get by. If they pay well, it’ll drive up the cost of goods a ton and still be unhelpful for people.

You would be able to afford a lot less if everything you bought was made in factories where every worker was paid north of $100k. That includes your home, by the way.

Yep, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re wrecking the economy so much that factory jobs might look desirable to some people.

Those people need to watch a few episodes of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs". Also people need to stop saying "unskilled labor". There is no such thing as labor without skills, outside a category in an archaic way of justifying low wages.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp

> IMHO, with the Big Tech boom winding down, what is more valuable for us to do?

Tech isn't winding down; tech, as the sector that draws the most investment based on long-term development, had the biggest response to tight monetary policy designed to slow the entire economy down, but that response demonstrates that tech is where most of the marginal dollar goes.

> Manufacturing could prepare us for the next wave, whatever that might be.

Trying to work our way down the raw materials -> manufacturing -> finance/services ladder that countries usually try to work their way up for maximum prosperity in globalized trade isn't going to prepare us for anything other than lasting economic decline. And why would “manufacturing”—which you can't build generically, but only by specific, usually impossible to reallocate to a different use that isn't closely similar without sacrificing most of the value, major capital investments in particular subareas of manufacturing, prepare us for anything else even ignoring that we’d have to regress to do it?

The big tech boom is winding down?

Just because we ended the era of cheap money to try and stop runaway inflation doesn't mean the tech boom is winding down.

Look at everything that's happening with gene editing, in physics, with the jwst, with LLMs and robotics and computer vision, with alt energy sources, batteries, in material sciences, etc.

I mean this is such a myopic take. We are in just now in an era where people are now capable of finding needles in needlestacks.

You are confusing easily manipulated economic vibes that feel bad right now with the rapid approach of a complete overhaul of the human experience.

The U.S. has basically supported the strip mining of our economy by value sucking predatory investment firms. There is a reason why China have more robotics per capita in their factories than we do and it has to do with a complete failure in strategic thinking, long term planning and ultimately a hatred for our youth.

That’s a hilarious thing to say considering our behavior towards trade lately. We’ve burned bridges with our closest trading partners and made everyone else uncomfortable to trade with us because they don’t know what the eventual tariff rate will be, or if it will change tomorrow. We’re retreating from the world stage, and guess who’s sitting there ready to take the reins. It’s genuinely the opposite of what you seem to want.

mold making is also pretty complicated -- anything in the 1,000-1M parts produced will _probably_ be an aluminum mold (cheaper than steel) but they're still heavy and large to keep around.

I haven't met any injection molding shops in the US that do a huge amount of specialty parts like toys. The industry tries to get as many medical device jobs as possible.

I've thought about this and love board games. I don't want cheap plastic anymore. I want a reusable modular gaming system that let's me use more imagination.

This seems like the kind of thing where 3d printing is probably good enough quality wise.

Of course, the 3d printers themselves are probably being made in China.

That's a crazy statement. It is clearly not true that every single person in the US capable of making board games now or in the future is instead already making high-grade aerospace and medical components.

I've been thinking lately that we don't properly account for things like security. I've also been thinking lately that a lot of people have terrible ethics and are more than happy to engage in nepotism and or fraud. Don't know what to do about it personally, I just try to keep my needs small and be happy with what I've got while trying to prepare my own children to have some level of a good life.

@agriculture.

Have you ever heard any concrete strategies and plans regarding food security?

Wouldn't there be policies about how many calories should be produced in what form, how long can it be stored, what would a local ramp up look like if there was a global catastrophe?

What percentage of agriculture is really relevant to food security?

Those are just empty words so farmers can get their subsidies and go on to produce more industrial rapeseed oil.

> In that sense yes, doing „low tech“ is valuable in the long run.

Sure. But how much tax money do you want to throw at entire industries to hide the basic fact that wages are lower elsewhere? Where do you want to take the labor away from? And where do you draw the essential/wasted subsidies boundary line?

Because in my view, Trump tariffs just ignore those very basic questions and don't even attempt to answer them.

It's perfectly reasonable IMO to throw 20 billion a year to agriculture, because that is a very essential sector. But doing the same for the textile industry? Ore/Oil refining? Steelworks? Chemical plants?

I don't wanna subsidies 20 non-essential industries just so that some former fast-food worker can assemble overpriced shoes inside the US (and labor demand from all those industries would drive up wages/costs in the fast-food sector, too, thanks to the Baumol effect).

I'm not against nurturing some important local industries, but Trump tariffs are a complete failure at achieving that IMO.

The EUV light sources are all made in San Diego. Currently, there is no single country that can make an 3600D or equivalent machine. Which shouldn't be surprising given the complexity.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory...

Very graceful.

I think the current Russia-Ukraine war is the delayed end of Soviet Union collapse.

Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks - until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.

So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved without a fight a couple of weeks later.

I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts being fought out in the open.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-yelt... - free to read with NYT registration

My pet theory is that he was in his 30s when the Plaza Accords happened and they really imprinted on him. If the rising Japanese economy could be brought to heel then so could the Chinese (ignore the fact that Japan was under the US security umbrella). It's no more rational than the fondness you might have for the first car you drove.

It explains it precisely. The United States is a maritime power. It has never had the capability to maintain longterm occupation the way the Soviets or Ottomans did.

Fighting wars isn't the same as having an empire.

The combined population of those locations is about 5 million people. Compare with, say, colonial India, which was about 300 million people.

I’m not denying the existence of American imperialism entirely, but let’s be real about its scope compared to old school empires.

hacker news is so much fun.

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?

It's almost like the U.S. is going to lose either way.

> Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.

What tax breaks has he aimed at these people beyond some of the overtime and tipping (which is expected to only equate to about $2K)?

Instead:

>The largest tax cuts would accrue to the highest-income families, the Treasury said.

> Household in the top 5% — who earn more than $450,000 a year, roughly — are the “biggest winners,” according to a July 2024 analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. They’d get over 45% of the benefits of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it said.

> A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of the broad Republican tax plan had a similar finding.

> The bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, according to the Wharton analysis, issued Thursday. The top 10% would get 56% of the value, it said.

Canada and the US are no longer allies.

Security allies? Sure. Economic allies? I don't think that has been the case for a long time. Even before Trump's second term.

Canada and the US have been to court multiple times over NAFTA violations (sometimes Canada is at fault admittedly).

https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-com...

1. Jobs.

2. Profits.

3. Refined products can be exported to countries that don't have refinement capabilities. Not just the US and China. This gives Canada better trade leverage.

4. Security. A big one that's emerged in the last few weeks.

I don't see either Poilievre or Carney talking about this which is disappointing but not unexpected.

>I suspect there was a bit of racism involved

Or they wanted access to sell to the Chinese market and they did whatever it took to get it.

> cares much about democracy anymore

Anymore? Arguably, the US never did. Ask, for example, the people living in Caribbean or Latin American countries what happened when they elected leaders that the US disliked.

Or Iran. Or Italy. Or Congo. And so on.

Or ask the Indonesians about the mass killings in their country in 1965-1966, supported by the US. Around 500,000 people died, though some estimates put the number of deaths at 1,000,000. Ask the Filipinos about how the US propped up their military dictatorship back in the 1970s-1980s.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The US has never been sincerely interested in democracy -- only strategically. The illusion that the US cared about democracy was a primarily Western luxury.

And when a Democrat is back in power in 2029, and China invades in 2030, what will she do? Protect Taiwan and destroy the US economy as we endure the equivalent of an infinite tariff; or appear weak by saying “that’s a shame”, even if China is doing a Great Leap Forward on the population?

> I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore, only dollars.

I don't think it's a good idea to assign Trump's beliefs, or those of his administration, to America as a whole. Any more, frankly, than it's a good idea to assign those of his opposition to the country as a whole.

Even if you are correct, we are in a situation where we risk having built our economy on the cheap labor of a Russia equivalent.

If that Russia equivalent invades an Ukraine equivalent, despite both instances being considered unthinkably crazy, what are we going to do? Or, what will China do, to us?

I was talking about the cost in the US, not overseas.

Or, Mexico, Vietnam, India, etc. Despite perception, they don't have all the world's manufacturing.