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There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing o

There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.

echelon 1y ago
This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore. Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs. We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it. Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have. And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
- mc32 1y ago
  They jobs don't pay spectacularly well, but they pay better than Mickey D's and other service jobs, so they would be an upgrade to those jobs. Manufacturing tend to have union rep., if that matters. We have lots of underemployed and people working lousy service jobs --we don't really need to import labor that needs additional customs/social and language training. Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    I think mcdonalds pays shockingly well nowadays, like 20 or 25 an hour some areas. I think paying 30 an hour for manufacturing jobs might hurt the economics of it?
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      sure, it's 20 in California because of a recent law passed saying so. But that's often high CoL areas to begin with. 30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        I live in des moines and I see mcdonalds offering $16/hr here. Probably more as that was a few years ago and I don't read their signs. I know of a town an hour away where manufacturing offers $16hr.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        Mcdonalds in <shithole city> NJ is 12-17 with 17 being managers who've been there a few cycles. Manufacturing in the same city starts just below $20 and also gets scheduled raises for sticking around.
    - inferiorhuman 1y ago
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. 1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken. 2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage. 3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal. Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
  - danaris 1y ago
    > this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again. As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
- analognoise 1y ago
  Why don’t we just tax the living shit out of the rich instead? We’re arguing over importing a massive underclass when 5 families control 50% of the wealth and 2 people have private space programs. Let’s just tax the shit out of them, instead?
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    Cool, we just funded the government for a few months, now what?
    - analognoise 1y ago
      Are you saying this would produce $0 is economic activity, and after it was spent “we would be out of rich people” or some such nonsense? That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows. I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go. I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
    - replyifuagree 1y ago
      3. ... 4. ... 5. Profit!
awesome_dude 1y ago
All of the manufacturing economies have started out as "low quality", and "cheap" - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China. All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota) There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Nothing but a few rich people who have no loyalty to any country, no. With the goverments being paid to agree, of course.
jppittma 1y ago
Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.
- hollerith 1y ago
  Actually, low-value manufacturing is a US competency because it is highly dependent on energy costs, which are lower in the US than in most countries.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market. If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  Because there's no higher power that can prosecute China for antitrust violations if they ever leverage our dependence on them against us. America is making the same mistake Europe made a few decades ago, which is constantly downsizing itself into irrelevancy because "helpful" countries are more than willing to take on the burden of economic domination. When we reach the point that all we make is fiat currency and software then we have nothing to offer the rest of the world and we become decadent and impotent. Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
  - vlachen 1y ago
nostrademons 1y ago
I've been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous, but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev. But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again. My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s. Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >'ve been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree. >Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them. I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
  - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
    Look at how miserably AI fails at any kind of CAD work and you may reconsider.
mikrl 1y ago
> I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day. Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends? That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  Carry your example far enough and the system becomes brittle. We need people who know how to make the machines that make the machines. If you go far enough up the stack components become unique enough that they're unique pieces of engineering.
  - geodel 1y ago
    Correct. Every component made in distant factories all over the world is like micro services model of software development where every function should be its own service. There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      The problem is that the idiots making their stupid cog in the machine decisions have a financial and ideological incentive not to see themselves, their work and the way they've been trained to approach their work. Some two bit code monkey screeching "it's not my fault my code shit all over the production database when something upstream of it got a little wonky, I coded to the spec I was given" is no different than some dumbass middle manager or MBA at HQ who's intentionally making the system more shitty for negligible, but measurable, savings so they can fuck off into the sunset with their bonus for hitting KPI before it all comes crashing down.
Caligatio 1y ago
SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the "Smarter Scrubber" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3]. [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5Tv68gg8Q https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
- LilBytes 1y ago
  Such a great series, highly recommend everyone here watch these.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    It is, and it reveals the pitfalls of trade as a whole to boot. At first order they want to make everything local, second order at least not China. So they order from India and get a drop shipment of Chinese made goods. LOL!

echelon 1y ago

This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore. Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs. We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it. Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.

forgotoldacc 1y ago
Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have. And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
mc32 1y ago
They jobs don't pay spectacularly well, but they pay better than Mickey D's and other service jobs, so they would be an upgrade to those jobs. Manufacturing tend to have union rep., if that matters. We have lots of underemployed and people working lousy service jobs --we don't really need to import labor that needs additional customs/social and language training. Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I think mcdonalds pays shockingly well nowadays, like 20 or 25 an hour some areas. I think paying 30 an hour for manufacturing jobs might hurt the economics of it?
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    sure, it's 20 in California because of a recent law passed saying so. But that's often high CoL areas to begin with. 30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      I live in des moines and I see mcdonalds offering $16/hr here. Probably more as that was a few years ago and I don't read their signs. I know of a town an hour away where manufacturing offers $16hr.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Mcdonalds in <shithole city> NJ is 12-17 with 17 being managers who've been there a few cycles. Manufacturing in the same city starts just below $20 and also gets scheduled raises for sticking around.
  - inferiorhuman 1y ago
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. 1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken. 2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage. 3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal. Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
- danaris 1y ago
  > this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again. As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
analognoise 1y ago
Why don’t we just tax the living shit out of the rich instead? We’re arguing over importing a massive underclass when 5 families control 50% of the wealth and 2 people have private space programs. Let’s just tax the shit out of them, instead?
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  Cool, we just funded the government for a few months, now what?
  - analognoise 1y ago
    Are you saying this would produce $0 is economic activity, and after it was spent “we would be out of rich people” or some such nonsense? That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows. I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go. I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
  - replyifuagree 1y ago
    3. ... 4. ... 5. Profit!

awesome_dude 1y ago

All of the manufacturing economies have started out as "low quality", and "cheap" - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China. All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota) There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Nothing but a few rich people who have no loyalty to any country, no. With the goverments being paid to agree, of course.

jppittma 1y ago

Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.

hollerith 1y ago
Actually, low-value manufacturing is a US competency because it is highly dependent on energy costs, which are lower in the US than in most countries.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market. If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
snickerbockers 1y ago
Because there's no higher power that can prosecute China for antitrust violations if they ever leverage our dependence on them against us. America is making the same mistake Europe made a few decades ago, which is constantly downsizing itself into irrelevancy because "helpful" countries are more than willing to take on the burden of economic domination. When we reach the point that all we make is fiat currency and software then we have nothing to offer the rest of the world and we become decadent and impotent. Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
- vlachen 1y ago

nostrademons 1y ago

I've been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous, but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev. But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again. My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s. Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>'ve been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree. >Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them. I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
- Our_Benefactors 1y ago
  Look at how miserably AI fails at any kind of CAD work and you may reconsider.

mikrl 1y ago

> I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day. Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends? That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.

idiotsecant 1y ago
Carry your example far enough and the system becomes brittle. We need people who know how to make the machines that make the machines. If you go far enough up the stack components become unique enough that they're unique pieces of engineering.
- geodel 1y ago
  Correct. Every component made in distant factories all over the world is like micro services model of software development where every function should be its own service. There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    The problem is that the idiots making their stupid cog in the machine decisions have a financial and ideological incentive not to see themselves, their work and the way they've been trained to approach their work. Some two bit code monkey screeching "it's not my fault my code shit all over the production database when something upstream of it got a little wonky, I coded to the spec I was given" is no different than some dumbass middle manager or MBA at HQ who's intentionally making the system more shitty for negligible, but measurable, savings so they can fuck off into the sunset with their bonus for hitting KPI before it all comes crashing down.

Caligatio 1y ago

SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the "Smarter Scrubber" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3]. [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5Tv68gg8Q https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY

LilBytes 1y ago
Such a great series, highly recommend everyone here watch these.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  It is, and it reveals the pitfalls of trade as a whole to boot. At first order they want to make everything local, second order at least not China. So they order from India and get a drop shipment of Chinese made goods. LOL!