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It’s like people excited about the new datacenter being built in their town, think of all the jobs that will bring they cry. Nobody realizes it takes 6 people t

It’s like people excited about the new datacenter being built in their town, think of all the jobs that will bring they cry. Nobody realizes it takes 6 people to run a datacenter. Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.

netsharc 2y ago
I saw a video today on Instagram (from Tiktok), AI generated of course, where rows and rows of people sit at sewing machines sewing shirts, but instead of the typical Asians one commonly expects to see, they're all overweight American-looking people...
- tekla 2y ago
  Apparently China propaganda making fun of the US.
  - basisword 2y ago
    I'd say this is more satire than propaganda.
    - some_random 2y ago
      Political satire usually is propaganda.
      - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
        Not always and I'm not sure if usually, but in this particular case it's both.
      - keybored 2y ago
        Yeah. And people need to stop thinking that things that they can label as funny or whatever else is not propaganda. Everything with an agenda is propaganda. “Wholesome Biden & Obama memes” are probably propaganda. And videos about “fat Americans” being marched into factories sounds like something the Chinese could make.
- yostrovs 2y ago
  https://x.com/damengchen/status/1909288019750011006?t=kO7hvUs5aHkm5KNsSjrFWQ&s=09 https://x.com/damengchen/status/1909288019750011006?t=kO7hvU...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- thrill 2y ago
  Sometimes the darkest humor is the most accurate.
xienze 2y ago
I think you're missing that the bigger value is having the manufacturing on your home soil instead of depending on being in the good graces of China.
- vidarh 2y ago
  Forcing China to become more independent of exports to the US also means China will care less about being in the good graces of the US. It cuts both ways.
  - xienze 2y ago
    Except for the whole military superpower thing. The US is actually in a somewhat unique situation compared to other countries.
    - hello_moto 2y ago
      Unique for now. It’s changing. The moment is threatened Canada , Denmark sovereignty and EU/NATO, countries are planning for life without US
    - vidarh 2y ago
      It's only in a somewhat unique situation if people the US is willing and able to stomach a large-scale war, and people believe that to be so, and that belief has also dropped dramatically.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - lamp_book 2y ago
      See the threads on the state of US shipbuilding.
      - ForOldHack 2y ago
        Yes. You should point out that >50% of ships are built by China, and 30% are built by Korea, and United States is not even on the list... Do we even make ships? Maybe a few military wessels.
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
Isn't that an even more compelling reason to do it, since unemployment is already low? It means more vertical integration, more domestic investment and productive capital.
- wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
  i think a lot of people are fixating on the market. I will share a metaphor you can spread. I run a mile every morning not because it is the most calorie efficient way to get around, nor because it is the most monetarily productive use of my time, but because it keeps my legs strong and me healthy.
  - throw310822 2y ago
    It's a good metaphor, but I guess the idea here is that a middle-aged sedentary person has suddenly decided, for his own good, to only eat what he can catch and kill with his bare hands.
    - wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
      My history is not that good, but I have a fondness for the guilded age. Lets look back for wisdom. Consider a case that was not unique, the growth of iron production in the great lakes area between 1855 and 1865. In 1855 it was 1000 tons of iron ore. By 1860 it was over 100,000. By 1865 it was a few times greater than that. Now consider even a single year in there where production is increasing by thousands to tens of thousands of tons. Good business. (The machines used to load and unload those boats and the change in boat designs is awesome by the way. Worth looking up.) That was early. With much worse technology, and much less capital. There were crazier deltas in production increase in the 1890's and across the guilded age. The US natural resources are gigantic. There are 330 million people living there. It has more resources than ever before in history. Steel and plastic are currently produced in the hundreds of millions of tons per year in the US. That is hardly a middle aged man who cant do a pushup. With a proper 10 year boom, US production could be exponentially increasing year over year. If it and its people choose it. A lot of people in the US seem to be envisioning this. It is a really non-abstract vision even for americans of... modest intelligence. It may be the case that providing the world with banking and facebook, and silicon plans, though possibly much more lucrative than physical production, is just too abstract for the average american to identify with as a positive. Or it may be the case that physical production is more lucrative than software service export, but that the US government has mismanaged the market constraints in the physical domain and so it just appears to not be the case. I am not sure which is true. What I do know is that for the average person, the idea of making stuff and trading it is simple to understand, and people like it. Even people who do not make anything identify with this goal. Maybe instead of iron and steel it will be nvidias chips this time around. I think Americans dont like being the social media export country. Its just not a good future vision you can identify with.
vidarh 2y ago
Indeed, US manufacturing has a higher output now than before outsourcing took off. But it employs far fewer people per inflation adjusted dollar of output. Because the manufacturing that stayed was largely the manufacturing that was so cost-effective to automate that not even third world labor could compete.
- piva00 2y ago
  Just to add to your point: what stayed was either cost-effective to automate or had so much value added that the labour component is quite low (like jet engines).
jacknews 2y ago
i don't understand the obsession with jobs anyway people don't want a job, they want money and purpose most jobs barely deliver either
- banqjls 2y ago
  [flagged]
- explodes 2y ago
  Human society has been optimizing for the wrong thing since 20,000BC. To that end, the future I want doesn't focus so much on money, but on needs. Letting a market dictate "needs" is clearly not working for the betterment of humanity a whole. While it helps with progress, I believe there is an upper limit when human behavior is brought into the equation.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    exactly, the market doesn't deliver human flourishing
    - snapcaster 2y ago
      Compared to what?
  - bpt3 2y ago
    Market economies have gotten us to the point where true needs are made available to all in the developed world. That's because money lets people efficiently deploy resources where they feel it is needed. What makes you say it's "clearly not working", other than comparing developed nations to a non-existent utopia?
- bpt3 2y ago
  Can you propose something better that provides money and purpose? Keep in mind that most people are unwilling and unable to sustainably maintain self-employment.
999900000999 2y ago
They'll start forcing us to make Nikes in prison. Even then the quality wouldn't be up to par. Since we've collectively agreed we don't need to have due process anymore, I guess I can look forward to making shoes will I'm being indefinitely detained.
- danaris 2y ago
  But even that is impossible in the near-to-medium term. The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale. None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all. With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US. Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or... And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer. Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.
rayiner 2y ago
> Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs. That’s probably correct. But the current trajectory means that China will have the robot-operated factories, not the US. What do you anticipate the US will do to obtain goods from those Chinese factories? Especially when AI stands poised to obsolete a lot of the white collar jobs where the US still retains a competitive edge? You can’t treat the reserve dollar as something that will perpetually defy physics. The pound used to be the world’s reserve currency not too long ago. There’s no reason for the world to continue flocking to dollars when other economies surpass the US.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  'The dollar might be weakened in the future so we must immediately blow it and our entire deeply thought out, researched, and supported policy since the 1940s up to now with no plan all based on a book the President read and hope things work out better than what might have happened sometime in the future (but that there were no signs was happening soon)'.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    The dollar will be weakened in the future. Is there any doubt about it? We cannot continue operating in this post-war regime when the conditions for the post-war regime have been dismantled. I have rarely ever aligned with this president, but it is clear that we need to bring manufacturing home if we are going to have any future.
    - philipwhiuk 2y ago
      It's almost like the Biden CHIPS act was designed to do that in a non-stupid way.
      - beeflet 2y ago
        I mean I approved of the CHIPS act at the time, but did it result in anything? It was also limited to the semiconductor industry.
fach 2y ago
What's comical is the US commerce secretary literally says this out loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsyyGHuPR88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsyyGHuPR88
snarf21 2y ago
I agree and if people want an example of this that isn't about a "what if ..." future, they need only look at Detroit. While we still manufacture cars in the US, the auto industry will continue to automate any jobs that they can.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Better than the three towns in my area that all gave away land, tax breaks, county paid power infrastructure to… coin miners. All three districts fell for “thousands of tech jobs”… turned out to be a couple dozen of people they brought in.
kingraoul 2y ago
Still, the value chain is what drives innovation. We should cheer efforts to clothe and feed ourselves that don’t rely on near slave labour sweatshops.
chrisco255 2y ago
Tesla's factories have a ton of automation, but the factory here in Austin employs 22K+ people. Automation will no doubt increase, but that just means the value humans provide is higher level and managing, maintaining, and redesigning the assembly lines as market demands and product categories shift. Datacenters are nothing like factories. Meanwhile, if it ever gets to the point that automation has truly replaced humans, why not have the machines here at home? There's no good argument against it and plenty of arguments for it.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > There's no good argument against it "I don't need 1000 pairs of shoes"
bluedino 2y ago
The real jobs are in building the datacenter and the people involved with the software that runs on the datacenters computers
Suppafly 2y ago
I'm not even sure why most people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. If this was a video game with a tech tree, becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position. Bombing our economy to go backwards to being a manufacturing economy is only attractive if you want to turn the middle class back into serfs.
- 9rx 2y ago
  > I'm not even sure why most people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. I am not sure why they think it left. The US manufactures far more today than it ever did in the past. The people were largely relieved by robots, granted. > becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position. Service isn't always fun. A lot of people don't like selling Big Macs. They are under the impression that if they could have a manufacturing job, they would enjoy work more. That is what drives it. What they don't realize is that they could already have a manufacturing job. Manufacturers struggle to hire. But the problem there is that, per BLS, 70% of manufacturing happens in rural areas – whereas most people never look for work outside of the city they live in. Thus they conclude that manufacturing doesn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind.

netsharc 2y ago

I saw a video today on Instagram (from Tiktok), AI generated of course, where rows and rows of people sit at sewing machines sewing shirts, but instead of the typical Asians one commonly expects to see, they're all overweight American-looking people...

tekla 2y ago
Apparently China propaganda making fun of the US.
- basisword 2y ago
  I'd say this is more satire than propaganda.
  - some_random 2y ago
    Political satire usually is propaganda.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
      Not always and I'm not sure if usually, but in this particular case it's both.
    - keybored 2y ago
      Yeah. And people need to stop thinking that things that they can label as funny or whatever else is not propaganda. Everything with an agenda is propaganda. “Wholesome Biden & Obama memes” are probably propaganda. And videos about “fat Americans” being marched into factories sounds like something the Chinese could make.
yostrovs 2y ago
https://x.com/damengchen/status/1909288019750011006?t=kO7hvUs5aHkm5KNsSjrFWQ&s=09 https://x.com/damengchen/status/1909288019750011006?t=kO7hvU...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
thrill 2y ago
Sometimes the darkest humor is the most accurate.

xienze 2y ago

I think you're missing that the bigger value is having the manufacturing on your home soil instead of depending on being in the good graces of China.

vidarh 2y ago
Forcing China to become more independent of exports to the US also means China will care less about being in the good graces of the US. It cuts both ways.
- xienze 2y ago
  Except for the whole military superpower thing. The US is actually in a somewhat unique situation compared to other countries.
  - hello_moto 2y ago
    Unique for now. It’s changing. The moment is threatened Canada , Denmark sovereignty and EU/NATO, countries are planning for life without US
  - vidarh 2y ago
    It's only in a somewhat unique situation if people the US is willing and able to stomach a large-scale war, and people believe that to be so, and that belief has also dropped dramatically.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lamp_book 2y ago
    See the threads on the state of US shipbuilding.
    - ForOldHack 2y ago
      Yes. You should point out that >50% of ships are built by China, and 30% are built by Korea, and United States is not even on the list... Do we even make ships? Maybe a few military wessels.

bitshiftfaced 2y ago

Isn't that an even more compelling reason to do it, since unemployment is already low? It means more vertical integration, more domestic investment and productive capital.

wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
i think a lot of people are fixating on the market. I will share a metaphor you can spread. I run a mile every morning not because it is the most calorie efficient way to get around, nor because it is the most monetarily productive use of my time, but because it keeps my legs strong and me healthy.
- throw310822 2y ago
  It's a good metaphor, but I guess the idea here is that a middle-aged sedentary person has suddenly decided, for his own good, to only eat what he can catch and kill with his bare hands.
  - wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
    My history is not that good, but I have a fondness for the guilded age. Lets look back for wisdom. Consider a case that was not unique, the growth of iron production in the great lakes area between 1855 and 1865. In 1855 it was 1000 tons of iron ore. By 1860 it was over 100,000. By 1865 it was a few times greater than that. Now consider even a single year in there where production is increasing by thousands to tens of thousands of tons. Good business. (The machines used to load and unload those boats and the change in boat designs is awesome by the way. Worth looking up.) That was early. With much worse technology, and much less capital. There were crazier deltas in production increase in the 1890's and across the guilded age. The US natural resources are gigantic. There are 330 million people living there. It has more resources than ever before in history. Steel and plastic are currently produced in the hundreds of millions of tons per year in the US. That is hardly a middle aged man who cant do a pushup. With a proper 10 year boom, US production could be exponentially increasing year over year. If it and its people choose it. A lot of people in the US seem to be envisioning this. It is a really non-abstract vision even for americans of... modest intelligence. It may be the case that providing the world with banking and facebook, and silicon plans, though possibly much more lucrative than physical production, is just too abstract for the average american to identify with as a positive. Or it may be the case that physical production is more lucrative than software service export, but that the US government has mismanaged the market constraints in the physical domain and so it just appears to not be the case. I am not sure which is true. What I do know is that for the average person, the idea of making stuff and trading it is simple to understand, and people like it. Even people who do not make anything identify with this goal. Maybe instead of iron and steel it will be nvidias chips this time around. I think Americans dont like being the social media export country. Its just not a good future vision you can identify with.

vidarh 2y ago

Indeed, US manufacturing has a higher output now than before outsourcing took off. But it employs far fewer people per inflation adjusted dollar of output. Because the manufacturing that stayed was largely the manufacturing that was so cost-effective to automate that not even third world labor could compete.

piva00 2y ago
Just to add to your point: what stayed was either cost-effective to automate or had so much value added that the labour component is quite low (like jet engines).

jacknews 2y ago

i don't understand the obsession with jobs anyway people don't want a job, they want money and purpose most jobs barely deliver either

banqjls 2y ago
[flagged]
explodes 2y ago
Human society has been optimizing for the wrong thing since 20,000BC. To that end, the future I want doesn't focus so much on money, but on needs. Letting a market dictate "needs" is clearly not working for the betterment of humanity a whole. While it helps with progress, I believe there is an upper limit when human behavior is brought into the equation.
- jacknews 2y ago
  exactly, the market doesn't deliver human flourishing
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    Compared to what?
- bpt3 2y ago
  Market economies have gotten us to the point where true needs are made available to all in the developed world. That's because money lets people efficiently deploy resources where they feel it is needed. What makes you say it's "clearly not working", other than comparing developed nations to a non-existent utopia?
bpt3 2y ago
Can you propose something better that provides money and purpose? Keep in mind that most people are unwilling and unable to sustainably maintain self-employment.

999900000999 2y ago

They'll start forcing us to make Nikes in prison. Even then the quality wouldn't be up to par. Since we've collectively agreed we don't need to have due process anymore, I guess I can look forward to making shoes will I'm being indefinitely detained.

danaris 2y ago
But even that is impossible in the near-to-medium term. The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale. None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all. With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US. Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or... And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer. Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.

rayiner 2y ago

> Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs. That’s probably correct. But the current trajectory means that China will have the robot-operated factories, not the US. What do you anticipate the US will do to obtain goods from those Chinese factories? Especially when AI stands poised to obsolete a lot of the white collar jobs where the US still retains a competitive edge? You can’t treat the reserve dollar as something that will perpetually defy physics. The pound used to be the world’s reserve currency not too long ago. There’s no reason for the world to continue flocking to dollars when other economies surpass the US.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
'The dollar might be weakened in the future so we must immediately blow it and our entire deeply thought out, researched, and supported policy since the 1940s up to now with no plan all based on a book the President read and hope things work out better than what might have happened sometime in the future (but that there were no signs was happening soon)'.
- beeflet 2y ago
  The dollar will be weakened in the future. Is there any doubt about it? We cannot continue operating in this post-war regime when the conditions for the post-war regime have been dismantled. I have rarely ever aligned with this president, but it is clear that we need to bring manufacturing home if we are going to have any future.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    It's almost like the Biden CHIPS act was designed to do that in a non-stupid way.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      I mean I approved of the CHIPS act at the time, but did it result in anything? It was also limited to the semiconductor industry.

fach 2y ago

What's comical is the US commerce secretary literally says this out loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsyyGHuPR88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsyyGHuPR88

snarf21 2y ago

I agree and if people want an example of this that isn't about a "what if ..." future, they need only look at Detroit. While we still manufacture cars in the US, the auto industry will continue to automate any jobs that they can.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

Better than the three towns in my area that all gave away land, tax breaks, county paid power infrastructure to… coin miners. All three districts fell for “thousands of tech jobs”… turned out to be a couple dozen of people they brought in.

kingraoul 2y ago

Still, the value chain is what drives innovation. We should cheer efforts to clothe and feed ourselves that don’t rely on near slave labour sweatshops.

chrisco255 2y ago

Tesla's factories have a ton of automation, but the factory here in Austin employs 22K+ people. Automation will no doubt increase, but that just means the value humans provide is higher level and managing, maintaining, and redesigning the assembly lines as market demands and product categories shift. Datacenters are nothing like factories. Meanwhile, if it ever gets to the point that automation has truly replaced humans, why not have the machines here at home? There's no good argument against it and plenty of arguments for it.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
> There's no good argument against it "I don't need 1000 pairs of shoes"

bluedino 2y ago

The real jobs are in building the datacenter and the people involved with the software that runs on the datacenters computers

Suppafly 2y ago

I'm not even sure why most people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. If this was a video game with a tech tree, becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position. Bombing our economy to go backwards to being a manufacturing economy is only attractive if you want to turn the middle class back into serfs.

9rx 2y ago
> I'm not even sure why most people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. I am not sure why they think it left. The US manufactures far more today than it ever did in the past. The people were largely relieved by robots, granted. > becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position. Service isn't always fun. A lot of people don't like selling Big Macs. They are under the impression that if they could have a manufacturing job, they would enjoy work more. That is what drives it. What they don't realize is that they could already have a manufacturing job. Manufacturers struggle to hire. But the problem there is that, per BLS, 70% of manufacturing happens in rural areas – whereas most people never look for work outside of the city they live in. Thus they conclude that manufacturing doesn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind.