17 ms·

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resourc

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full of lazy knuckleheads (and believe me I’ve got the stories to back this assertion).

gjsman-1000 2y ago
I have plenty of stories of programmers being lazy knuckleheads. The industry is full of them.
- xigency 2y ago
  Well, that's a bit different. Laziness is a virtue in our field in ways that it is not in other fields. Math is a good example. Mathematicians are even more lazy than programmers. That's how they end up with shorter proofs than our programs and end up able to work lying down as well as just sitting on a computer.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    This feels like cope; ignoring that there are multiple kinds of “lazy.” There’s the kind that focuses on simplicity and avoiding unnecessary work to achieve the same goal (the good kind); and there’s the kind that just ignores necessary work and drags out the process delaying the goal (the bad kind). There are plenty of programmers, and machinists, in both camps. Many programmers actually are lazy knuckleheads in the worst sense of the word - and, according to recent researchers, 10% of programmers self-admit to doing nothing at their jobs.
    - xigency 2y ago
      Well, I guess democracy has spoken. And so has the market as the do-nothing people continue to get paychecks and I collect unemployment.
turtlesdown11 2y ago
> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? You mean the worlds strongest, most developed and most successful economy?
- franktankbank 2y ago
  On paper. That's not to say we don't have the greatest potential for even greater prosperity but you can't eat stonks. Right now we are making good on promises to the boomer generation while absolutely dicking over the generations who are making good on the promises of old.
  - sorcerer-mar 2y ago
    The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. We obviously can and do eat the fruits of our labor. In fact we (being Americans broadly) eat only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the absolutely gargantuan amount of value we (being Americans broadly) create.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. Strong, yes. Strongest by nominal, yes. But not strongest by PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
  - jayd16 2y ago
    Wealth inequality seems like completely perpendicular subject. What does on shoring lower paying jobs and ballooning the cost of goods do to help that?
- jackyinger 2y ago
  Reminds me of a friend’s defense of the service focused economy: “I’ve got a PhD in economics”. Sure services may be great when things are going well, but you can’t ONLY have services, and then go and blow up international trade and expect to have a good time.
jackyinger 2y ago
And this isn’t going to change overnight. You know what I’m talking about. Most of the good machinist knowledge in America has retired, if not already literally died. And mechanical engineers in the US largely don’t have the hands on skill to really understand making these machines. Not that that can’t gain it. But to achieve truly high precision (the pinnacle from which all other percussion is derived) is an extreme art form. CNC doesn’t come close. The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping: https://www.krcmachinetoolsolutions.com/machine-tool-scraping/ https://www.krcmachinetoolsolutions.com/machine-tool-scrapin... Things used to be made better because people cared about making a good product and took pride in their work. This is especially true in the machine tool industry: don’t try to make it in the field if you don’t really legitimately care.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  things used to be made better because of baumol cost disease and far fewer people having those things.
- hwillis 2y ago
  > The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping No, it absolutely is not. Optics machine tools make things flat and accurate within a few atoms. Cheap surface plates are more precise than any human could hope to achieve by hand. Hand scraping is remarkable- skill can get you ~micron cutting depth. It would be totally obsolete except that the rough crosshatch pattern it creates is useful for retaining oil. Modern tools, especially the most precise tools, are not hand scraped. Cheap clone knee mills are hand scraped. Single-point diamond cutters run on air bearings with no oil, because the oil gap in plain ways is too large. Hand scraping is thoroughly limited by the viscosity of the marking fluid. You identify high spots by painting a flat blue and rubbing it on another flat part. If the whole surface rubs off then you can't tell where to scrape. The fluid does not spread out in single atom thickness.
morkalork 2y ago
Crushing unions is partly to blame here. I've got relatives whose families have been working in the mining industry for a few generations. They all lament the good old days that are long gone now.
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  There was a related hashtag that was banned for hilarious reasons.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  how would increasing the cost of labor mean that we have more manufacturing jobs in the US today?
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    There are a lot of manufacturing jobs. In fact, the "Manufacturing" category is four times larger (12M vs 4M) in terms of employment than "Information." The primary interests of people working in manufacturing are higher pay and better working conditions. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#snid=4900 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#s...
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      right, but what i am missing is the connection to ‘more machinist jobs’. unions pretty much necessarily trade off number of jobs with average pay for that job, it’s the whole name of the game to restrict entry and wage negotiation.
  - os2warpman 2y ago
    Every single country on earth, except China, that has a more robust and profitable machine tool sector than the US has unions strong enough to make a social media libertarian shit their pants. Indeed, the three countries listed in the report as being better than the US all have EXTREMELY strong machinist/metalworking unions. Japan: JAM Italy: FIOM And Germany, with probably the most powerful union in the entire world: IGM The problem isn't unions. The problem is the parasite MBA class, shuffling memos and spreadsheets around to make it look like they're doing something.
franktankbank 2y ago
> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? It looks really hollow, like we will be over a barrel when we experience a real embargo. I wish your brother all the luck in the world, I think his time will come soon because at the very minimum having guys like him on our team keep us from getting gouged to death.
ryandrake 2y ago
> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.
- jackyinger 2y ago
  Exactly. This is the problem with throwing all the money into “hot spots”. Growing the heck out of a few hot industries virtually ensures established ones will decline.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches. They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
  - tmpz22 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - DebtDeflation 2y ago
      The factories of today are nothing like the 1980s factories this administration thinks they are going to bring back. Go to FRED or any other economic data site and plot manufacturing output and manufacturing employment on the same chart. The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. Meanwhile, manufacturing employment is around its all time low and declines every year.
hwillis 2y ago
> My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists, they are designed by engineers. Machinists do not know how frames deflect or resonant modes or overconstraint or the other things that are critical in machine tool design. Machine tools are inherently dynamic systems where moving cutters cause feedback into the system. Being able to make something accurate under static conditions is very different.
- jackyinger 2y ago
  Skilled machinists are very well aware of deflection and resonance. Operating a machine tool is not static in the slightest.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    The average software engineer is working on A to B plumbing code to confer more privacy violating javascript onto webpages, not novel implementations of algorithms at scale. Likewise the average machinist is not "skilled" in the way that most here are implying.
  - hwillis 2y ago
    I can tell when a dirt bike is running rough, but that doesn't mean I can design the helmholtz resonator in the exhaust. That difference is engineering.
- letitbeirie 2y ago
  > Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.
  - 2y ago
jayd16 2y ago
> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? Until this administration kicked in, historically high?
kcb 2y ago
Shoot yourself in the foot...guess we shouldn't have depended on that foot to walk for so long.
InfiniteTitan 2y ago
This whole line of reasoning is so similar to consumers picking up chicken breast in a grocery store and not realizing that it comes from chickens somehow. The US manufacturing base is extremely broad, deep, and strong. The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  > The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise. You each made claims. You each have onus for them because you made the claims, not because someone says you do. That's how the burden of proof works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
analog31 2y ago
To put a finer point on it: How's basing the US economy on advertising looking? I went to college and eventually got a PhD in physics. I've built specialized machine tools. Yet I'm considered a schmuck because I didn't go into software development, and the software developers are considered schmucks if they didn't go into financial services or advertising. And none of that was about emphasizing college. Becoming a programmer doesn't require college. And lazy knucklehead stories are part of the workforce culture in virtually every occupation and industry. I'm sure I'm the lazy knucklehead in some of those stories.
- Teever 2y ago
  The west coast is in for a rude awakening when they realize that they can't win a war against china with code, and they don't have jobs because they don't have chips to run their advertising code on anymore because China took Taiwan. Manufacturing is what builds up strong economies and it's what saves lives by preventing wars as long as possible and minimizes casualties on your side in war by fielding troops with more/better equipment.
  - analog31 2y ago
    Hard to imagine rebuilding a manufacturing economy while your scientists are fleeing the country.
  - jopsen 2y ago
    If only the US had allies. But I guess it's hard to count on them when you're actively threading invasion! A war with China won't be won with manufacturing. It'll be won by having allies. If it actually comes to pass, you'll probably declined fighting the hot war, and opt for a cold one. But without allies it'll get real cold.
    - Teever 2y ago
      You can have all the allies in the world but if none of you have weapons and the means to make them you won't win.
rainsford 2y ago
> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is awesome, the pay and conditions are generally better and at their best can be incredibly intellectually stimulating. My Dad started out working in an industrial plant but pretty quickly ended up going to college to get a computer science degree because that job sounded way better than what he was doing...and that was way back when those kind of factory jobs were still a reasonable way to make a living. I can somewhat agree with the Dirty Jobs philosophy that non-college careers can be valuable and the right choice for some people, and the world after all still needs crab fishermen. But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree.
- xienze 2y ago
  > But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree. Well they are better in the sense that you can’t really outsource HVAC or plumbing work to India. The downside of course, and the reason that so many Americans fell out of love with the trades, is that we’re extremely eager to import foreign labor, legally or otherwise, to suppress wages.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The flaw is in putting these things out as alternatives to each other. The future of manufacturing is in automation, but in order to do automation you need machinists and computer science. You need people who can design a machine that makes other machines, which is a physical device that operates under the direction of software. Getting people to learn to code instead of learning how to build machines doesn't get it.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

I have plenty of stories of programmers being lazy knuckleheads. The industry is full of them.

xigency 2y ago
Well, that's a bit different. Laziness is a virtue in our field in ways that it is not in other fields. Math is a good example. Mathematicians are even more lazy than programmers. That's how they end up with shorter proofs than our programs and end up able to work lying down as well as just sitting on a computer.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  This feels like cope; ignoring that there are multiple kinds of “lazy.” There’s the kind that focuses on simplicity and avoiding unnecessary work to achieve the same goal (the good kind); and there’s the kind that just ignores necessary work and drags out the process delaying the goal (the bad kind). There are plenty of programmers, and machinists, in both camps. Many programmers actually are lazy knuckleheads in the worst sense of the word - and, according to recent researchers, 10% of programmers self-admit to doing nothing at their jobs.
  - xigency 2y ago
    Well, I guess democracy has spoken. And so has the market as the do-nothing people continue to get paychecks and I collect unemployment.

turtlesdown11 2y ago

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? You mean the worlds strongest, most developed and most successful economy?

franktankbank 2y ago
On paper. That's not to say we don't have the greatest potential for even greater prosperity but you can't eat stonks. Right now we are making good on promises to the boomer generation while absolutely dicking over the generations who are making good on the promises of old.
- sorcerer-mar 2y ago
  The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. We obviously can and do eat the fruits of our labor. In fact we (being Americans broadly) eat only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the absolutely gargantuan amount of value we (being Americans broadly) create.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. Strong, yes. Strongest by nominal, yes. But not strongest by PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
- jayd16 2y ago
  Wealth inequality seems like completely perpendicular subject. What does on shoring lower paying jobs and ballooning the cost of goods do to help that?
jackyinger 2y ago
Reminds me of a friend’s defense of the service focused economy: “I’ve got a PhD in economics”. Sure services may be great when things are going well, but you can’t ONLY have services, and then go and blow up international trade and expect to have a good time.

jackyinger 2y ago

And this isn’t going to change overnight. You know what I’m talking about. Most of the good machinist knowledge in America has retired, if not already literally died. And mechanical engineers in the US largely don’t have the hands on skill to really understand making these machines. Not that that can’t gain it. But to achieve truly high precision (the pinnacle from which all other percussion is derived) is an extreme art form. CNC doesn’t come close. The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping: https://www.krcmachinetoolsolutions.com/machine-tool-scraping/ https://www.krcmachinetoolsolutions.com/machine-tool-scrapin... Things used to be made better because people cared about making a good product and took pride in their work. This is especially true in the machine tool industry: don’t try to make it in the field if you don’t really legitimately care.

whimsicalism 2y ago
things used to be made better because of baumol cost disease and far fewer people having those things.
hwillis 2y ago
> The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping No, it absolutely is not. Optics machine tools make things flat and accurate within a few atoms. Cheap surface plates are more precise than any human could hope to achieve by hand. Hand scraping is remarkable- skill can get you ~micron cutting depth. It would be totally obsolete except that the rough crosshatch pattern it creates is useful for retaining oil. Modern tools, especially the most precise tools, are not hand scraped. Cheap clone knee mills are hand scraped. Single-point diamond cutters run on air bearings with no oil, because the oil gap in plain ways is too large. Hand scraping is thoroughly limited by the viscosity of the marking fluid. You identify high spots by painting a flat blue and rubbing it on another flat part. If the whole surface rubs off then you can't tell where to scrape. The fluid does not spread out in single atom thickness.

morkalork 2y ago

Crushing unions is partly to blame here. I've got relatives whose families have been working in the mining industry for a few generations. They all lament the good old days that are long gone now.

Galatians4_16 2y ago
There was a related hashtag that was banned for hilarious reasons.
whimsicalism 2y ago
how would increasing the cost of labor mean that we have more manufacturing jobs in the US today?
- whatshisface 2y ago
  There are a lot of manufacturing jobs. In fact, the "Manufacturing" category is four times larger (12M vs 4M) in terms of employment than "Information." The primary interests of people working in manufacturing are higher pay and better working conditions. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#snid=4900 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#s...
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    right, but what i am missing is the connection to ‘more machinist jobs’. unions pretty much necessarily trade off number of jobs with average pay for that job, it’s the whole name of the game to restrict entry and wage negotiation.
- os2warpman 2y ago
  Every single country on earth, except China, that has a more robust and profitable machine tool sector than the US has unions strong enough to make a social media libertarian shit their pants. Indeed, the three countries listed in the report as being better than the US all have EXTREMELY strong machinist/metalworking unions. Japan: JAM Italy: FIOM And Germany, with probably the most powerful union in the entire world: IGM The problem isn't unions. The problem is the parasite MBA class, shuffling memos and spreadsheets around to make it look like they're doing something.

franktankbank 2y ago

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? It looks really hollow, like we will be over a barrel when we experience a real embargo. I wish your brother all the luck in the world, I think his time will come soon because at the very minimum having guys like him on our team keep us from getting gouged to death.

ryandrake 2y ago

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

jackyinger 2y ago
Exactly. This is the problem with throwing all the money into “hot spots”. Growing the heck out of a few hot industries virtually ensures established ones will decline.
whatshisface 2y ago
The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches. They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - DebtDeflation 2y ago
    The factories of today are nothing like the 1980s factories this administration thinks they are going to bring back. Go to FRED or any other economic data site and plot manufacturing output and manufacturing employment on the same chart. The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. Meanwhile, manufacturing employment is around its all time low and declines every year.

hwillis 2y ago

> My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists, they are designed by engineers. Machinists do not know how frames deflect or resonant modes or overconstraint or the other things that are critical in machine tool design. Machine tools are inherently dynamic systems where moving cutters cause feedback into the system. Being able to make something accurate under static conditions is very different.

jackyinger 2y ago
Skilled machinists are very well aware of deflection and resonance. Operating a machine tool is not static in the slightest.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- potato3732842 2y ago
  The average software engineer is working on A to B plumbing code to confer more privacy violating javascript onto webpages, not novel implementations of algorithms at scale. Likewise the average machinist is not "skilled" in the way that most here are implying.
- hwillis 2y ago
  I can tell when a dirt bike is running rough, but that doesn't mean I can design the helmholtz resonator in the exhaust. That difference is engineering.
letitbeirie 2y ago
> Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.
- 2y ago

jayd16 2y ago

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? Until this administration kicked in, historically high?

kcb 2y ago

Shoot yourself in the foot...guess we shouldn't have depended on that foot to walk for so long.

InfiniteTitan 2y ago

This whole line of reasoning is so similar to consumers picking up chicken breast in a grocery store and not realizing that it comes from chickens somehow. The US manufacturing base is extremely broad, deep, and strong. The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise.

drewcoo 2y ago
> The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise. You each made claims. You each have onus for them because you made the claims, not because someone says you do. That's how the burden of proof works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

analog31 2y ago

To put a finer point on it: How's basing the US economy on advertising looking? I went to college and eventually got a PhD in physics. I've built specialized machine tools. Yet I'm considered a schmuck because I didn't go into software development, and the software developers are considered schmucks if they didn't go into financial services or advertising. And none of that was about emphasizing college. Becoming a programmer doesn't require college. And lazy knucklehead stories are part of the workforce culture in virtually every occupation and industry. I'm sure I'm the lazy knucklehead in some of those stories.

Teever 2y ago
The west coast is in for a rude awakening when they realize that they can't win a war against china with code, and they don't have jobs because they don't have chips to run their advertising code on anymore because China took Taiwan. Manufacturing is what builds up strong economies and it's what saves lives by preventing wars as long as possible and minimizes casualties on your side in war by fielding troops with more/better equipment.
- analog31 2y ago
  Hard to imagine rebuilding a manufacturing economy while your scientists are fleeing the country.
- jopsen 2y ago
  If only the US had allies. But I guess it's hard to count on them when you're actively threading invasion! A war with China won't be won with manufacturing. It'll be won by having allies. If it actually comes to pass, you'll probably declined fighting the hot war, and opt for a cold one. But without allies it'll get real cold.
  - Teever 2y ago
    You can have all the allies in the world but if none of you have weapons and the means to make them you won't win.

rainsford 2y ago

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is awesome, the pay and conditions are generally better and at their best can be incredibly intellectually stimulating. My Dad started out working in an industrial plant but pretty quickly ended up going to college to get a computer science degree because that job sounded way better than what he was doing...and that was way back when those kind of factory jobs were still a reasonable way to make a living. I can somewhat agree with the Dirty Jobs philosophy that non-college careers can be valuable and the right choice for some people, and the world after all still needs crab fishermen. But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree.

xienze 2y ago
> But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree. Well they are better in the sense that you can’t really outsource HVAC or plumbing work to India. The downside of course, and the reason that so many Americans fell out of love with the trades, is that we’re extremely eager to import foreign labor, legally or otherwise, to suppress wages.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The flaw is in putting these things out as alternatives to each other. The future of manufacturing is in automation, but in order to do automation you need machinists and computer science. You need people who can design a machine that makes other machines, which is a physical device that operates under the direction of software. Getting people to learn to code instead of learning how to build machines doesn't get it.