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I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing 17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.

lazide 1y ago
The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries. Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy. As to if that matters? What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.
phil21 1y ago
I really despise this talking point. Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example. But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component. There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security. If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet. We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.
201984 1y ago
Measuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider one country that manufactures a billion dollars of diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a billion dollars of steel per year. Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.

lazide 1y ago

The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries. Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy. As to if that matters? What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.

phil21 1y ago

I really despise this talking point. Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example. But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component. There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security. If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet. We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.

201984 1y ago

Measuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider one country that manufactures a billion dollars of diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a billion dollars of steel per year. Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.