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> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. In my opinion one of the biggest

• petermcneeley 1y ago
  Or you could have trade borders.
  • Spooky23 1y ago
    Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking. I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car. When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
    • EdwardDiego 1y ago
      > I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu? Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
      • alsetmusic 1y ago
        Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
        • wmwmwm 1y ago
          I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
          • trollbridge 1y ago
            20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.
          • youngtaff 1y ago
            The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
        • 2b3a51 1y ago
          A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level. The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
      • numpad0 1y ago
        I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter. Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.
    • nebula8804 1y ago
      >When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison. Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • nradov 1y ago
        The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA steps back from that then global trade networks will gradually break down because no other country or stable coalition has the desire or resources to step into that role. The situation will revert to something more like what we saw pre-war when most trade was regional. New Zealand in particular is in a weak position as they are heavily reliant on agriculture exports, and lack any ability to project power beyond their own borders.
        • youngtaff 1y ago
          Nope… the US has been relying on the rest of the world to fund it's deficit, provide land for military bases to project it's 'power'
          • Spooky23 1y ago
            There’s interdependence, which is a system that benefits the world and the US. The US taxes the world with inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.
    • tim333 1y ago
      >I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. >People in backwards places like rural... That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.
      • bluGill 1y ago
        There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but choose not to. In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars. Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.
        • Spooky23 1y ago
          In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example. Distribution centers are the more modern one. It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia.
          • bluGill 1y ago
            We build in small cities. That is different from rural. The people live in the town.
  • AliceH0521 1y ago
    [dead]
  • tclancy 1y ago
    Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him in the head or anything, but don’t we have decades of research showing the negative effects of those?
    • petermcneeley 1y ago
      I have never had anybody make this reference before!
      • tclancy 1y ago
        Way back in the day I used to have the number for his answering machine, which had a ridiculously funny answer message in it.
    • schmidtleonard 1y ago
      Sure, decades of research by think-tanks hell-bent on pumping the assets of their sponsors at any cost to others. "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis is a good counterpoint.
    • coderenegade 1y ago
      This hinges on the assumption that economists are correctly accounting for value, which seems unlikely. For example, what's the value of being able to repair your jets in a conflict, because the supply chain is local, and doesn't start in an enemy's factory? Comparative advantage tells us we should trade for things that our economy doesn't do well, but if your rival makes bullets better than you do, you're probably still going to make your own. But how do you value that? Security is an intangible asset that can quickly become pathological, as we see in other areas (too much is never enough, just think of the children). Industries don't exist in isolation, so these effects propagate. If you can't make cars, you probably won't make good tanks. When we assess the value of a local car industry, how do we account for the "use it or lose it" nature of retaining knowledge built up by industry? Part of learning and skilling up is actually doing the thing you're learning about. It's no surprise that the country the West has skilled up in the pursuit of greater profits is now it's chief rival. And of course, all of this is before we ask questions like what metric is used to determine the benefit. Efficiency in particular is rife with competing definitions that fit various niche use cases, and for which the underlying assumptions may not be obvious. E.g. thermodynamic efficiency is often calculated using the lower heating value of a fuel, the reasons for which are good, but typically left unstated. A layman comparing thermodynamic efficiencies where differing methods are used might draw an erroneous conclusion if they don't understand that there can be differences.
• coliveira 1y ago
  Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
  • protocolture 1y ago
    Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items. Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
    • nebula8804 1y ago
      There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
      • baq 1y ago
        India will gladly accept those factories for a few decades.
        • nradov 1y ago
          If that's true then why hasn't India changed government policy to make it a more attractive location for manufacturing?
          • Der_Einzige 1y ago
• nradov 1y ago
  I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate. https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html
  • criddell 1y ago
    Wow - super automated and they still employ 11,000 people?
    • helltone 1y ago
      The goal of automation is not necessarily reduce personnel, it could be increased reliability, reduced risk to life, reducing waste from scraps, faster lead time, etc
• Closi 1y ago
  > Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production. The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
  • Gustomaximus 1y ago
    I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time. It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned. Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
  • youngtaff 1y ago
    They're automating the production of many items not just cars https://archive.ph/DuZGe https://archive.ph/DuZGe >The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
    • Closi 1y ago
      I know, that’s not what I was saying :)
• mbesto 1y ago
  > In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation. While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China. IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse. [0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling... [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA