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Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we ha
by vsgherzi 8mo ago
Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists.
- tencentshill 8mo agoIt needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim.
- ljsprague 8mo ago[flagged]
- OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo agoWas Kamala campaigning on bringing manufacturing to Texas?
- dropofwill 8mo agoProbably referring to the CHIPs Act? Technically Biden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
- lastdong 8mo agoTechnically Kamala. — As Vice President, Kamala Harris was a key proponent and promoter of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tokyobreakfast 8mo ago[flagged]
- daymanstep 8mo agoManaged to do what?
- nxm 8mo agoAt least he’s trying. Instead of the other side just yelling about “corporate greed” while doing nothing but collecting lobbying money as jobs continue to get exported.
- tokyobreakfast 8mo agoBuild products in the US. Those jobs Steve Jobs told Obama are "never coming back".
- JohnTHaller 8mo ago> Last time I checked, manufacturing employment hasn't gone up since Jan 2025. It's gone down according to the official US numbers, as expected
- daymanstep 8mo agoLast time I checked, manufacturing employment hasn't gone up since Jan 2025.
- hn_acc1 8mo agoWhich of those have come back?
- mothballed 8mo agoManufacturing output has been ~monotonically increasing except during the great recession for the past 3 decades. Jobs though have been basically monotonically decreasing. We're still getting the strategic benefits of more manufacturing, just have fewer people getting their thumbs cut off in stamping machines or melted alive in steel mills.
- xienze 8mo agoHe’s at least getting companies to pretend like they’re going to try. That’s a starting point. Before, the best you’d get out of these CEOs is “LOL those jobs are never coming back, learn to code or whatever else hasn’t been outsourced fully yet.”
- throwaway894345 8mo agoHis predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments. Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
- 0_____0 8mo agoThere is no contingent in the US federal government that has a coherent plan for doing what you're talking about. The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
- mothballed 8mo agoI don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well. If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoHell, don't even match it. Split the difference and it would unleash a torrent of economic activity. It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.
- 0_____0 8mo agochina did not synthesize shenzhen through having poor environmental regulations and cheap labor, nor would one expect to have a shenzhen appear spontaneously in the us if the us allowed in unlimited migrant labor and abolished all environmental law.
- palmotea 8mo ago>> Just as manufacturing in China took time manufacturing in the US will take time. The US has lost much of its skilled labor and mom and pop parts shop. If we have any hope of re-invigorating this some large company is going to have to bite the bullet. Chicken and egg problem imo. I'll leave whether this is worth it or not up to the economists. > It needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim. The problem is all the real leaders got indoctrinated and drank the globalization kool-aid. Unfortunately, it seems only an insane and chaotic person was able to actually buck the iamverysmart consensus.
- 9dev 8mo agoAre you sure that’s actually what you want though, competing with China in skilled labor?
- vsgherzi 8mo agoOf course I do. Competition can only be good here.
- hn_acc1 8mo agoYou willing to work 996? I would prefer some form of work-life balance.
- vsgherzi 8mo agoWhy is that the only way to accomplish that? We'll have to restart manufacturing while also keeping wages livable and the work the US does competitive. As I said above we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
- edgyquant 8mo agoMost factories in the us simply have multiple shifts and run 24 hours
- rob74 8mo agoWell, once AI takes over most of the white collar jobs, people will have to do something to put food on the table, and not all of them can be gig workers. Or do you see ideas like Universal Basic Income as an alternative for the US?
- nkassis 8mo agoThat's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US. If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
- rockskon 8mo agoNo amount of time will let the U.S. - a country of 348 million people - replicate what China - a country with 1.4 billion people - a can do with manufacturing. This isn't "working harder". This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure". This isn't "training people in trades". The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
- vsgherzi 8mo agowe don't have to entirely replace Chinese manufacturing to build back American manufacturing that's a false dichotomy.To compete we'll just have to be more revolutionary than the manufacturing industry already is.
- rockskon 8mo agoAnd what exactly will stop China - a country infamous for copying U.S. technology - from copying whatever the U.S. comes up with?
- tw1984 8mo agoforcing the US to copy Chinese designs? Ford is openly discussing the idea to have joint ventures with Chinese EV makers, the whole idea is to get Chinese EV techs in exchange for US market access. TikTok takeover is another good example.
- rswail 8mo agoChina did in the 1990s exactly what the US did in the 1890s, steal IP to build up its own industries. The US did it to the UK and Europe back then, China has done it against the US/EU over the last 3 decades. It's at the point now where it is self-sustaining, which is why you see China starting to enforce IP Rights, precisely because it is now generating its own IP that it wants to protect. Any economist would say that if China did just "copy" US technology to make itself more productive, that's good economic practice, from China's perspective. Moats only worked for a while to protect European castles, they don't exist now.
- throwaway894345 8mo agoThere’s no world in which large scale manufacturing is returning to the US. Not only are our labor costs dramatically higher than in east asia, but we also lack the logistics infrastructure to quickly produce components and get them to their next stage of assembly quickly. And we can’t just build that stuff because we don’t have a totalitarian government that can just bulldoze farms and houses to run a highway or railway. We also are less interested in pollution, which raises the sticker price on US manufacturing. If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- vsgherzi 8mo agoIn spite of no totalitarian government and things like environmental regulations the US still is able to be one of the most innovative nations on the planet. I don't think we need those things to be able to have manufacturing in the united states. We had it at one point and we can do it again. It's not going to be easy and it's going to need some real breakthrough ideas before we can actually compete. Apple here is the first step.
- throwaway894345 8mo agoWe never had manufacturing within an order of magnitude of China's scale in the US. Probably not within two orders of magnitude. When the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, we had far cheaper labor, far fewer environmental regulations, far fewer labor regulations, and far simpler supply chains. > Apple here is the first step. Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.
- azinman2 8mo agoThe US had it when the rest of the world was severely bombed during WWII, and a lot of the world was very undeveloped. Things changed.
- whynotmaybe 8mo agoNo, US didn't lose it, we collectively decided that whenever we buy something, the price was the most important aspect. It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them. We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
- denkmoon 8mo agoHomo economicus' desire for a 'good deal' or 'a bargain' will kill us.
- SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago“Why would I hire X when I can get it for $20 a month on ChatGPT?” Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.
- vsgherzi 8mo agoWhat you're describing literally is us losing it. We lost in the market. Price was above all for the market and we didn't adapt and lost. I agree with the point you're trying to make but we did lose it in the sense that we do not have the manufacturing capacity we once did
- donw 8mo agoWe collectively decided nothing. Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.