17 ms·

America Can’t Even Produce the Things It Invented

115 points by vo2maxer 6y ago

fermienrico 6y ago
I wish Silicon Valley wasn’t just about software, particularly adtech. Some of the most brilliant minds are working on optimizing click ratios. There is some hardware tech (Apple, nVidia, Intel, Tesla), but vast majority of the engineers are working on cushy jobs paying $400k to serve ads. SV should be leading investments in Semiconductors, automation and manufacturing tech. It doesn’t even live up to its name. If you’ve been following how difficult it is to manufacture things at scale (Tesla), it’s a hard problem. Manufacturing is difficult. Serving ads isn’t of national strategic importance. It’s just juicy. “Someone’s gotta make stuff” - Elon. It’s true even if you don’t like the guy.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Apple: Made by Foxconn, not in the US. nVidia: Made by TSMC, not in the US. Intel and Tesla are made in the US afaik, but even the hardware startups we do have still tend to manufacture abroad.
  - jfim 6y ago
    How much of the electronics in Teslas are made in the USA though?
  - adventured 6y ago
    Apple: assembled by Foxconn. If your premise were accurate, the primary value would be in Foxconn and they'd destroy Apple by competing with them and take their $60 billion per year in profit. Most of the value is from Apple and the other component makers, not the company doing primitive assembly. Further, Foxconn makes nothing in the iPhone, so once again it's very obviously not "made by Foxconn." And that's why Foxconn gets such a tiny slice of the profit.
    - microtherion 6y ago
      There are different ways of doing outsourcing. Companies like IBM (and Dell, at one point) outsourced more and more of their value chain, until eventually all they contributed to their products was their logo. I believe Apple is trying to go down a different path, by staying involved in the minutiae of manufacturing, materials science, etc, basically everything but actually doing the manufacturing.
  - jmisavage 6y ago
    Intel is global they have fabs in Israel, Ireland, and China too. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000015142/programs.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
    - fermienrico 6y ago
      The fab in China is 20 year old tech. Primarily chipsets.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - blackrock 6y ago
    SpaceX rockets are still made in the US. Go work for them. Seriously, you do not want to be assembling iPhones. Build a robot to do that tedious work instead.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Thinking about SV as just adtech is pretty reductionist. Through another lens, SV basically solved big data and global software distribution and scalability. Big tech has contributed to both the tools that allow handling massive data streams and ML. That foundation is what is helping data-driven manufacturing companies pull ahead.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Agree, it is deliberately reductionist to provoke discussion about what we're not doing in SV. What do you think we should be doing in SV in addition these technologies?
  - ragebol 6y ago
    And what purpose is that big data stuff typically used for? Something related to serving ads.
    - aeternum 6y ago
      For Tesla, collecting self-driving training data as well as general fleet data. For Square, collecting transaction data to mitigate risk so that merchants worldwide can take payments. For Uber/Lyft predicting areas where there will be people needing rides to optimize transportation needs. Plenty of real-world applications other than ads.
      - deeeeplearning 6y ago
        >to optimize transportation needs. You mean to optimize Uber and Lyft revenue
      - mynameisash 6y ago
        I used to work with a guy that liked to talk about how much porn has helped technology - primarily that the desire for privacy (in viewing and purchasing) helped drive SSL adoption. I'm sure he was being facetious, but the idea that an industry like porn or ads might drive technology that then can benefit other 'worthy' industries seems obvious to me.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Investment follows returns, or at least the speculative possibility of returns. Unfortunately, semiconductors, automation and manufacturing tech doesn't have the same upside capability. If you want 10-100X returns, you look elsewhere.
  - MichaelZuo 6y ago
    Well the return on investment is in fact greater than it appears for critical industries. It’s just that the upside is not entirely captured in dollars or RMB, or any other monetary currency for that matter. So when people, who have been habituated to looking at numbers denominated in dollars, think about it they effectively have blinders on.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Fair point. I explained why financial investors are not interested in those technologies. The advantage of financial returns is that they are measurable and currency broadly accepted. People have subjective opinions on what constitutes non-financial returns and you can't buy a house with happiness. If the proposal is that more people should invest time in non-monetary pursuits, then what alternative incentive motivate them. Presumably people working in ad-tech could leave retrain for another career if they wanted.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Very true. It would be great if these brights were working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation. Instead it’s about extracting as much as possible from existing tech. It reminds me a little of the situation with journalism and news. We have less and less reporters collecting information but more and more websites and blogs that dissect and debate the same information.
  - jdross 6y ago
    There are infinite ways to retort this, but let’s go with the easiest and point to the company literally dealing with plastics recyling and separation that raised $55 million today https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-million-for-ai-that-picks-and-sorts-recyclables/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-mi...
  - bmitc 6y ago
    > working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation Do you happen to have any helpful analysis, articles, companies, etc. along these lines? I have thought it would be a fun thing to work on, but I have struggled to know where to look and haven’t found anything particular in my searching.
    - spaetzleesser 6y ago
      When you look at recycling facilities there are people sorting the trash that goes by them on conveyor belts. To automate this you need to somehow detect what the item is and then you need to be able to handle it. Seems like a great challenge for computer vision or other sensors and then robotics. Or have robots that can find trash in oceans or on beaches and remove it. This would be super useful but unfortunately our system rewards producing trash way more than removing or even better avoiding it.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  Let’s not ignore biotech. It’s experiencing a tremendous boom in SV (and in the Berkeley-Emeryville area). It gets way less attention than Tesla and Facebook, for some reason... probably because its products and innovations are much harder to explain to the public. (Though that may be an overly cynical answer with regards to the media.)
  - godelski 6y ago
    I thought these technologies are still early and in the research phase. That would make sense for them to operate in stealth mode. Tesla sells vehicles to the public (and let's be real, Elon is a big PR department). Are these companies producing useful products currently? It seems that you're implying that they are and that we (me) aren't aware of them, so I'm curious if you could expand on this and enlighten us. I do know investors are dumping a ton of money into bio-tech, just not aware of products that are being sold.
    - haram_masala 6y ago
      Regarding products, I'd divide biotech into three very broad categories, medical, industrial, and food. Medical biotech is generally the most well-established, from Genentech (now Roche) on down to the companies being created today. Most of that work are novel and very promising therapies for a range of diseases, and diagnostics/prognostics to detect and track disease states. Both are generally at the level that's popularly known as "personalized medicine" (specific to your genome, epigenetics, and in some cases microbiome). Some of the diagnostics in development and hitting the market now would be considered sorcery just five years ago. Industrial biotech is harnessing biological and biochemical processes for industry and production. That's much smaller but growing fast; people outside the industry would be shocked to discover what chemicals and other products can and will be produced simply by fermenting various microbes. Zymergen is one company doing this, and among the biggest but by no means the only one. Recently there's been a surge in biotech-based food production. Most people don't realize that the Impossible Burger (and other products from Impossible) taste so "meaty" because it contains transgenic yeast that secretes cow heme. There are companies that are creating cow dairy products from transgenic yeast - you can actually buy their ice cream today - and companies like Memphis Meats are working on cell-cultured meat, made entirely from animal-free processes , minus the initial cell biopsy. Same with Finless Foods. All of the above are within a couple miles of each other, and these are only a few examples.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  It took 2 days for the Moderna vaccine to be created, and it still hasn't been approved in the EU. We could be doing amazing things in bio with mRNA, Crisper and deep learning but the entire thing is so wrapped up in regulation in order to protect the incumbents that it is not a space worth working in.
  - boringg 6y ago
    2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer. Building the vaccine, bio-reacting it to scale and testing across appropriate populations took a considerable amount of time. Health regulations are in place for a reason, to protect the public not to protect incumbents. Sometimes I am sure it does, other times it makes sure poor products don't go into the public market.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      > 2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer This step used to take years. And require state of the art facilities, with biohazard containment, viral samples, etc. Now? Given a virus sequence done in a lab on the other side of the planet, one can design a vaccine in a day. Sure, it took many years of research (and in coronaviruses in particular) to reach this stage, specially on how to stabilize the spike protein. But one cannot understate how amazing this new technology is. And then once done you can send the results to a machine to get it "built". At a low scale, sure, but it's still impressive. With the mRNA approach we no longer have to resort to things like using eggs to make the vaccines, we can use the cellular machinery for that. It's mind-boggling.
      - boringg 6y ago
        Oh I think you are misconstruing my statement. It is an incredible feat what’s been done on these vaccines. I assume you got youre intel from the bio eats world podcast. I’m pointing out that jumping the testing that slows the vaccine to market is a bad move.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Hardware manufacturers have a ton of additional labor needed to produce things. The engineers can't all be paid 200k+ or they'll bleed the company dry. The highest margins are realized in markets with the lowest overhead. That's where everybody shifted to.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I share the lament of the GP comment. It seems like it would better if there was hardware engineering and engineers weren't paid 200k+. That the market has shifted seems like a failure of the economic system.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Money wants to make more money. And it doesn't care about national boundaries. It also isn't good at pricing catastrophes like the collapse-of-the-US-financial-system-because-of-the-collapse-of-the-electrical-grid catastrophe that we can't recover from because we can't make the transforms anymore and China won't sell them to us and our ports won't work without computers anyway, and so on.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    You're mistaken, China will most definitely sell that to us. It is in their interest. To problem is if the US will be able to afford it.
- m463 6y ago
  I also wonder about this kind of stuff. I think about things like this: What if all the wallstreet quants and sv adtech guys were all put on a nuclear fusion project? It would be like an unstoppable force against an immovable project.
prionassembly 6y ago
China is able to manipulate its exchange rate to regulate the relative prices of imports and exports. So are ~200 other economies in the world. The US doesn't have an exchange rate to fiddle with. Hell, it can hardly produce domestic inflation with its low interest rates, let alone devalue its currency. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
- ska 6y ago
  True, but there is a reason it's been called "exorbitant privilege" - while nothing here is clear cut there lots of reasonable people would argue that there is a net benefit to US.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Yes. To abuse mathematical language, the first-order effects of the exorbitant privilege are very positive for the US. Some negative second-order effects are arguable (strategic capacity / robustness); some are reminiscent of your typical third-world lobbying for a kind of state capitalism. Then, this has beneficiaries and losers. "Good jobs" in particular is such specious rhetoric.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  If China can move to DCEP (Chinese state crypto) and get their borrowers to follow their lead, the US will find itself in a tough position. In the end game for China, they displace the US and can avoid the dollar in trade.
  - seppin 6y ago
    If it was that easy to displace the dollar, someone would have done it already. What advantage does a Chinese cryptocurrency have over a traditional one?
    - caeril 6y ago
      This. August 15th of this year will be FIFTIETH anniversary of Nixon telling the rest of the world that their dollars held in reserve are redeemable for precisely one bag of dicks. If the world was ever going to de-dollarize, they would have done it at any point in the last half-century.
Tycho 6y ago
At a certain point, does automation/robotics swing the manufacturing base back towards the west?
- jbay808 6y ago
  It's mostly being deployed in Asia, where the demand is high and the supply of complementary parts is also high. PCB manufacturing is almost completely automated, for example. Didn't move back.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Unlikely in our lifetime. The same automation will be available in the east, but with cheaper technicians, electricity, taxes, regulation, and land.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    Also, what is there to automate in the U.S.? Most of what could be a target of automation is already in China.
    - Tycho 6y ago
      Well if cheap labour is not an input then there's no reason that the manufacturing has to be done somewhere with cheap labour costs.
      - bmitc 6y ago
        But the automation will need engineers and technicians. China is likely not super reliant if at all on the west for automation expertise, and is likely closing any gap that may exist. They have a legion of more and more well educated people to fill those roles. I’m super worried that the U.S. is turning into Russia, i.e., a corrupt oligarchy with no want or ability to mobilize and educate its people. China saw that happening to themselves and specifically steered away from it back in the 80s.
        6y ago
recursivedoubts 6y ago
We were sold down the river by our own elites, particularly on Wall Street and with the full complicity of the Economics Departments of the west. "Comparative Advantage", something something about corn and wool, meanwhile the whole supply chain was moved to China, our middle class was decimated and we went into tremendous amounts of debt to pretend everything was fine... Left, right... whatever. The elites have failed us.
- babaganoosh89 6y ago
  The problem isn't comparative advantage, it's that the US left the poor states to languish with poor education. So instead of higher quality manufacturing / blue collar jobs, non-educated folks got minimum wage service jobs.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    The US is at or near the top of all western countries on educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      The US also has the highest spending in health care per capita. Spending does not equal outcomes.
      - recursivedoubts 6y ago
        Yes, I agree. But the comment implied neglect, which is false. Our education system is a mess, but it's not due to neglect, and it doesn't have anything to do with manufacturing being shipped abroad. As a side note, the US has the second highest public spending per capita (second only to Norway, last I checked). Our Government spends more per citizen than all but one "socialist" country. We then of course spend another doubling of that in private expenditures, and, yes, get worse outcomes. The US is in a very bad spot.
liminal 6y ago
"Made in America" is a nice slogan, but "Not Made by an Enemy" would be more apt. Made in an Ally would be fine too (Canada, Mexico, Western Europe...)
- boringg 6y ago
  Haven't heard that one. That would be the best expression -- Made by an Ally to co-brand with Made in America. Made in America protectionism raises the ire of all its allies (which over the last 4 years it has trashed).
- Udik 6y ago
  What you call "enemy" is, in this case, simply a fully independent nation. That is, one free to have goals and strategies that put its interest first. What you call "allies" are subordinate nations, free to pursue their own interest as long as it doesn't conflict with the interest of the US. The US are a perfectly independent nation. So is China.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  I felt like we should have done that with Saudi oil after 9/11. Why did we let them have no consequences when their policies were most directly responsible for it, out of all countries in the world? We should have put a tariff on their oil and used Canadian crude until they stopped promoting extreme Wahabiism.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Because it would have crashed the US economy. The US was highly dependent on Saudi oil back then, and Canada could not have come close to filling that gap (their output was 2m barrels per day circa 1999/2000, the US needed both all of that supply and OPEC supply). Over time the US has removed its dependency on Saudi oil, courtesy of fracking. OPEC oil is no longer necessary for the US economy. The most interesting thing about Saudi Arabia going forward is that the US will eventually benefit from destroy them as China is the primary beneficiary of Saudi oil (which will also make US oil that much more valuable, we'll send it to Saudi's #2 and #3 customers, Japan & South Korea). I'd expect the hawks in DC to eventually consider turning Saudi Arabia into another Syria. The second most interesting thing about Saudi Arabia, is their population to barrels of production ratio. It keeps plunging as the Saudi population soars and oil production can't keep up. A revolution is inevitable; that ratio plunging represents a ticking timebomb of the non-elite population's future wealth rapidly declining (while they perpetually fail to develop an alternative economy).
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
Manufacturing coupled with enviro taxes is coming back to West.
legitster 6y ago
So few of these conversations actually discuss the reasons American manufacturing is so uncompetitive and assume it's entirely legislative/outside factors. As I been told, cost is rarely the primary factor - Chinese manufacturing is insanely flexible. You can set up a plant with almost no capital, be able to retool at a moment's notice to a customer's whim, and add and drop employees to production at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, in the US, unless you are talking about very expensive CNC processes, batch production is not a thing. If you set up a production line, everything needs to be stable and long term. You need permits. You need employee contracts. You need to train people. You can't handle a lot of turnover. You bring in robots, and that requires more specialization and training. I firmly believe that things which increase fluidity in the labor market will be key to improving US manufacturing. Things like affordable healthcare and housing. Make it so that people can comfortably live in a gig economy.
- mncharity 6y ago
  > actually discuss the reasons On topics where the fraction of HN readership with professional expertise is relatively small, it seems HN infrastructure and culture often isn't able to surface that expertise, to sustain the quality of discussion which exists when the fraction is large. I wonder if there might be some form of low hanging fruit, like maybe a cultural convention of creating a "professionals" comment tree, where people are expected to apply a stricter-than-usual test of whether they have the expertise to comment? Attempting to create a lump of critical mass professional discussion.
- mncharity 6y ago
  > flexible I don't disagree, and very not my field, but I found it curious that France's manufacturing exports per capita remain 2x the US[1], despite not having a reputation for flexibility. Germany remains 4x. Which raises a question, with respect to manufacturing exports, why does the US look like a smaller EU, rather than like a larger France or Germany? [1] https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/mnfc.ex?country=BRA&indicator=3803&countries=CHN,DEU,FRA,GBR,IDN,JPN,MEX,CAN,USA&viz=line_chart&years=1990,2014&compareBy=region https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/mnfc.ex?country=B...
esoterica 6y ago
Real manufacturing output is a lot higher than it was back in the supposed heyday of manufacturing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS Manufacturing employment, on the other hand, is down substantially because of automation.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  How much of manufacturing output growth was driven by the boom in the oil/gas industry? People hear manufacturing and think electronics or cars, but petroleum and coal was 2x the size of the auto manufacturing last time I looked.
taylodl 6y ago
How many countries in the world manufacture commercial airliners? How many countries in the world manufacture automobiles sold around the world (don't forget a lot of 'foreign' cars are manufactured in the United States)? How many countries in the world has a private company manufacturing re-usable rocketry capable of carrying crews to the ISS? I've been reading these scaremongering stories all my life. First it was Japan eating our lunch. Where are they now? Then it was Mexico poised to take all our manufacturing. Didn't happen. Now everyone is scared about China. Pretty soon they're going to realize they don't want to be in the business of manufacturing screws, either. There's simply no money in it. Meanwhile U.S. manufacturing has been growing. That's something the NY Times is conspicuously silent about. I'm not saying the U.S. doesn't have social and political issues we need to get sorted out - but there's never been a time in our history that we haven't had social and political issues we need to get sorted out. I'm not saying we don't have progress to achieve. I'm saying I'm sick and tired about hearing how the U.S. no longer manufactures screws and consumer electronics. There's a bigger picture to consider.
- m463 6y ago
  What's funny to me is that people complain about US automakers losing... with no mention of Tesla at all.
roland_nilsson 6y ago
Well I'm no economist, but this seems inevitable if (1) consumers want cheap products and (2) production is cheaper elsewhere. Given those conditions, any company that wants to survive will have to move production abroad (and those that do not will quickly be replaced). So if we want to keep domestic production, either consumers need to voluntarily choose more expensive alternatives -- which seems unlikely to happen -- or we have to put tariffs or other restrictions on import of goods. The EU does this for a variety of agricultural products to protect farming, for example. Or is there another way out?
- m463 6y ago
  Computer controlled manufacturing, robotics, and other forms of automation, like Elon Musk's gigafactories. I don't know the reality of the gigafactories though: - how many "corner cases" are handled by humans - would it (un)scale for things with smaller production numbers?
  - roland_nilsson 6y ago
    Increasing automation to push prices might keep the factories within the country, but it won't save manufacturing jobs.
jjk166 6y ago
Most stories like these completely misunderstand the issues with american manufacturing. It's easy to see lower American manufacturing employment and increasing Chinese manufacturing and conclude that American jobs are simply moving to china, but this narrative doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny. Take for example steel production. American employment in the industry has fallen by 55% since 1989, while chinese production is now 5 times higher. Case closed right? Well no. In that time period, the US built over 40 Million Tons of steel production capacity, 46% of its total capacity. Further, while chinese production has increased dramatically, they are not a major exporter of steel to the US, peaking at 7th largest trading partner in 2015 and currently not even in the top 10. Our biggest steel trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Looking at the situation more granularly, we see that US steel production has been approximately constant since the early 80s, whereas Chinese steel production didn't ramp up till the 00s, around the same time that the decrease in US steel employment leveled off. There has been a major shift in how steel is produced over the past few decades. Over this time period, blast furnaces have been shutting down and been replaced with basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces which require less manpower to produce steel. In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US, now 1 man-hour produces 300 tons. Further there have been major shifts in consumption. The US is consuming less steel as most of its infrastrucuture is already built up, and as new products use less steel (either because stronger steels can do more with less or other materials like aluminum and plastics are used instead). China is employing many more steel workers to work less efficient plants, making lower grade steels to fuel its transition into a developed nation. While this is merely one example, the story is similar in a number of industries - employment goes down in the US, up in China, but there is no decrease in productivity in the US which closely coincides with an increase in production in or exports from China. In general, productivity and capital investment in the US actually remains steady despite shrinking employment, and where there are decreases in productivity, they tend to correlate with reduction of demand, for example in the auto industry. When people think about automation, they typically picture robots doing what they had been doing. In most industries that hasn't happened, so most people conclude that automation hasn't had any serious impact yet. But the real change is typically in much more mundane process improvement. You don't need as many people to do the same amount of work, and the work that needs doing tends to be different from what was done in the past - more desk jobs and information processing, as well as more low cost unskilled labor, with the blue collar professional in the middle mostly made obsolete. Trade wars with China or subsidies for "onshoring" aren't going to change anything, unfortunately recreating the prosperity of our past will require complicated holistic changes to many sectors, informed by a firm understanding of manufacturing technology and economics.
mips_avatar 6y ago
I think what companies really want is manufacturing as a service, much like cloud computing economics but for physical goods manufacturing. They want the ability to scale without building their own infrastructure, they don't want to deal with the personnel, they want to be able to lock-in only the capacity they know they will use and get a discount. The problem is that unlike cloud computing which can automatically scale, manufacturing as a service is all about people. You have to remove people from the equation to the point that the only people are debugging the machines.
nine_zeros 6y ago
I don't see any talk of removing US dollar as a reserve currency. The only reason China is so export oriented is because they need to earn dollars to buy oil. If they didn't need to buy oil in dollars, they would reorient their factories to sell their manufactured goods domestically, giving everyone a high standard of living. Instead, they are making more and more goods for our fat American consumption just to earn more and more dollars. Sure, removing dollar as a reserve currency will make all of us poorer by global standards but we won't need to import manufactured goods from China any longer.
- kenned3 6y ago
  Your post contains many errors. 1) The "Petroyuan"... Should this ever happen, Oil will be priced in Yuan. https://eurasiantimes.com/petro-dollar-vs-petro-yuan-is-china-set-to-replace-u-s-as-the-biggest-player-in-m-east-as-ties-grow-with-saudi-arabia/ https://eurasiantimes.com/petro-dollar-vs-petro-yuan-is-chin... 2) this is NOT the reason china exports. They do this as they have a large labour advantage, very lax pollution laws and can make things for far cheaper then others can. You can determne this for yourself once you realize that China doesnt only export to the USA. When China exports to the EU for example they earn Euro notes. They can convert Euro's to USD if needed, but i dont think their primary goal is to accumulate USD, espeically given their massive USD Bond holdings. If anything, they are probably looking to sell USD bonds to diversify. 3) removing the US as a reserve curency wont just make americans "poorer" - it will have a devistating impact on your ability to borrow. Since the US gvt constantly runs a deficit who will finance this when other nations no longer want/need USD? 4) The US needs to import because as the article stated, they no longer manufacture things. Try going to a city like "bridgeport, Connecticut" and see the mothballed factories. It will take decades to undue the damage outsourcing has caused.
  - nine_zeros 6y ago
    I understand everything you said. I meant weaning the US dollar as a reserve currency gradually instead of abruptly. We are already getting some ways there by printing to pay for the massive deficits. What I meant is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. If we want to assemble smartphones here, our workers will have to accept the life of those workers. Those workers don't own cars, live in shitty shacks and have no wlb to speak of. But considering that so many people are clamoring for such jobs, maybe that's what we should go for.

115 points by vo2maxer 6y ago

I wish Silicon Valley wasn’t just about software, particularly adtech. Some of the most brilliant minds are working on optimizing click ratios. There is some hardware tech (Apple, nVidia, Intel, Tesla), but vast majority of the engineers are working on cushy jobs paying $400k to serve ads. SV should be leading investments in Semiconductors, automation and manufacturing tech. It doesn’t even live up to its name. If you’ve been following how difficult it is to manufacture things at scale (Tesla), it’s a hard problem. Manufacturing is difficult. Serving ads isn’t of national strategic importance. It’s just juicy. “Someone’s gotta make stuff” - Elon. It’s true even if you don’t like the guy.

nikanj 6y ago
Apple: Made by Foxconn, not in the US. nVidia: Made by TSMC, not in the US. Intel and Tesla are made in the US afaik, but even the hardware startups we do have still tend to manufacture abroad.
- jfim 6y ago
  How much of the electronics in Teslas are made in the USA though?
- adventured 6y ago
  Apple: assembled by Foxconn. If your premise were accurate, the primary value would be in Foxconn and they'd destroy Apple by competing with them and take their $60 billion per year in profit. Most of the value is from Apple and the other component makers, not the company doing primitive assembly. Further, Foxconn makes nothing in the iPhone, so once again it's very obviously not "made by Foxconn." And that's why Foxconn gets such a tiny slice of the profit.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    There are different ways of doing outsourcing. Companies like IBM (and Dell, at one point) outsourced more and more of their value chain, until eventually all they contributed to their products was their logo. I believe Apple is trying to go down a different path, by staying involved in the minutiae of manufacturing, materials science, etc, basically everything but actually doing the manufacturing.
- jmisavage 6y ago
  Intel is global they have fabs in Israel, Ireland, and China too. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000015142/programs.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    The fab in China is 20 year old tech. Primarily chipsets.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- blackrock 6y ago
  SpaceX rockets are still made in the US. Go work for them. Seriously, you do not want to be assembling iPhones. Build a robot to do that tedious work instead.
aeternum 6y ago
Thinking about SV as just adtech is pretty reductionist. Through another lens, SV basically solved big data and global software distribution and scalability. Big tech has contributed to both the tools that allow handling massive data streams and ML. That foundation is what is helping data-driven manufacturing companies pull ahead.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  Agree, it is deliberately reductionist to provoke discussion about what we're not doing in SV. What do you think we should be doing in SV in addition these technologies?
- ragebol 6y ago
  And what purpose is that big data stuff typically used for? Something related to serving ads.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    For Tesla, collecting self-driving training data as well as general fleet data. For Square, collecting transaction data to mitigate risk so that merchants worldwide can take payments. For Uber/Lyft predicting areas where there will be people needing rides to optimize transportation needs. Plenty of real-world applications other than ads.
    - deeeeplearning 6y ago
      >to optimize transportation needs. You mean to optimize Uber and Lyft revenue
    - mynameisash 6y ago
      I used to work with a guy that liked to talk about how much porn has helped technology - primarily that the desire for privacy (in viewing and purchasing) helped drive SSL adoption. I'm sure he was being facetious, but the idea that an industry like porn or ads might drive technology that then can benefit other 'worthy' industries seems obvious to me.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
Investment follows returns, or at least the speculative possibility of returns. Unfortunately, semiconductors, automation and manufacturing tech doesn't have the same upside capability. If you want 10-100X returns, you look elsewhere.
- MichaelZuo 6y ago
  Well the return on investment is in fact greater than it appears for critical industries. It’s just that the upside is not entirely captured in dollars or RMB, or any other monetary currency for that matter. So when people, who have been habituated to looking at numbers denominated in dollars, think about it they effectively have blinders on.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Fair point. I explained why financial investors are not interested in those technologies. The advantage of financial returns is that they are measurable and currency broadly accepted. People have subjective opinions on what constitutes non-financial returns and you can't buy a house with happiness. If the proposal is that more people should invest time in non-monetary pursuits, then what alternative incentive motivate them. Presumably people working in ad-tech could leave retrain for another career if they wanted.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Very true. It would be great if these brights were working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation. Instead it’s about extracting as much as possible from existing tech. It reminds me a little of the situation with journalism and news. We have less and less reporters collecting information but more and more websites and blogs that dissect and debate the same information.
- jdross 6y ago
  There are infinite ways to retort this, but let’s go with the easiest and point to the company literally dealing with plastics recyling and separation that raised $55 million today https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-million-for-ai-that-picks-and-sorts-recyclables/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/04/amp-robotics-raises-55-mi...
- bmitc 6y ago
  > working on important stuff like how to deal with plastics recycling and separation Do you happen to have any helpful analysis, articles, companies, etc. along these lines? I have thought it would be a fun thing to work on, but I have struggled to know where to look and haven’t found anything particular in my searching.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    When you look at recycling facilities there are people sorting the trash that goes by them on conveyor belts. To automate this you need to somehow detect what the item is and then you need to be able to handle it. Seems like a great challenge for computer vision or other sensors and then robotics. Or have robots that can find trash in oceans or on beaches and remove it. This would be super useful but unfortunately our system rewards producing trash way more than removing or even better avoiding it.
haram_masala 6y ago
Let’s not ignore biotech. It’s experiencing a tremendous boom in SV (and in the Berkeley-Emeryville area). It gets way less attention than Tesla and Facebook, for some reason... probably because its products and innovations are much harder to explain to the public. (Though that may be an overly cynical answer with regards to the media.)
- godelski 6y ago
  I thought these technologies are still early and in the research phase. That would make sense for them to operate in stealth mode. Tesla sells vehicles to the public (and let's be real, Elon is a big PR department). Are these companies producing useful products currently? It seems that you're implying that they are and that we (me) aren't aware of them, so I'm curious if you could expand on this and enlighten us. I do know investors are dumping a ton of money into bio-tech, just not aware of products that are being sold.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    Regarding products, I'd divide biotech into three very broad categories, medical, industrial, and food. Medical biotech is generally the most well-established, from Genentech (now Roche) on down to the companies being created today. Most of that work are novel and very promising therapies for a range of diseases, and diagnostics/prognostics to detect and track disease states. Both are generally at the level that's popularly known as "personalized medicine" (specific to your genome, epigenetics, and in some cases microbiome). Some of the diagnostics in development and hitting the market now would be considered sorcery just five years ago. Industrial biotech is harnessing biological and biochemical processes for industry and production. That's much smaller but growing fast; people outside the industry would be shocked to discover what chemicals and other products can and will be produced simply by fermenting various microbes. Zymergen is one company doing this, and among the biggest but by no means the only one. Recently there's been a surge in biotech-based food production. Most people don't realize that the Impossible Burger (and other products from Impossible) taste so "meaty" because it contains transgenic yeast that secretes cow heme. There are companies that are creating cow dairy products from transgenic yeast - you can actually buy their ice cream today - and companies like Memphis Meats are working on cell-cultured meat, made entirely from animal-free processes , minus the initial cell biopsy. Same with Finless Foods. All of the above are within a couple miles of each other, and these are only a few examples.
tomjen3 6y ago
It took 2 days for the Moderna vaccine to be created, and it still hasn't been approved in the EU. We could be doing amazing things in bio with mRNA, Crisper and deep learning but the entire thing is so wrapped up in regulation in order to protect the incumbents that it is not a space worth working in.
- boringg 6y ago
  2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer. Building the vaccine, bio-reacting it to scale and testing across appropriate populations took a considerable amount of time. Health regulations are in place for a reason, to protect the public not to protect incumbents. Sometimes I am sure it does, other times it makes sure poor products don't go into the public market.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > 2 days to determine what the Moderna vaccine should be from a computer This step used to take years. And require state of the art facilities, with biohazard containment, viral samples, etc. Now? Given a virus sequence done in a lab on the other side of the planet, one can design a vaccine in a day. Sure, it took many years of research (and in coronaviruses in particular) to reach this stage, specially on how to stabilize the spike protein. But one cannot understate how amazing this new technology is. And then once done you can send the results to a machine to get it "built". At a low scale, sure, but it's still impressive. With the mRNA approach we no longer have to resort to things like using eggs to make the vaccines, we can use the cellular machinery for that. It's mind-boggling.
    - boringg 6y ago
      Oh I think you are misconstruing my statement. It is an incredible feat what’s been done on these vaccines. I assume you got youre intel from the bio eats world podcast. I’m pointing out that jumping the testing that slows the vaccine to market is a bad move.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Hardware manufacturers have a ton of additional labor needed to produce things. The engineers can't all be paid 200k+ or they'll bleed the company dry. The highest margins are realized in markets with the lowest overhead. That's where everybody shifted to.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I share the lament of the GP comment. It seems like it would better if there was hardware engineering and engineers weren't paid 200k+. That the market has shifted seems like a failure of the economic system.
javajosh 6y ago
Money wants to make more money. And it doesn't care about national boundaries. It also isn't good at pricing catastrophes like the collapse-of-the-US-financial-system-because-of-the-collapse-of-the-electrical-grid catastrophe that we can't recover from because we can't make the transforms anymore and China won't sell them to us and our ports won't work without computers anyway, and so on.
- coliveira 6y ago
  You're mistaken, China will most definitely sell that to us. It is in their interest. To problem is if the US will be able to afford it.
m463 6y ago
I also wonder about this kind of stuff. I think about things like this: What if all the wallstreet quants and sv adtech guys were all put on a nuclear fusion project? It would be like an unstoppable force against an immovable project.

prionassembly 6y ago

China is able to manipulate its exchange rate to regulate the relative prices of imports and exports. So are ~200 other economies in the world. The US doesn't have an exchange rate to fiddle with. Hell, it can hardly produce domestic inflation with its low interest rates, let alone devalue its currency. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

ska 6y ago
True, but there is a reason it's been called "exorbitant privilege" - while nothing here is clear cut there lots of reasonable people would argue that there is a net benefit to US.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  Yes. To abuse mathematical language, the first-order effects of the exorbitant privilege are very positive for the US. Some negative second-order effects are arguable (strategic capacity / robustness); some are reminiscent of your typical third-world lobbying for a kind of state capitalism. Then, this has beneficiaries and losers. "Good jobs" in particular is such specious rhetoric.
twobitshifter 6y ago
If China can move to DCEP (Chinese state crypto) and get their borrowers to follow their lead, the US will find itself in a tough position. In the end game for China, they displace the US and can avoid the dollar in trade.
- seppin 6y ago
  If it was that easy to displace the dollar, someone would have done it already. What advantage does a Chinese cryptocurrency have over a traditional one?
  - caeril 6y ago
    This. August 15th of this year will be FIFTIETH anniversary of Nixon telling the rest of the world that their dollars held in reserve are redeemable for precisely one bag of dicks. If the world was ever going to de-dollarize, they would have done it at any point in the last half-century.

Tycho 6y ago

At a certain point, does automation/robotics swing the manufacturing base back towards the west?

jbay808 6y ago
It's mostly being deployed in Asia, where the demand is high and the supply of complementary parts is also high. PCB manufacturing is almost completely automated, for example. Didn't move back.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
Unlikely in our lifetime. The same automation will be available in the east, but with cheaper technicians, electricity, taxes, regulation, and land.
- bmitc 6y ago
  Also, what is there to automate in the U.S.? Most of what could be a target of automation is already in China.
  - Tycho 6y ago
    Well if cheap labour is not an input then there's no reason that the manufacturing has to be done somewhere with cheap labour costs.
    - bmitc 6y ago
      But the automation will need engineers and technicians. China is likely not super reliant if at all on the west for automation expertise, and is likely closing any gap that may exist. They have a legion of more and more well educated people to fill those roles. I’m super worried that the U.S. is turning into Russia, i.e., a corrupt oligarchy with no want or ability to mobilize and educate its people. China saw that happening to themselves and specifically steered away from it back in the 80s.
      - 6y ago

recursivedoubts 6y ago

We were sold down the river by our own elites, particularly on Wall Street and with the full complicity of the Economics Departments of the west. "Comparative Advantage", something something about corn and wool, meanwhile the whole supply chain was moved to China, our middle class was decimated and we went into tremendous amounts of debt to pretend everything was fine... Left, right... whatever. The elites have failed us.

babaganoosh89 6y ago
The problem isn't comparative advantage, it's that the US left the poor states to languish with poor education. So instead of higher quality manufacturing / blue collar jobs, non-educated folks got minimum wage service jobs.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  The US is at or near the top of all western countries on educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    The US also has the highest spending in health care per capita. Spending does not equal outcomes.
    - recursivedoubts 6y ago
      Yes, I agree. But the comment implied neglect, which is false. Our education system is a mess, but it's not due to neglect, and it doesn't have anything to do with manufacturing being shipped abroad. As a side note, the US has the second highest public spending per capita (second only to Norway, last I checked). Our Government spends more per citizen than all but one "socialist" country. We then of course spend another doubling of that in private expenditures, and, yes, get worse outcomes. The US is in a very bad spot.

liminal 6y ago

"Made in America" is a nice slogan, but "Not Made by an Enemy" would be more apt. Made in an Ally would be fine too (Canada, Mexico, Western Europe...)

boringg 6y ago
Haven't heard that one. That would be the best expression -- Made by an Ally to co-brand with Made in America. Made in America protectionism raises the ire of all its allies (which over the last 4 years it has trashed).
Udik 6y ago
What you call "enemy" is, in this case, simply a fully independent nation. That is, one free to have goals and strategies that put its interest first. What you call "allies" are subordinate nations, free to pursue their own interest as long as it doesn't conflict with the interest of the US. The US are a perfectly independent nation. So is China.
earthboundkid 6y ago
I felt like we should have done that with Saudi oil after 9/11. Why did we let them have no consequences when their policies were most directly responsible for it, out of all countries in the world? We should have put a tariff on their oil and used Canadian crude until they stopped promoting extreme Wahabiism.
- adventured 6y ago
  Because it would have crashed the US economy. The US was highly dependent on Saudi oil back then, and Canada could not have come close to filling that gap (their output was 2m barrels per day circa 1999/2000, the US needed both all of that supply and OPEC supply). Over time the US has removed its dependency on Saudi oil, courtesy of fracking. OPEC oil is no longer necessary for the US economy. The most interesting thing about Saudi Arabia going forward is that the US will eventually benefit from destroy them as China is the primary beneficiary of Saudi oil (which will also make US oil that much more valuable, we'll send it to Saudi's #2 and #3 customers, Japan & South Korea). I'd expect the hawks in DC to eventually consider turning Saudi Arabia into another Syria. The second most interesting thing about Saudi Arabia, is their population to barrels of production ratio. It keeps plunging as the Saudi population soars and oil production can't keep up. A revolution is inevitable; that ratio plunging represents a ticking timebomb of the non-elite population's future wealth rapidly declining (while they perpetually fail to develop an alternative economy).

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

Manufacturing coupled with enviro taxes is coming back to West.

legitster 6y ago

So few of these conversations actually discuss the reasons American manufacturing is so uncompetitive and assume it's entirely legislative/outside factors. As I been told, cost is rarely the primary factor - Chinese manufacturing is insanely flexible. You can set up a plant with almost no capital, be able to retool at a moment's notice to a customer's whim, and add and drop employees to production at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, in the US, unless you are talking about very expensive CNC processes, batch production is not a thing. If you set up a production line, everything needs to be stable and long term. You need permits. You need employee contracts. You need to train people. You can't handle a lot of turnover. You bring in robots, and that requires more specialization and training. I firmly believe that things which increase fluidity in the labor market will be key to improving US manufacturing. Things like affordable healthcare and housing. Make it so that people can comfortably live in a gig economy.

mncharity 6y ago
> actually discuss the reasons On topics where the fraction of HN readership with professional expertise is relatively small, it seems HN infrastructure and culture often isn't able to surface that expertise, to sustain the quality of discussion which exists when the fraction is large. I wonder if there might be some form of low hanging fruit, like maybe a cultural convention of creating a "professionals" comment tree, where people are expected to apply a stricter-than-usual test of whether they have the expertise to comment? Attempting to create a lump of critical mass professional discussion.
mncharity 6y ago
> flexible I don't disagree, and very not my field, but I found it curious that France's manufacturing exports per capita remain 2x the US[1], despite not having a reputation for flexibility. Germany remains 4x. Which raises a question, with respect to manufacturing exports, why does the US look like a smaller EU, rather than like a larger France or Germany? [1] https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/mnfc.ex?country=BRA&indicator=3803&countries=CHN,DEU,FRA,GBR,IDN,JPN,MEX,CAN,USA&viz=line_chart&years=1990,2014&compareBy=region https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/mnfc.ex?country=B...

esoterica 6y ago

Real manufacturing output is a lot higher than it was back in the supposed heyday of manufacturing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS Manufacturing employment, on the other hand, is down substantially because of automation.

WillPostForFood 6y ago
How much of manufacturing output growth was driven by the boom in the oil/gas industry? People hear manufacturing and think electronics or cars, but petroleum and coal was 2x the size of the auto manufacturing last time I looked.

taylodl 6y ago

How many countries in the world manufacture commercial airliners? How many countries in the world manufacture automobiles sold around the world (don't forget a lot of 'foreign' cars are manufactured in the United States)? How many countries in the world has a private company manufacturing re-usable rocketry capable of carrying crews to the ISS? I've been reading these scaremongering stories all my life. First it was Japan eating our lunch. Where are they now? Then it was Mexico poised to take all our manufacturing. Didn't happen. Now everyone is scared about China. Pretty soon they're going to realize they don't want to be in the business of manufacturing screws, either. There's simply no money in it. Meanwhile U.S. manufacturing has been growing. That's something the NY Times is conspicuously silent about. I'm not saying the U.S. doesn't have social and political issues we need to get sorted out - but there's never been a time in our history that we haven't had social and political issues we need to get sorted out. I'm not saying we don't have progress to achieve. I'm saying I'm sick and tired about hearing how the U.S. no longer manufactures screws and consumer electronics. There's a bigger picture to consider.

m463 6y ago
What's funny to me is that people complain about US automakers losing... with no mention of Tesla at all.

roland_nilsson 6y ago

Well I'm no economist, but this seems inevitable if (1) consumers want cheap products and (2) production is cheaper elsewhere. Given those conditions, any company that wants to survive will have to move production abroad (and those that do not will quickly be replaced). So if we want to keep domestic production, either consumers need to voluntarily choose more expensive alternatives -- which seems unlikely to happen -- or we have to put tariffs or other restrictions on import of goods. The EU does this for a variety of agricultural products to protect farming, for example. Or is there another way out?

m463 6y ago
Computer controlled manufacturing, robotics, and other forms of automation, like Elon Musk's gigafactories. I don't know the reality of the gigafactories though: - how many "corner cases" are handled by humans - would it (un)scale for things with smaller production numbers?
- roland_nilsson 6y ago
  Increasing automation to push prices might keep the factories within the country, but it won't save manufacturing jobs.

jjk166 6y ago

Most stories like these completely misunderstand the issues with american manufacturing. It's easy to see lower American manufacturing employment and increasing Chinese manufacturing and conclude that American jobs are simply moving to china, but this narrative doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny. Take for example steel production. American employment in the industry has fallen by 55% since 1989, while chinese production is now 5 times higher. Case closed right? Well no. In that time period, the US built over 40 Million Tons of steel production capacity, 46% of its total capacity. Further, while chinese production has increased dramatically, they are not a major exporter of steel to the US, peaking at 7th largest trading partner in 2015 and currently not even in the top 10. Our biggest steel trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Looking at the situation more granularly, we see that US steel production has been approximately constant since the early 80s, whereas Chinese steel production didn't ramp up till the 00s, around the same time that the decrease in US steel employment leveled off. There has been a major shift in how steel is produced over the past few decades. Over this time period, blast furnaces have been shutting down and been replaced with basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces which require less manpower to produce steel. In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US, now 1 man-hour produces 300 tons. Further there have been major shifts in consumption. The US is consuming less steel as most of its infrastrucuture is already built up, and as new products use less steel (either because stronger steels can do more with less or other materials like aluminum and plastics are used instead). China is employing many more steel workers to work less efficient plants, making lower grade steels to fuel its transition into a developed nation. While this is merely one example, the story is similar in a number of industries - employment goes down in the US, up in China, but there is no decrease in productivity in the US which closely coincides with an increase in production in or exports from China. In general, productivity and capital investment in the US actually remains steady despite shrinking employment, and where there are decreases in productivity, they tend to correlate with reduction of demand, for example in the auto industry. When people think about automation, they typically picture robots doing what they had been doing. In most industries that hasn't happened, so most people conclude that automation hasn't had any serious impact yet. But the real change is typically in much more mundane process improvement. You don't need as many people to do the same amount of work, and the work that needs doing tends to be different from what was done in the past - more desk jobs and information processing, as well as more low cost unskilled labor, with the blue collar professional in the middle mostly made obsolete. Trade wars with China or subsidies for "onshoring" aren't going to change anything, unfortunately recreating the prosperity of our past will require complicated holistic changes to many sectors, informed by a firm understanding of manufacturing technology and economics.

mips_avatar 6y ago

I think what companies really want is manufacturing as a service, much like cloud computing economics but for physical goods manufacturing. They want the ability to scale without building their own infrastructure, they don't want to deal with the personnel, they want to be able to lock-in only the capacity they know they will use and get a discount. The problem is that unlike cloud computing which can automatically scale, manufacturing as a service is all about people. You have to remove people from the equation to the point that the only people are debugging the machines.

nine_zeros 6y ago

I don't see any talk of removing US dollar as a reserve currency. The only reason China is so export oriented is because they need to earn dollars to buy oil. If they didn't need to buy oil in dollars, they would reorient their factories to sell their manufactured goods domestically, giving everyone a high standard of living. Instead, they are making more and more goods for our fat American consumption just to earn more and more dollars. Sure, removing dollar as a reserve currency will make all of us poorer by global standards but we won't need to import manufactured goods from China any longer.

kenned3 6y ago
Your post contains many errors. 1) The "Petroyuan"... Should this ever happen, Oil will be priced in Yuan. https://eurasiantimes.com/petro-dollar-vs-petro-yuan-is-china-set-to-replace-u-s-as-the-biggest-player-in-m-east-as-ties-grow-with-saudi-arabia/ https://eurasiantimes.com/petro-dollar-vs-petro-yuan-is-chin... 2) this is NOT the reason china exports. They do this as they have a large labour advantage, very lax pollution laws and can make things for far cheaper then others can. You can determne this for yourself once you realize that China doesnt only export to the USA. When China exports to the EU for example they earn Euro notes. They can convert Euro's to USD if needed, but i dont think their primary goal is to accumulate USD, espeically given their massive USD Bond holdings. If anything, they are probably looking to sell USD bonds to diversify. 3) removing the US as a reserve curency wont just make americans "poorer" - it will have a devistating impact on your ability to borrow. Since the US gvt constantly runs a deficit who will finance this when other nations no longer want/need USD? 4) The US needs to import because as the article stated, they no longer manufacture things. Try going to a city like "bridgeport, Connecticut" and see the mothballed factories. It will take decades to undue the damage outsourcing has caused.
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  I understand everything you said. I meant weaning the US dollar as a reserve currency gradually instead of abruptly. We are already getting some ways there by printing to pay for the massive deficits. What I meant is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. If we want to assemble smartphones here, our workers will have to accept the life of those workers. Those workers don't own cars, live in shitty shacks and have no wlb to speak of. But considering that so many people are clamoring for such jobs, maybe that's what we should go for.