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I see you getting downvoted which seems a bit harsh given it seemed like a very honest question. As far as I understand, a huge amount of materials and intermed
by gleenn 2y ago
I see you getting downvoted which seems a bit harsh given it seemed like a very honest question. As far as I understand, a huge amount of materials and intermediate steps and companies are over in Taiwan or Shenzen or other places in Mainland China. Even if you could do some parts in the US (like final production) all the sub-components and companies who can actually produce them are dotted over Asia. This is part of the problem in raw economic terms: there is a large vendor and/or geographic lock-in. It's hard to get manufacturing jobs and work back in the US because most of these lines if production are somewhere else and moving one or even a few parts can't overwhelm the huge cost of moving stuff over the ocean potentially multiple times. I read that a brake manufacturer was particularly screwed even within North America because steel came from Canada, partial assembly would occur in Mexico and in the US, and then the finished product might cross a border yet again. Without tariffs this wasn't so bad, but if all the products have to cross a ton of borders a lot of these supply chains are in deep trouble.
- trhway 2y ago>Shenzen or other places in Mainland China Shenzen, Dongguan, Guangzhou - ie. the Pearl River Delta, population 86 million, that somebody called a largest factory on Earth. I see no way to beat that "factory" in any manufacturing game (the first thing in manufacturing is scale). I think we were just lucky that that factory has been working for us basically "at cost" (and very low cost at that). All good things come to an end though.
- theshrike79 2y agoYep, even if 0.1% of those people are experts on a very specific field of manufacturing, that's immediately 86k people. You can't beat that with any amount of automation.
- trhway 2y agowell, automation itself has a tariffs problem - all the components for automation are mostly foreign made, mostly in China, and even to start - the R&D in automation requires large unimpeded churn of parts and components with quick turnaround, and the tariffs would tremendously impede it and increase cost of it which in R&D means increased risk of failure and a much decreased R&D result for a given budget and timeframe.
- theshrike79 2y agoAnd there just plain are jobs you can't automate, some tasks are too delicate or varying for a machine to reliably. Plus someone has to design that stuff, you have a hiring pool of literal millions of people in China from which to pick the best fit to design your physical widget.