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The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’

The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. The fact that Tesla started their factories here then rolled it out as a pattern globally is illustrative of this. Further, when you consider the aggregate production in Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, etc and recognize that an awful lot of it, including electronics, is managed and built by US manufacturing outssourcers like Jabil, it become pretty obvious the US hasn’t lost its edge in manufacturing. It’s just shut down the Knick nack production onshore. Rebuilding those factories in a crisis could be done rapidly, and the labor skill required to oversee a machine pressing scissors is pretty low - that’s why it can be offshored to an unskilled labor pool with such ease. China dominates these through a willingness to exploit itself for a very low margin and extreme scales. These are definitely advantages - if you don’t care about your people and are willing to destroy your environment for dominance in producing forks, you’ll probably be allowed to. The margins are so low and the barrier to reentry is tiny.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
  - readyman 2y ago
    Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
      - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
        I live in a former socialist country, many kids saw their profession just like this.. elementary school (8 years, ~7->15yo), technical high school, and then work at a local factory for 40 years. And they did exactly that. Only the best few in class went to gimnasiums (general highschools, thought of like prep for college), and then to colleges to become "more". The wide middle of the bell curve was for high school graduates working in factories. And not just factories, some wanted to be automechanics, some electricians, etc. Now everyone wants to go to college, many to study something where there are literally no real jobs (with added benefit) available (ancient greek, comparative literature, sociology, etc.), and then end up in the public sector, where it doesn't matter if you studied electrical engineering or latin language, all college diplomas are worth the same. I mean sure, everybody wants to be a superhero, etc. (or pewdiepie-sized influencer for the more younger generations), but once you're 14yo, ending elementary school, you have to choose your next level of education (general gymnasium, one of the technical highschools, economics, construction, cosmetics, etc.), and back then a lot more people chose their actual future careers at that moment than now, where parents push them to gymnasiums, colleges, where some fail (and some somehow succeed), and you then have baristas and warehouse workers with masters degrees and not enough electricians, construction yard workers, factory workers, etc. (electricians etc. are especially bad, because you actually need a high school diploma (or similarly hard alternatives) to do the job).
ViktorRay 2y ago
In reality what you posted here is actually wrong. The sophisticated tooling that you are talking about is plentiful in China and is the reason tech companies like Apple choose to manufacture electronics in China. Here’s what Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, had to say: "There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is...The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields..." Source: https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-is-number-1-reason-we-make-iphones-in-china-its-not-what-you-think.html https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  I don’t think you understood. The quality of the tooling doesn’t mean the tooling was built there. It’s also not true that China is the exclusive place where such quality or tooling or critical mass of infrastructure exists. You see similar things in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and - in the United States. But the customer of the US manufacturing isn’t you personally, a crucial fact when talking about Apple and where they manufacture things for - you personally. The customer is advanced manufacturers - who export tooling and infrastructure to China. That doesn’t mean China is unable to do this themselves, but it’s just not their focus. I’m sure the decoupling we are doing and export controls will change that faster than would otherwise happen. The specific market though the US is unable to easily rebuild and bootstrap is end to end semiconductor manufacturing. Our supply chain is almost entirely tied to East Asian manufacturing which is a geopolitical and economic problem for us. Part of decoupling is trying to break that by creating a bipolar manufacturing structure for semiconductors, and increasingly battery and solar.
- silisili 2y ago
  He's lying. The people who build his phones in China do so for less than $3 per hour. That sounds pretty low labor cost to me. Sure, one could probably find even lower labor costs elsewhere, and the infra in place is definitely a benefit, but let's not pretend we couldn't just as easily do it in the US if it weren't for those pesky labor costs.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. European here: I have some products made in USA in my house besides Intel CPUs and Micron DRAM/NAND: a plastic AeroPress coffee maker with paper filters, a plastic Oral-B toothbrush. Nothing fancy or expensive. Do those items strike you like some exotic, precise, high-margin widgets that only the US can make? Spoiler alert: they aren't, even after the EU import taxes and VAT. So how come US can make mass market commodity tooth brushes and plastic coffee makers locally considering the high wages but we pretend it's not possible? I'm not american so I don't have the right perspective as the locals but from my vantage point it doesn't seem impossible that the US can make other stuff that's usually offshored to the cheapest bidder in Asia. To me, the issue seems corporate greed that refuses to do it, not that it's not possible to make profit making commodity goods in the US as the proof is in the pudding above. Another proof is that I have a shit tonne of Swiss-made commodity goods in my house that aren't some nanometric precision widgets but for example my plastic trash can and another toothbrush, and Switzerland also has some of the highest wages in the world.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > how come US can make mass market commodity tooth brushes and plastic coffee makers locally considering the high wages but we pretend it's not possible? America’s advantages are deep, risk-taking capital markets and cheap energy. Our hurdles are high labour costs and stricter-than-China environmental rules. Our advantage against China is in energy and scale-intensive production that can be automated and done cleanly. This applies to most extrusion methods, which make cheap goods. It also applies to heavy machinery, which is why we make lots of big engines and electric motors.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).

thriftwy 2y ago
Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
- readyman 2y ago
  Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      I live in a former socialist country, many kids saw their profession just like this.. elementary school (8 years, ~7->15yo), technical high school, and then work at a local factory for 40 years. And they did exactly that. Only the best few in class went to gimnasiums (general highschools, thought of like prep for college), and then to colleges to become "more". The wide middle of the bell curve was for high school graduates working in factories. And not just factories, some wanted to be automechanics, some electricians, etc. Now everyone wants to go to college, many to study something where there are literally no real jobs (with added benefit) available (ancient greek, comparative literature, sociology, etc.), and then end up in the public sector, where it doesn't matter if you studied electrical engineering or latin language, all college diplomas are worth the same. I mean sure, everybody wants to be a superhero, etc. (or pewdiepie-sized influencer for the more younger generations), but once you're 14yo, ending elementary school, you have to choose your next level of education (general gymnasium, one of the technical highschools, economics, construction, cosmetics, etc.), and back then a lot more people chose their actual future careers at that moment than now, where parents push them to gymnasiums, colleges, where some fail (and some somehow succeed), and you then have baristas and warehouse workers with masters degrees and not enough electricians, construction yard workers, factory workers, etc. (electricians etc. are especially bad, because you actually need a high school diploma (or similarly hard alternatives) to do the job).

ViktorRay 2y ago

In reality what you posted here is actually wrong. The sophisticated tooling that you are talking about is plentiful in China and is the reason tech companies like Apple choose to manufacture electronics in China. Here’s what Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, had to say: "There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is...The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields..." Source: https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-is-number-1-reason-we-make-iphones-in-china-its-not-what-you-think.html https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...

fnordpiglet 2y ago
I don’t think you understood. The quality of the tooling doesn’t mean the tooling was built there. It’s also not true that China is the exclusive place where such quality or tooling or critical mass of infrastructure exists. You see similar things in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and - in the United States. But the customer of the US manufacturing isn’t you personally, a crucial fact when talking about Apple and where they manufacture things for - you personally. The customer is advanced manufacturers - who export tooling and infrastructure to China. That doesn’t mean China is unable to do this themselves, but it’s just not their focus. I’m sure the decoupling we are doing and export controls will change that faster than would otherwise happen. The specific market though the US is unable to easily rebuild and bootstrap is end to end semiconductor manufacturing. Our supply chain is almost entirely tied to East Asian manufacturing which is a geopolitical and economic problem for us. Part of decoupling is trying to break that by creating a bipolar manufacturing structure for semiconductors, and increasingly battery and solar.
silisili 2y ago
He's lying. The people who build his phones in China do so for less than $3 per hour. That sounds pretty low labor cost to me. Sure, one could probably find even lower labor costs elsewhere, and the infra in place is definitely a benefit, but let's not pretend we couldn't just as easily do it in the US if it weren't for those pesky labor costs.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. European here: I have some products made in USA in my house besides Intel CPUs and Micron DRAM/NAND: a plastic AeroPress coffee maker with paper filters, a plastic Oral-B toothbrush. Nothing fancy or expensive. Do those items strike you like some exotic, precise, high-margin widgets that only the US can make? Spoiler alert: they aren't, even after the EU import taxes and VAT. So how come US can make mass market commodity tooth brushes and plastic coffee makers locally considering the high wages but we pretend it's not possible? I'm not american so I don't have the right perspective as the locals but from my vantage point it doesn't seem impossible that the US can make other stuff that's usually offshored to the cheapest bidder in Asia. To me, the issue seems corporate greed that refuses to do it, not that it's not possible to make profit making commodity goods in the US as the proof is in the pudding above. Another proof is that I have a shit tonne of Swiss-made commodity goods in my house that aren't some nanometric precision widgets but for example my plastic trash can and another toothbrush, and Switzerland also has some of the highest wages in the world.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> how come US can make mass market commodity tooth brushes and plastic coffee makers locally considering the high wages but we pretend it's not possible? America’s advantages are deep, risk-taking capital markets and cheap energy. Our hurdles are high labour costs and stricter-than-China environmental rules. Our advantage against China is in energy and scale-intensive production that can be automated and done cleanly. This applies to most extrusion methods, which make cheap goods. It also applies to heavy machinery, which is why we make lots of big engines and electric motors.