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I keep thinking about Tim Cook's words years back about manufacturing in China, and how there's a talent density there that just doesn't exist in the United Sta

• RangerScience 2y ago
  The speculation that I’ve seen is that the carve-outs will be used to reward loyalists and punish detractors. So yes, likely to happen.
• amazingamazing 2y ago
  America’s consumer economy isn’t sustainable anyways. Once China figures out tech and India takes American services, America has nothing. These tariffs are stupid, but it’s either now or later. Better figure it out now, I suppose. people who think america will indefinitely have tech supremacy are unbelievably delusional. once tech is lost, america has what exactly (it’ll be like the UK - rich, but a shell of its former self)? look at SPY gains since year 2000. almost all of it has been due to tech. trump is one of the dumbest famous people of all time, but this was going to happen one way or another. better it happen sooner.
  • analognoise 2y ago
    You might not know this, but Americans aren’t big on “giving up”. Ever. We’re also not big on defeatism.
    • 4d4m 2y ago
      Agreed. We have the staying power.
    • EB-Barrington 2y ago
      [dead]
  • zozbot234 2y ago
    > Once China figures out tech and India takes American services, America has nothing. This is an economically illiterate argument - it ignores the fact that new jobs are created precisely when old ones become redundant. It's like saying that China and India "have nothing" because first-world countries have figured out everything already. It's good for a country when others become better at what they're doing - that's what enables broader supply chains, bigger markets and ultimately a higher variety of products and services.
    • amazingamazing 2y ago
      new jobs are not created precisely when old ones are redundant, lol - that’s wishful thinking. you think every manufacturing job taken from the USA was matched 1-1, the quality of job is very different. losing a manufacturing job and gaining a job at Wendy’s is hardly a good trade.
      • matwood 2y ago
        Those jobs will be gone soon anyway due to automation. They are not coming back now or ever. The US also manufactures a lot right now, second only to China. The US failed by not using the huge prosperity it gained to put the social programs in place to help those people pushed out of manufacturing.
    • dumbledoren 2y ago
      > it ignores the fact that new jobs are created precisely when old ones become redundant That did not happen after the electronics revolution changed manufacturing starting in the 1970s. Factories that needed thousands of workers to manufacture a certain car model for large regions started to be run with only a few hundred workers. Same for other manufacturing fields. The Western countries directed all the resulting excess workforce to sectors like finance, law, tech and services, but with AI and the zero interest economy ending all of those sectors are also coming crashing down. So no, technological advancement and automation really reduced the workforce need and did not replace it with new jobs.
  • dustingetz 2y ago
    tech 2.0 is coming, the question is where. As dysfunctional as SV is, it is at least possible to raise risk capital in the US. Foreign startups still come to the US for capital. Hard to see this changing - the US for its culture wars is very adaptable and can reconfigure everything in a generation
    • zozbot234 2y ago
      > Foreign startups still come to the US for capital. Not only that, but foreign capital also flows to the U.S. for higher returns. This is why all the scare-mongering about the trade deficit is yet more economic illiteracy. Every trade deficit is really an investment surplus, and the kind of investment surplus the U.S. is running can be surprisingly beneficial in the longer run.
  • UncleMeat 2y ago
    So the solution is to have people work in factories sewing cheap t-shirts?
    • Marsymars 2y ago
      I’m picking this out of context - but there’s probably some better steady-state where fast fashion isn’t a thing and your baseline t-shirt costs more and lasts proportionally longer.
      • UncleMeat 2y ago
        Jobs sewing $80 t-shirts are not actually that much better than jobs sewing $10 t-shirts.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    America is dreaming of moving back into manufacturing rather than doing R&D, creating IP, and reaping most of the value of things created in other places. China, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction: they are much more interested in doing what America was doing and are less interested in manufacturing things (they are willing to send that to poorer countries in Asia). In a decade or two, America and china’s roles in the world are going to be completely swapped.
• duxup 2y ago
  The whole process from this administration doesn't seem the least bit thought out and nobody with any economic education / background is explaining what is supposed to happen. According to insiders in the white house the tariffs came about from a 3 hour meeting, there's nobody willing say no to the old man who can't keep his thoughts or words together sometimes ... and regarding environmental problems IIRC he has already expressed "I'll be dead by then". I wonder if that is his approach to everything? In some ways this feels like the country has been brought along on some senile old man's suicide pact.
  • hayst4ck 2y ago
    China and the cultural revolution/great leap forward should be a warning of what can happen when there is no oppositional veto power. These tariffs could be our four pests moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems. Mao ambitiously sought an increase in rural grain production and an increase in industrial activity. Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles, which meant that industrialization of the countryside would solely be dependent on the peasants. Output from the industrial activities such as steel was also supposed to be used for urban growth. Local officials were fearful of the so-called "Anti-Right Deviation Struggle" and they competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. Acknowledging responsibilities for the Great Leap Forward, Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and "rightists" who opposed him. There is a reason historians are already fleeing the country: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-yale-whos-fleeing-america https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-... If we wait too long to act, there's a good chance it will be too late or cost much much more.
• recursivedoubts 2y ago
  man, maybe the US shouldn't have let the supply chain move to asia so our upper 10% could get rich and especially our upper 1% could get really rich and especially especially our upper .1% could get super-duper rich, oh well, too bad nobody said that back then and were laughed off the national stage
  • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Ross Perot said it, but he was considered crazy.
    • recursivedoubts 2y ago
      i member
  • duxup 2y ago
    I'm not convinced the supply chain moving isn't just ... how it was going to play out. I don't think you need a conspiracy to discover cheap labor is a place to do manufacturing.
    • recursivedoubts 2y ago
      specific people with specific names pushed offshoring it isn’t secret
      • duxup 2y ago
        Does “pushing” matter if it actually works regardless?
        • recursivedoubts 2y ago
          Does pushing for slavery matter if it works regardless?
          • 2y ago
• trebligdivad 2y ago
  Well China did build that capability from scratch over ~50 years; the US does have the advantage that it probably has most of the experience...somewhere; what it needs if it really wants to do it is pull all that together into something streamlined and build up capacity in those bits it doesn't have much of. (Not that I'm saying this crazy sudden tariff mechanism is a good way to get that to happen; heck even if you wanted to do it, you wouldn't have to dump the entire lot on everyone in one day)
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    At this rate of economic and market turmoil, you’d need to have the Chinese manufacturing capability domestically by the end of the week for this to make sense?
  • philistine 2y ago
    What was it that the US was making in the 80s that consumers want now? Even if we could magically resurrect American manufacturing, the world has moved on.
    • trebligdivad 2y ago
      Oh I suspect the US has most modern manufacturing somewhere in small quantities, for more specialist uses - I agree you don't want to resurrect the 1980s stuff.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Maybe if we imported Chinese engineers and factory tech (along with German engineers and tech), we could do this quickly. But we would also have to prioritize a huge outlay in building factories infrastructure, and when done…we still wouldn’t have enough poorly educated women to staff these factories (who typically staff these factories in Asia, so maybe we import lots of Chinese robots as well?).
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > did build that capability from scratch over ~50 years with a _huge_ amount of government "push", made possible because it wasn't a free market economy (and still is only partially so)
• wyldfire 2y ago
  > The only plausible way out I see in the near term is a bunch of carve outs and one-off deals that allows the U.S. government to say, "our bluff worked." It's not a bluff. This is Idiocracy in action. They have no idea how to fix "the starving bullshit, dust storms, French fries and burrito coverings." It turns out governance requires collaboration and compromise, and some measure of trust. Without that, the executive can only press the buttons given by the legislature.
• raincom 2y ago
  How many years it took for both Chinese and the American capitalists to come to the state, a state "[T]hat within a three block radius you can find people with deep knowledge and skillset in all areas of production."?
• philistine 2y ago
  And there's always this amorphous blob of manufacturing jobs coming back being discussed. While the last time the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, things were made completely differently. The US can't just return to manufacturing, because manufacturing is fundamentally different from what it was in the 80s. All the knowledge is lost, and all the knowledge that was lost was already incompatible.
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• hintymad 2y ago
  > Just don't see how this materializes in any meaningful timeframe in the United States — if it's even doable at all. Many people, especially successful business people, believe this. And this both saddens me and puzzles me. I'm not sure if people still remember, China was dirt poor even in the 1990s. America's manufacturing prowess was the envy of the entire nation. They produced mostly low-end crappy stuff even in the early 2000s. They didn't have "talent density". Instead, their media kept telling people how professional and efficient the American workers were and how efficient the American systems were. I still remember people widely criticized the Chinese government for imposing too many regulations (too many stamps in local terms). By the way, I think that's the right attitude: acknowledge the problems and seek solutions, but that's a different topic. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Hongkong people, and westerners who brought in investment, talent, and know-hows to China to bootstrap their now-great manufacturing industry. That took only 20 years or less. And now we as Americans have to accept that we can never bring out manufacturing back? What kind of defeatism is that? Now let's say that Americans and systems are indeed inferior to China's (I really don't believe that), what would happen? We keep deindustrializing the nation? Then what if a war breaks out? Who's going to produce all the weapons and cars and battleships and what not? China? And if we don't produce anything, why in the world would other countries use our services? Are they that stupid that they don't want to climb up the value chain? Case in point, we had this $20K toilet for our air force not because of corruption but because we had to manufacture them in the US! Our cost of manufacturing artillery shell is 10X of that by Russia. Russia! One of the most corrupted countries in the world, yet we still can't be cheaper than them?? It would cost us billions to make a battleship when it would cost China at most hundreds of millions because even a customized screw can be 10X or 100X more expensive if we don't use China's output. Oh, did I mention that our killer drones cost $90K a piece while Chinese drone of better spec would cost only a few thousands? So, what I really don't get is, how can we believe that we can be prosperous and secure without a robust manufacturing sector. Note I'm not saying that the US must have everything. We can certainly share the supply chains with our allies, but Europe has even worse deindustrialization than us.
  • zozbot234 2y ago
    The U.S. (indeed to some extent, the West more generally) still has a robust manufacturing sector where it matters, such as military. The stuff is expensive because the jobs involved pay so well, which also creates a further incentive to push for quality over quantity. This is a success story, at least if seen from the POV of manufacturing workers. It's not clear that artificially expanding this beyond military to other stuff would have much effect. The fact is there's plenty of other high-paying jobs around e.g. in services, and it's not possible to just put this cat back in the bag.
• dumbledoren 2y ago
  > It also ignores the fact that since the 1970s the United States has transitioned more and more to information and services jobs. Even that would have been better. The reality is that since the 70s the brainpower of the US has been pushed to finance, law and tech. US finance has become detached from ties to the real economy and became a sector that created imaginary wealth out of thin air, law remained a sector that complicates everything for a chance at political careers, and much of the brainpower sucked into tech was used to generate bloated valuations/stock returns for the investors by producing mostly marginally useful things. Tech did succeed in producing the most tangible results, but it failed to impact the physical world much. After all, it wasn't possible to get a big stock value bump at having farming automatized instead of making the next social/publishing/streaming/gaming/subscription/whatever app for X and shaking the investors off of their money. But now that the zero interest economy ended, that business model is dead and tech is dumping the brainpower it sucked. Like how finance did circa 2008. Multiple generations of top-tier brainpower and all the years of education they received and the experience they have are going to sh*t...
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    Think you might be undervaluing the fact that securitized capital markets offer much broader access to loans at attractive terms. Which isn't to say there aren't some parts of the financial industry that produce little real value. But is to say that the competitiveness, ease, and attractive terms of standard 30-yr-fixed-rate US mortgages don't spring out of thin air.
    • dumbledoren 1y ago
      > securitized capital markets offer much broader access to loans at attractive terms At the initial phase, when there is the 'Wild West' development stage, yes. After that phase it becomes a scam where value is generated out of thin air. If you put the entire economic value of a country into financialized vehicles, people WILL start doing everything they can to maximize their gain. Like making up assets.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Much of the brain power used in American tech was imported. I don’t think it could have happen if we were isolationists and anti-immigration.
• Helmut10001 2y ago
  > United States has transitioned more and more to information and services jobs Perhaps this was done deliberately by Trump to weaken CA's economy and shift more power to his supporting states? CA benefits greatly from exporting information and digital services around the world, most of which do not pay taxes to those countries. If the EU (and other economies) now add tariffs on social media, Apple, Google services, etc., it will hit CA hard.
• deleted 2y ago
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