I interviewed at one; the picture says it all. Clean facility full of robots and perhaps one human per acre. More janitorial staff than production staff LOL. Production staff is mostly QA/QC auditing as I understand their explanation.
I was (or maybe will?) sysadmin their SCADA/IoT stuff.
The article is behind a paywall I can't pierce so I didn't read it, they may have mentioned that but I'll never know.
America has plenty of cheap reliable electric, particularly in the interior, and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need. Non automated factories need lots of cheap labor, but when you don't hire thousands of people cost of labor isn't as important.
>and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need.
Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation.
Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars.
The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation.
So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
I've worked with the factory techs before, and my experience was the same. The techs move assemblies from point A to point B, and hit the big green go button, and occasionally hit the big red stop button. They know how to diagnose failures that they've been given a runbook for. New failures they're clueless about and don't have even the first idea how to diagnose. For that, there's the engineers that designed the station and the engineers that designed the underlying thing being assembled.
Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product.
Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
The engineering isn't in the factory, it happens behind the scenes. Often in different cities from the factory .
One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria).
That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy.
American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes.
All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states).
All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too.
Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school.
Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
I did go to gymnasium in Bosnia and Croatia. To your points, some of my friends went to electrical or medical or navigational high schools.
I do find in some states and provinces, there is informal division between schools and formal division inside school - the core curriculum vs advanced curriculum or ap / ib programs. But agree it's not as segregated or pronounced as in Croatia and some other places in Europe. I moved around and studied at 3 universities in North America. Nowhere near top schools but nowhere near bottom either. Average places e.g. University of Toronto. I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting, though there's downsides.
Some school districts do adopt informal tracking (college track, vocational track, normal track) but this is very much at the discretion of the local school district.
IB is occasionally included at local public schools in the US to help drive up rankings because College Board AP classes would require more staffing (3-4 AP physics classes can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB Physics track, and AP Stats/Calc AB/Calc BC can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB SL/HL track. In essence, you can hire 2 teachers with a Masters Degree instead of 4-5 for AP classes just in Physics and Math alone).
> I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting
The classes that are 400 levels in a Bachelors program in North America should be comparable to those taught in the first year of a Masters program. Depending on how many credits you came into college with, you may have never had enough free slots open to take those interesting classes.
First minor point, but a country I was born in is not necessarily "my country" and I feel I was pretty clear in my possessive pronouns through this thread :-)
Second, yours is a true logical statement, but I feel if we are talking of our North American education system as a competitive advantage, then we are inherently talking about comparative and relative performance. Which countries have worse educational system? I can name a few, certainly, but if we look at our economic and geopolitical competitors, how does our education actually compare? Not favourably has always been my impression. I'm curious to see any stats to otherwise, and especially when it comes to efficiency I. E. Money invested vs educational results (understanding measuring educational results is a tricky and controversial area)
Does anybody believe that Russian, Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese Indian etc etc etc (pick a meaningful economic competitor) education is worse than American?
It depends a lot on where in America you went to school. They're highly variable. So you have to find some way to standardize for that. You said you had AP/IB classes. Did you (or others in your school) commonly score 5's on AP tests, indicating they were up to the national standard? Or was it a great accomplishment if someone got a 3?
Ah, sorry. Didn't know how far back you were reaching.
The easy-to-remember alternative would be if (a) you got credits for your AP classes for specific college courses and (b) the faculty was not impressed with your results.
There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.
(Canada perspective) - it’s on the lower end of the software engineer. If a software eng makes 80-120k in non faang, you are looking at 70-100k. Those are just example numbers, it’s been about 5 years since I worked in that industry.
There are two paths in this industry though, work for the factory itself, very cushy job, sometimes unionized. You’re responsible for fixing small things as they come, but overall I don’t think much is expected since you’re one of the few in the factory who can program those machines so if you give a time estimate there’s nobody to argue. You likely stay in the lower end of the pays scale.
There is the consultant route, which can be gruelling, but you make closer to the higher end of the pay scale.
Here it’s just a programmer shop, much is expected of you because you’re billing by the hour, also you will travel about 1/3 of your time, because you need to go from factory to factory to fix/install new code or machines.
The people I know who work in the defense industry seem to think so. That's what I hear. We're gearing up for a big conflict. Take that with a grain of salt, though.
Q Anon types lean Tea Party / Trump / America First and are generally anti-war IME. There was a big shift among the Republican base after Bush II. They are more likely to say that the bad guys are in DC than in China / Russia / Afghanistan / whatever, notwithstanding Fox News types trying to corral them back into the fold.
> the bad guys are in DC than in China / Russia / Afghanistan / whatever
Shockingly, same narrative as Russia has been pushing in Ukraine for a long time (except for Kiev rather than DC). Unfortunately, it has worked really well for them and we all know the grim events that followed.
Ever used a computer running an Intel or AMD processor?
Ever worked at a company with Microsoft Windows or enterprise Linux servers (IBM RedHat)?
Ever connected to the internet or a cell tower? They use Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc technology.
Almost all large tech companies in the US and tons of smaller startups have active contracts with the DoD/DHS/DoE or with contractors and suppliers for them.
Congratulations, you're part of the defense industry. Last I checked, most of my coworkers and and peers voted blue, like most other people in the Bay Area.
i dont work in the tech industry, so try again. either way your argument is pedantic as i think most people understand defense contractors to be mostly manufacturing and tech related to it. if you want the definition to include people who use computers you do you
The neocons thought they would get an Iran war long before 2025. Instead they got Beijing brokering peace between Tehran and Riyadh, and an increasingly unstable Tel Aviv.
The Iran-Saudi talks have been overstated in American media. All they really are is the reopening of diplomatic communications between Iran and the KSA (aka a return to the 2014-15 time period) [0][1]. In essence, it's Saudi admitting they lost the War in Yemen [4] (which btw was projected to occur around now years ago) [5]
The core Saudi-Iran national security concerns continue to persist with continued conflicts between both countries partners inside Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. [0][1]
The moment Iran gets the bomb, Saudi and the UAE would readily enter a hot war with Iran. This is a big reason the KSA and UAE are pushing forward defense pacts with Israel [2][3]
That list doesn't have any of the more common type of war that America has fought over the last ~70 years: wars against small countries. What good is a predictive list if it would have excluded wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Granada, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, etc.?
> The U.S. is low on rockets and artillery shells. Congress is funding a huge arms buying spree, but U.S. factories can't produce munitions fast enough. Price gauging is also a concern.
> Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposed a U.S. national security problem. The country can't make rockets and artillery shells nearly as fast as they get used when two major countries go to war. That's triggered an effort to speed up munitions manufacturing in the United States. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.
---
We may be, but at the same time we're realizing that we don't have the capacity for the current rate of use in Ukraine.
I'm old enough to remember the mantra "manufacturing is never coming back to the US!"
ANY system with numerous, complex, and hidden dependencies is fragile and higher risk. Covid, Russia/Ukraine, and now the BRICS/de-dollarization are making many of those dependencies explicit.
Eh 'never' was always the wrong statement because a lot of manufacturing that required large amounts of stable power while having low manpower requirements never left the US.
At the same time I don't think we should expect any factories coming to the US to provide massive amounts of jobs as they did in the past. Companies that manufactured overseas quite commonly had their administrative divisions either in the US already, or some other country, and as a huge amount of that is remote style work it will remain fungible.
I remember when we signed NAFTA and it was said we didn't need those jobs. Something about becoming a service economy.
The 'never coming back' mantra was mostrecently the unfortunate cry of the democrats during the 2016 election cycle. A shame because it cemented in the minds of the rural working class that they are unwanted.
We value diversity but then make these claims that our economy doesn't need this.
That’s the underlying premise of their politics. The immigrants Hilary Clinton wants to bring to the country aren’t any less “deplorable” (from her viewpoint) than rural white Americans. They are just don’t feel the same ownership over the society, and are willing to support people like Clinton in return for being allowed to come here.
Immigrants can't vote so this logic is bizarre. The people who make the most money off illegal immigrants in the US are rural land owners, meat packing plant owners, etc. They don't want illegal immigration to stop they just want to keep those laborers cheap which wouldn't happen with a reform that makes them comfortable seeking a new employer.
It sounds to me like you've got some kind of self loathing thing going on. Political arguments are mostly about whether illegal immigrants should get at best a gradual path to citizenship which doesn't mean they will be a tool to win the electoral college.
Quite the opposite: as I have become more established in this country, I’m less inclined to reject my parents’ values. E.g. JD Vance and my dad are kind of on the same page about childless people. That was never politically motivating for my parents, because they could just tell me “you can’t do what your white friends do.” I can’t realistically tell my own kids that. I have to care about the direction of American culture in a way my parents didn’t.
Almost 10% of the potential electorate is foreign born naturalized citizens like me and my parents. Most of these folks aren’t liberal. They are in a political alliance which is based on white liberals supporting immigration and certain welfare systems, and non-white immigrants looking the other way on cultural issues.
At the same time, I found other studies showing that second generation immigrants support many left wing social policies, such as gay marriage and multiculturalism, but that recent first generation were slightly less inclined to support gay marriage.
It would seem that on the balance, naturalized immigrants (many of which are considered second generation in that study) are on the left socially but not necessarily economically.
> At the same time, I found other studies showing that second generation immigrants support many left wing social policies, such as gay marriage and multiculturalism, but that recent first generation were slightly less inclined to support gay marriage.
What country are you originally from? I’m a first generation immigrant from South Asia, and in my experience, support for socially liberal policies in these communities is often based on compartmentalization. For example, Hindu Americans may support multiculturalism, insofar as they are religious minorities in a Christian majority country. But 70% also support Modi, who definitely doesn’t have a multicultural vision of India: https://theprint.in/india/49-of-indian-americans-back-pm-mod.... One rule for their own country, different rule for someone else’s country. Similarly, most Muslim Americans support gay marriage. But not in their own families: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....
That’s why liberals like immigrants. When they seek to change American culture, immigrants like my parents think “well let the Americans do what they want.”
I don't see how it is a criticism of a rainbow coalition that they are able to redirect people away from intolerance even if the only motivator is self interest.
This is in fact why the republic is structured as it is, should we pretend people are inherently good and switch to a simple democracy that can vote for its first genocide next week?
In a democracy, it absolutely is a criticism of a political party that it can’t win elections among an electorate that is securely rooted in the country, and must instead rely on newcomers who will put aside their own values because of their precarious circumstances. Democracy is about allowing people to create the society they want to live in, not maximizing individual freedom from moral regulation. Using immigration to enact social change that is undesired among both the people already here and people coming here undermines democracy.
So at what point did immigration become unacceptable instead of part of our system with natural political consequences? Do we need to take the vote away from Irish Americans and re-examine whether the Know Nothings should have won elections and controlled the shape of America so that it might please the majority of white rural Americans? Of course not the portion that would be dragged behind pickups for seeming too queer or having a possibly black grandfather.. But the majority.
> In a democracy, it absolutely is a criticism of a political party that it can’t win elections among an electorate that is securely rooted in the country, and must instead rely on newcomers who will put aside their own values because of their precarious circumstances.
It can be useful to think of immigration as a species of (or perhaps just analogous to) the Monte Carlo method [0].
I'm from MENA. I can't speak to South Asians, but the immigrants I know overwhelmingly support secularism, multiculturalism and other progressive policies in their original countries. In fact, the biggest reason why they tell me they wouldn't go back is because they take issue with cultural attitudes and politics there, not because of economics as most feel they might be more prosperous back home.
> Hilary Clinton would consider most of the people in my community “deplorables.”
From Time magazine's summary of Clinton's remarks — which are spot-on:
<quote>
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.
</quote>
The Time piece includes the transcript of the full remarks.
Those who "believe the same things about nationality, gender roles, same sex marriage, etc., as even pretty liberal Bangladeshis" are free to practice their beliefs. But they should expect forceful pushback if they try to compel others to conform to those beliefs as well.*
* With the usual caveat of assuming that nonconformance to those beliefs doesn't cause harm to other "people" — and on that, Blackmun got it more or less right in Roe.
Both evangelicals in Wisconsin and Bangladeshis tend to believe that society can regulate individual morality for the common good. They don’t embrace your libertarian view. You’re welcome to it, but you’re merely proving my point. Social liberals use immigration to advance minority positions they couldn’t achieve otherwise.
> Social liberals use immigration to advance minority positions they couldn’t achieve otherwise.
Isn't that like a losing team saying, "we'd have won the championship if only our star player hadn't gotten hurt"? Or, "I've got mine, so pull up the ladder." Immigration is a fact, and beneficial in so many ways — including, IMHO, a more-liberal electorate. If MAGA types want to shut the gate to try to preserve their political power, they need to offer better reasons than they have so far.
> It’s a more fragmented electorate, with fault lines liberals can use to bypass the need to achieve consensus for social change. It’s an end-run around democracy that ultimately frays our system of self governance.
Methinks you have an overly-idealized notion of how democracy works (or at least its U.S. variant).
To be fair, I don't think those people think about any concept of "ownership" of society or culture, except perhaps that they 'own' society and you will do as you are told. They presumably look at everyone else as cattle to be herded, and as long as the prevailing culture does not involve anything about guillotining the elites, we can do whatever we want, especially if it's something from which these 'elites' can profit.
The proles by definition don't own capital, social or otherwise. I find the focus on Clinton a bit short-sighted. She certainly bought into the Reaganite neoliberalism (her husband cemented it into American zeitgeist for a generation by embracing it), but I'd hardly call her the source of it. And I'd take more offense at being called a "dumb, cousin-fucking terrorist"[0] than a "deplorable", but either way these people will not be served by either side.
I find it odd that you perceive this as a new thing. I'd call it an American trope that long predates me. For instance, "The Beverly Hillbillies" was a 1962 sitcom that played off of it.
> The Clampetts bring a moral, unsophisticated, and minimalistic lifestyle to the swanky, sometimes self-obsessed and superficial community. Double entendres and cultural misconceptions are the core of the sitcom's humor. Plots often involve Drysdale's outlandish efforts to keep the Clampetts' money in his bank, and his wife's efforts to rid the neighborhood of "those hillbillies". The family's periodic attempts to return to the mountains are often prompted by Granny's perceiving a slight from one of the "city folk".
That’s an illustration of my point. It’s a Hollywood criticism of Beverly Hills’ departure from the “moral, unsophisticated, and minimalistic lifestyle.” When Mrs. Drysdale calls the Clampett’s “deplorables” the audience is expected to see her as the villain.
Ah, is it the "openly" part that you're focusing on? I can imagine that, but it always seemed pretty open to me. I suppose I'm attuned to the dog whistles that they've long used. I'm pretty sure George Bush didn't spend much more time clearing brush off his ranch than it took to finish the photo op for instance.
Or maybe I just spent too long on calls with executives who were trying to find the best place to source "non-value added labor" (the ideal proles are interchangeable cogs, ideally without any benefits) that I forget that they sometimes try to hide these things.
Stupidest thing economists got people to believe. That it's a good idea to export industries like manufacturing that benefit highly from technological progress. While keeping those most subject to Baumol's Cost disease.
Bonus: Prioritizing overhead industries like adshit, finance and insurance.
History doesn't repeat itself but it sure as hell rhymes.
Interesting to see this migration of manufacturing back to US+ now that Chinese manufacturing costs have caught up to Mexico (which is a MASSIVE compliment btw - a lot of North American high value manufacturing such as in the automotive, medical robotics, and IC space is done in Nuevo León, and China has caught up).
The supply chain to manufacture generic plastics (most concentrated around Guangzhou and moving to Northern Vietnam) is different from the supply chain needed to manufacture generic pharmaceuticals (mostly concentrated in Himachal, Hyderabad, and central Maharashtra) is different from the supply chain to manufacture medical robotics (concentrated around Tijuana).
Cost of labor isn't the only variable when these decisions are made. Decisions need to take into account business continuity, availability of expertise, availability of suppliers, etc.
This is why low value manufacturing began moving from Guangdong to the Haiphong Delta in the mid 2000s and 2010s, and is now moving to Laos+Cambodia.
And this is why intermediate parts manufacturing (the kind which china is very competitive in) is returning to Mexico - incomes and costs in China have caught up to Mexico, which was the proto-China before the Peso Crisis and China's entry into the WTO. If I'm paying the same in labor in both China and Mexico, I may as well save money in logistics and taxes by reopening my plants in Mexico.
The story of manufacturing returning to ASEAN and India is the same - the factories that South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese companies built in the late 90s/early 2000s moved to China by the mid-2000s, but started either returning to Malaysia (electronics, plastics, automotive), Thailand (electronics, plastics, automotive), and India (plastics, pharmaceuticals) or began opening greenfield such as in Vietnam (electronics, plastics).
The return of manufacturing in South+SE Asia was due to trade wars the Chinese govt initiated against Korea (bought THAAD against NK, PRC didn't approve which sparked a mass boycott against Korean products in China), Japan (Senkakou/Diayou Islands standofd which caused a massive boycott against Japanese products in China), and Taiwan (a major Taiwanese origin KPop singer began pushing for Taiwan Sovereignty which sparked a mass boycott against Taiwan in China) in the 2012-2017 time period.
This led South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to initiate their "Look South" policies to decouple their economics from China. SK and Japan largely succeeded, but Taiwan lagged behind due to internal political acrimony.
And low end is hardly coming back. This has be said many times in the past during brief alignments, then by the time we’ve tooled up the rug is pulled out from under us and a new 3rd world nation is doing it for 1/10th the cost.
This is not easy for me to believe even with the desire for a rosy outlook. Those who know know this was bs before.
> a new 3rd world nation is doing it for 1/10th the cost
There are fewer and fewer of those all the time, though. Manufacturing is now starting to move to Africa because Asia has become more expensive. I don't think there's anywhere left to go after Africa.
More get created though every time one of those former countries undergoes a regime change of some sort. The types of countries where you can get slave wage labor aren't exactly known for their political stability.
Large factories require some level of political stability to protect the capital. Also, a functioning power grid is critical. That has been a blocker in many areas of Africa as I understand it.
Wages definitely are pennies on the dollar. However factors like international shipping, taxes/tariffs, quality control and lead times cost more time and money compared to domestic. So in the end it’s probably closer to 1/2 the monetary cost.
If I can get an ePacket from AliExpress for a $0.50 item without paying shipping (and presumably where the shipper didn’t eat the shipping+tariff costs either, those costs not being worth it to make at most $0.50), presumably there’s a way around both of these things.
Also, insofar as your argument would seem to generalize to any country’s domestic imports, this makes it “too strong”, and therefore suspicious as economic theory. There are plenty of markets outside of North America that can be served overland or with not-so-powerful ships from developing-country suppliers. (Africa can sell to itself, and to Europe, and the Middle East. Many South American nations can sell into Brazil. Obviously, you can drive a truck of t-shirts from Thailand or Vietnam straight to China. The Philippines can ship pretty cheaply to Japan and Taiwan. Etc.)
So why do these countries still have domestic factories? Why does Germany still make cars? Why isn’t China outsourcing electronics production to Vietnam? The same arguments should apply to them, even more strongly than it does to America. But we don’t see the same effect.
A few years ago in Spain, AliExpress orders always came via Correos (national postal operator), at least once it arrived in Spain. Nowadays, it seems everything is private, at least in the major city I live in. Based on how they will combine orders in China, it seems like the seller ships to an AliExpress operated warehouse in China, orders are combined and packaged together, flown to Madrid, then from there private companies fly it to where it’s going (in my case Valencia) and then it’s dispatched out to delivery driver, usually on a bike or scooter. Usually the employee is wearing a UberEats or Just Eat backpack, so I assume either the delivery companies are in the last mile game, or the delivery drivers themselves are picking up packages when it makes sense. Maybe there’s a gig-economy app for package delivery I’m not aware of?
Anyways, long story to say that anecdotally prices haven’t really gone up at all. At one point they started charging VAT on orders (21%), but the switch to private delivery hasn’t seemed to increase prices.
If you've never seen the costs for bulk ship shipping, they're effectively infinitesimal. The downsides are high latency, but not cost or throughput unless a disaster strikes.
Not OP, but I assume in regards to the garment district it means people with the requisite skills aren’t around anymore. Back in the day, nearly every woman knew how to sew and make clothes. Nowadays, do you know a single woman (or man!) who knows how to sew and make clothes? I don’t. People could learn, buts it’s a lot easier when you already have a large population with the required skills to draw from.
Oddly enough, I do know how, both via school (home ec) and more importantly, due to older relatives who were into quilting. I have zero interest in ever doing it, but I absolutely do know far more than I ever wanted to about sewing.
I think you can find a few who still do such things in maker spaces, as well, but it only seems to be taken up by people who are already gainfully employed in things that make a lot more than low end manufacturing work.
I don’t think they mean professionally, but rather being able to create clothing from scratch.
How many people do you know that could turn raw fabric into a dress? I have can do the simplest repairs and even used a sewing machine a few times but that’s not particularly useful to a garment factory.
My daughter has made at least 10 dresses before graduating from high school. She's now progressed into a textiles program at our university. My step-sister made very elaborate dresses for her daughter throughout school as well.
Sewing/dressmaking is a lot like woodworking. Being able to visualize things well in 3D is an asset, but also having good tools helps as well.
The main missing ingredient is "Pattern Makers." These are the Garment District equivalent of Engineers. They are still around, but in far lower numbers.
It's fairly obvious that people think that these folks can be replaced by software, but they say the same thing about engineers.
Also, entire communities were built around textile mills and transportation/consolidation/intermodals. When we shut down the Garment District, and shipped all the work overseas (and my friend freely admits his company did the same), it destroyed these communities. Lot of skilled labor left, and stopped training the next generation.
And, to answer another question, I don't have to "prove" anything. I was simply telling something that I heard from an extremely relevant source. I'm sure as hell not going to ask my friend to "prove what he said," for the convenience of Internet randos.
I do go over it in the linked entry. It's not a particularly long or technical article.
Basically, it's the social structure that is built around a community's Raison D'etre, or reason for existence.
This is schools, housing, curriculum (there's a reason that RIT is based in Rochester, for example), as well as oral and learned tradition.
"Tribal knowledge" is a dirty word to efficiency nerds, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and is highly effective, for a reason.
There are entire districts, known for the finest $WHATEVER. Lübeck, Germany, is known for marzipan (I don't really like it, but lots of others do). Bordeaux is known for wines and cooking, Afghanistan has some of the best opium, etc. Some of these are due to climate and soil, but others can be lost to other areas (Sonoma, for instance).
They may have great soil, but they also have great farmers, who have been handing their skills down, for generations, etc.
Once that is gone, there ain't no making new ones.
I believe the missing part is that it takes a lot of work to create that social network. Without a driving economic reason or lots of time and regional interest (ie generations) it would be difficult to redevelop.
Much of this social capital requires lots of folks being interested in something since they were young and "playing" at it. Play is an important way to learn and understand it. Also I believe social capital requires adults to respect and take interest in the item, as children often take their cues from that.
That said, I wonder if industrial clothing manufacturing requires that much social infrastructure? That industry seems to move very couple of decades to a new country with the cheapest labor.
Exactly. And it is not just knowledge, it's not even just ways of thinking - it's ways of being.
For our own sanity we have to believe we have at least some handle on the reality unfolding around us - but even a cursory examination shows this cannot be true. Our lives are so brief, so localised, when set against the totality of all that is, was, and will be. Instead, as we shape the world, the world shapes us, and it is this emergent collective consciousness that conspires to give us all that we have.
Imagine a software company with a 50M LOC codebase that shuts down and lays off all workers. The office is still there, servers are still running, and nothing has been touched--but the employees are all gone.
How easily do you think a new team of the same size could come in and restart operations? Most likely it would take a long time and a lot of capital before that company was productive again.
That's what the parent means by social infrastructure: institutional knowledge--all the stuff that isn't written down anywhere.
> Can you explain what is this secret sauce social infrastructure?
The NASA-industrial complex that built the Saturn V rocket is largely gone: The engineers, factory workers, etc., who had the necessary knowledge — much of it tacit — are retired or dead.
I mean if of course it’s not coming back. Clothing has a huge labor component and labor is expensive in the USA. Way cheaper to pay 1$ a day than 20$ an hour.
But even if you fixed that the sub component infrastructure isn’t there. The raw fabrics are simply not available here so even if you did pay labor of 160/$ a day you would still not be able to get raw materials
Hypernormalizing human agency in terms of fiat economics is political propaganda to maintain contemporary economic tradition where wealth management middleman create the pipeline of raw textile to product in store shelf.
We should greatly simplify the pipeline to raw textile to end user.
Give people something todo in the evening but passively consume other’s emotional dynamism via TV, YouTube and TikTok.
We make it cheap in fiat dollars to use up a shit ton of resources on enriched middlemen roleplaying American civic life.
It’s gonna cost a lot because their buying power isn’t going to get deflated, that’s for sure. Keep public access to commodities mired in legal obligations of recent history, yet more roleplay in accordance with tradition, which tons of money is put into reminding us we must obey.
We’re such a wacky culture of willful ignorant while proclaiming to be data driven and science minded.
How do you explain the success of American Giant? They use US grown cotton, make all their clothes in the US. Granted, you're not going to be able to buy a $5 t-shirt from them, but a $40 t-shirt that doesn't rely on crappy labor practices seems like something people have gotten behind.
Same with New Balance. Their shoes compete with Nike made in Asia, and are MIUSA.
We've just become addicted to cheap crap shoveled into Walmart and Amazon.
> clothing manufacturing ... [and] many other industries ... the infrastructure is gone ... the social infrastructure... as well
You fail to show what exactly in a social infrastructure inhibits clothing manufacturing or other industries.
One example that may come to mind is a possible cultural refusal of jobs offering low wages - yet there exist societies in which it is difficult to find personnel for menial jobs and yet clothing manufacturing still thrives.
I’m not sure I see things the same way. I could definitely be wrong. I frequently am.
Define “strategic.”
If you mean a vital military asset, remember that clothing factories were an important industry during the wars (including the Revolutionary and Civil wars, in the US).
Military uniforms are critical. Ask any soldier. Just a couple of days ago, a friend that is an ex-marine, was telling me about the marvelous gear he had for winter exercises in Lake Tahoe. Watch any show about the siege at Stalingrad, to see what improper uniforms can mean.
If you mean a vital financial asset, then think about the economic vitality that is created by any industry. All the factories, brokers, marketers, transporters, etc. Lots of busy little ants. The garment industry is huge. My friend is extremely wealthy from a fairly small, undistinguished corner of it.
If we think of “fashion,” as a flighty, will o’ the wisp “hobby,” then consider the amazing amount of money sloshing around the world, from it. I’m not a fashionista, and the company that my friend owns isn’t really a high-fashion outfit. They do high-quality “every[wo]man” clothes, for reasonable costs. If you spent an hour, talking to him about the logistics of his operation, your jaw would hit the floor.
Many folks would argue that alcoholic beverages are an unnecessary, and possibly immoral, product, but, once again, we have an enormous industry around it. I have a couple of other friends and acquaintances that are fairly wealthy, from selling booze. Prohibition taught us a pretty big lesson.
Many folks would say that advertising, mobile games, and “vanity apps” are “not strategic,” but I’ll bet there’s a ton of folks here, that would take issue with that statement.
I sometimes wonder whether that’s long-term truly the case. When I see various advanced aramid weaving processes and techniques designed and built in the US, I wonder if they had to scale a dizzying skills and operational mountain by themselves with the lack of a US domestic textile industry, or whether there isn’t much of a cross-fertilization in the entire journey from R&D through scale-out mass manufacturing.
I’m personally inclined to believe an innovation-oriented, Burkes’ian Connections-style society is only feasible when the Brownian motion of ideas occurs within a dense fabric of interplaying, fractally-complex industrial relationships between a massive number of different industries.
Planet money did a fantastic series on the textile industry several years ago when they decided to make a t-shirt and wanted to trace the whole thing.
Turns out textiles is sort of the cheapest industry. It’s unique in that it requires capital in the form of machines, but doesn’t require a high skill labor force and the machines tend to be highly portable. So it ends up being an industry to follow if you want to know where the cheapest labor is. Basically what happens with textiles, is that every so often the standard of living in a country goes up, and the factory owners look around to try to save on labor, and hope to find a cheaper place to move to. What’s sort of interesting is that there aren’t many places left that have enough political stability that owners are willing to risk moving equipment to that are cheaper than bangledesh. This was like 10 years ago though, I’d be curious where textiles are located now.
Vietnamese textile manufacturing is moving towards Cambodia and Laos (both figuratively and literally - lots of garment factories starting to open in Tay Ninh and Gia Lai).
The Bangladeshi textile industry will continues to remain for the foreseeable future, but textile manufacturing has started to return to India now that unskilled manufacturing wages are starting to reach the $150-200/month mark globally. When Bangladeshi and Indian unskilled labor starts going for $300-400/montn it will move to Nepal and then Eastern Africa (or Pakistan+Myanmar if their politics stabilizes).
This is not at all what happens but ok. This is sort of the capitalist fable on what’s happening.
Read “How Asia Works” for how things actually work in industrialising a country and its stages.
Countries actively choose to seek to develop an industrial base and they start with textiles. Then they evolve their industrial base to a higher income industry, and they let go of textiles over time.
That’s how it happens in an organised industrial development plan. In disorganised industrialisation, you have everything going on at once and you get Brazil.
This narrative doesn't falsify or go against the one you're replying to. Both things can be true - investors follow incentives and some countries try to manage incentives in a certain way.
FWIW, I recently purchased a pack of Kirkland Signature T-shirts from Costco, which were made in Ethiopia. It's the first time I've noticed my clothing coming from Africa.
My parents and extended family owned and operated clothing factories in two countries and in the US for some time. The idea that clothing manufacturing (as in mass products, not niche items) will come back to the US (or Europe) is unimaginable.
There are so many layers to this. At $15 per hour minimum wage the math simply does not add-up. People are not willing to pay enough for clothing to be able to support mass US or European manufacturing. That cork was put on that bottle a long time ago. This, BTW, is the case for lots of other sectors, not just clothing.
Given that a pair of Jeans in Europe costs usually 100 EUR or more in retail, I never understood why the manufacturing couldn't cost more than 5 USD somewhere in South East Asia.
Because the retailers and the manufacturers aren't the same companies - the retailers are looking for the cheapest goods to buy and have a lot of other expenses as well (rent, wages for shop staff, capital for maintaining inventory, etc).
My family had a textile factory in Israel from the 1970s until the mid 90s - it used to be very, very profitable until the market opened up to imports from China/India in the 90s. Within a few short years my parents had to shut down the factory because they couldn't compete with countries where the prevailing wage was < 1/10th as much as Israeli minimum wage.
I tried multiple times to pay more for textiles. I wanted to have some T shirts made at very good American wages, preferably in America. No one was able or interested in accommodating me. Admittedly it would have made their work much more complicated for a small order.
There are some companies that make textiles in the US. American Giant makes hoodies and sweatshirts that are MIUSA, and their quality is excellent. Flint and Tinder makes shirts, coats, hoodies/sweatshirts MIUSA and their 10-year pullover hoodie is the best hoodie I've ever owned.
Try buying something from the German company Trigema, the exclusively produce in Germany. Here a translation from the German wiki article:
“ Grupp [ the owner] is publicly committed to Germany as a production location and advertises that all raw materials for the clothing are purchased in EU countries, that all production takes place in Germany, that there has been no short-time work or layoffs for over 30 years, and that Trigema guarantees employees' children a job or apprenticeship.”
At a certain point of automation, America’s energy-cost and proximity advantages outweigh its cost of labor and regulation. This tradeoff as a whole occurs against margin, which is why we’re seeing middle manufacturing reshoring.
> Shipping things via train or boat is stupidly stupidly cheap, even across the planet both ways
Totally agree on shipping. There are other benefits to proximity, from lower geopolitical and supply-chain risk to tighter integration with design and the customer (due to enhanced information flow and lower latency).
Not just that but you are deeply underestimating the cost of automation compared to manufacturing margins, which in the middle market I really doubt is changing.
Unfortunately, human hands are still much cheaper than machines.
I see a fair bit of manufacturing in Chicago, and I don’t see any of these equations changing in the way that this article purports them to
Yeah but it adds a month of flow when you need to make clothes to the latest trends that’s way too long. Also you want to try samples and inspect the process so you need people on site all that adds friction.
You're not accounting for the cost of automation itself. The "problem" with automation is that it's actually terrifically expensive - industrial robots run into the high-six-figures and upwards.
There's a reason why low-end manufacturing is not heavily automated no matter where it occurs - automation would likely be more expensive than using humans.
Also importantly automation tends to be expensive to reconfigure - for stable product lines where the same general processes are in use for years at a time, and product variability is low (see: cars) automation is highly successful. But for product lines that are more fly-by-night (see: most fast fashion) the reconfiguration cost of automation makes it even less practical.
Retraining a group of humans is vastly cheaper and easier than reconfiguring a fully integrated automated assembly line.
> "problem" with automation is that it's actually terrifically expensive - industrial robots run into the high-six-figures and upwards
Totally agree. Just pointing out how the trade-off is rebalancing the margin at which reshoring makes sense down, and that this is a trend one can expect to continue as industrial robots get better and cheaper.
Industrial robots are getting much cheaper. The controllers and electronics to drive them are now fairly commodity as is the low level control software. You could easily get Fanuc style arm robots in the sub-100k nowadays.
The real limitation is still programming and training the robots. I'm just entering this field, and its fun but yah it takes a team of expensive talented engineers to do it. Especially if you're automating to a higher degree. The progress with AI has been huge but I'd guess on the order of a decade before its commonplace.
I work as a master diesel mechanic on heavy machinery, and it should be said that every customer assumes the parts and service are low end.
Drive and cam shafts, bearing sleeves, rebuilds and reworks are all still unmatched in quality and remain largely american. Waiting 4 months for pajeet or Mr wong to float the parts over from a scrapyard masquerading as a machine shop versus sending a skilled onsite mechanical maintenance tech to rebuild an excavator blade or bucket sleeve is a no brainer.
Petroleum and mining industries have zero tolerance for a service or product without a stateside relationship
I agree with the content of your comment but you didn't need to add the racist comment about Asians (bruh, us Pajeets and Wongs are Americans as well. Write that same sentence with the N word and see how racist it is).
There's another angle to this as well. IMO the main reason that manufacturing stopped in the US that nobody seems to address: the USD.
The USD couldnt function as a reserve currency (from the perspective of the US) if the US didnt run a massive trade deficit on purpose (import way more than you export). That's very hard to do if your manufacturing isn't happening outside of the US in countries that you want to be dependent on the USD.
The day manufacturing actually makes a significant comeback to the US is the day that the US lost it's status as the nr 1 world power: the day the USD will stop being a world reserve currency. It would be extremely bad news for the US geo-politically and economically.
Contradictory perception of what's going on with manufacturing in the U.S. recently is because when seen by investors, economists, and mainstream press, things look like manufacturing is returning (or even never left apart from a few sectors); when seen by workers, it seems like it has almost disappeared. It's just because manufacturing may be growing but manufacturing employment isn't, and won't be growing: when labor is expensive, it is automated away.
I can't say there's anything wrong about it. Do we want people in developed countries toil in sweatshops?
Meanwhile, China's factory business have dropped dramatically.
- Tech multinationals are moving out of China fast. Apple is mandating Foxconn to move 50% production lines to India by 2024. And anticipates 50% iPhones out of India bu 2027 https://techwireasia.com/2023/01/india-is-anticipated-to-pro.... Most of the downstream apple supply chains in China have all left for Vietnam. Dell is going to cut all ties to China by 2027 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dell-made-in-china-us-exit. HP and LG is quietly exiting as well. Samsung has already left China a while back.
- According to the office for national statistics in China, for jan/feb of 2023 http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202303/27/t20230327_38464161..., car manufacturing profits is down 41%. non-metal products manufacturing profits is down 39%. chemicals manufacturing profits is down 56%. electronics manufacturing profits is down 71%!! In fact, all businesses have dropped 22% in profit. This is supported by empty malls in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, as well as 50% collapse in real estate prices in Tier 1 cities.
Mmm. I think you’re misrepresenting what your linked articles actually say.
1. Apple is moving some of its assembly capacity out of China but the article itself mentions that they’re still dependent on component imports from China.
2. Dell has a plan to move manufacturing of products for the US market out of China. That’s hardly cutting ties.
Similarly Samsung may no longer have assembly plants in China but that says nothing of where the components are manufactured.
A harrowing idea that I think is correct is what Michael Hudson says about our current economy.
Even if you paid for everything other than rent for a low skill worker, America and Canada are priced out of manufacturing based on rent/housing alone.
This is a huge reason why low skill labour can't come back.
It’s never been about the space, for 40 years it’s always been about zoning and compliance. Environmental assessments costs multiple times what they did a few decades ago in ON, this is a problem we created ourselves.
Freight Cost, Robotics, Oil Price, Lead Time. I dont think every business will move back, but for some it makes a lot more sense. With interest rate and oil price I am not sure if the current freight cost are sustainable. Robotics have improved tremendously over the past 5 years, it wasn't because we cant automate something, it was simply the time and cost of those automation means less labours are required.
The next frontier will likely be electricity price affecting OPEX. ( it has always been the case but never gotten media attention ) For the rest, read [1] alephnerd's answer.
I've seen comments that this is nominal dollars not adjusted for inflation. Normalized in real dollars value and investment is slightly lower than peak 2015 factory spending of 70B. 5-10B is fab subsidy via CHIPs, which puts rest of spending within norms of past decade of 50-60B.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadI was (or maybe will?) sysadmin their SCADA/IoT stuff.
The article is behind a paywall I can't pierce so I didn't read it, they may have mentioned that but I'll never know.
Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars.
The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation.
So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product.
Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria).
That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy.
American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes.
All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states).
All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too.
Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school.
Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
I did go to gymnasium in Bosnia and Croatia. To your points, some of my friends went to electrical or medical or navigational high schools.
I do find in some states and provinces, there is informal division between schools and formal division inside school - the core curriculum vs advanced curriculum or ap / ib programs. But agree it's not as segregated or pronounced as in Croatia and some other places in Europe. I moved around and studied at 3 universities in North America. Nowhere near top schools but nowhere near bottom either. Average places e.g. University of Toronto. I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting, though there's downsides.
Some school districts do adopt informal tracking (college track, vocational track, normal track) but this is very much at the discretion of the local school district.
IB is occasionally included at local public schools in the US to help drive up rankings because College Board AP classes would require more staffing (3-4 AP physics classes can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB Physics track, and AP Stats/Calc AB/Calc BC can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB SL/HL track. In essence, you can hire 2 teachers with a Masters Degree instead of 4-5 for AP classes just in Physics and Math alone).
> I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting
The classes that are 400 levels in a Bachelors program in North America should be comparable to those taught in the first year of a Masters program. Depending on how many credits you came into college with, you may have never had enough free slots open to take those interesting classes.
Second, yours is a true logical statement, but I feel if we are talking of our North American education system as a competitive advantage, then we are inherently talking about comparative and relative performance. Which countries have worse educational system? I can name a few, certainly, but if we look at our economic and geopolitical competitors, how does our education actually compare? Not favourably has always been my impression. I'm curious to see any stats to otherwise, and especially when it comes to efficiency I. E. Money invested vs educational results (understanding measuring educational results is a tricky and controversial area)
Does anybody believe that Russian, Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese Indian etc etc etc (pick a meaningful economic competitor) education is worse than American?
The easy-to-remember alternative would be if (a) you got credits for your AP classes for specific college courses and (b) the faculty was not impressed with your results.
There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.
There are two paths in this industry though, work for the factory itself, very cushy job, sometimes unionized. You’re responsible for fixing small things as they come, but overall I don’t think much is expected since you’re one of the few in the factory who can program those machines so if you give a time estimate there’s nobody to argue. You likely stay in the lower end of the pays scale.
There is the consultant route, which can be gruelling, but you make closer to the higher end of the pay scale. Here it’s just a programmer shop, much is expected of you because you’re billing by the hour, also you will travel about 1/3 of your time, because you need to go from factory to factory to fix/install new code or machines.
War is probably the argument by absurdity that disproves the above though.
Total BS.
Lol, that is stupendously overgeneralizing.
Shockingly, same narrative as Russia has been pushing in Ukraine for a long time (except for Kiev rather than DC). Unfortunately, it has worked really well for them and we all know the grim events that followed.
Ever used a computer running an Intel or AMD processor?
Ever worked at a company with Microsoft Windows or enterprise Linux servers (IBM RedHat)?
Ever connected to the internet or a cell tower? They use Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc technology.
Almost all large tech companies in the US and tons of smaller startups have active contracts with the DoD/DHS/DoE or with contractors and suppliers for them.
Congratulations, you're part of the defense industry. Last I checked, most of my coworkers and and peers voted blue, like most other people in the Bay Area.
The core Saudi-Iran national security concerns continue to persist with continued conflicts between both countries partners inside Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. [0][1]
The moment Iran gets the bomb, Saudi and the UAE would readily enter a hot war with Iran. This is a big reason the KSA and UAE are pushing forward defense pacts with Israel [2][3]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/13/china-middle-east-d...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/06/china-saudi-iran-de...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-17/israel-st...
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/21/saudi-mbs-biden-israel-...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-led-coalitio...
[5] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/04/18/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Possible_future_wars
> The U.S. is low on rockets and artillery shells. Congress is funding a huge arms buying spree, but U.S. factories can't produce munitions fast enough. Price gauging is also a concern.
> Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposed a U.S. national security problem. The country can't make rockets and artillery shells nearly as fast as they get used when two major countries go to war. That's triggered an effort to speed up munitions manufacturing in the United States. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.
---
We may be, but at the same time we're realizing that we don't have the capacity for the current rate of use in Ukraine.
ANY system with numerous, complex, and hidden dependencies is fragile and higher risk. Covid, Russia/Ukraine, and now the BRICS/de-dollarization are making many of those dependencies explicit.
At the same time I don't think we should expect any factories coming to the US to provide massive amounts of jobs as they did in the past. Companies that manufactured overseas quite commonly had their administrative divisions either in the US already, or some other country, and as a huge amount of that is remote style work it will remain fungible.
The 'never coming back' mantra was mostrecently the unfortunate cry of the democrats during the 2016 election cycle. A shame because it cemented in the minds of the rural working class that they are unwanted.
We value diversity but then make these claims that our economy doesn't need this.
Almost 10% of the potential electorate is foreign born naturalized citizens like me and my parents. Most of these folks aren’t liberal. They are in a political alliance which is based on white liberals supporting immigration and certain welfare systems, and non-white immigrants looking the other way on cultural issues.
I've attempted to find evidence, and found this study, which indicates that first generation immigrants are actually very close to 4th+ in terms of welfare and taxation : https://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulle...
At the same time, I found other studies showing that second generation immigrants support many left wing social policies, such as gay marriage and multiculturalism, but that recent first generation were slightly less inclined to support gay marriage.
It would seem that on the balance, naturalized immigrants (many of which are considered second generation in that study) are on the left socially but not necessarily economically.
What country are you originally from? I’m a first generation immigrant from South Asia, and in my experience, support for socially liberal policies in these communities is often based on compartmentalization. For example, Hindu Americans may support multiculturalism, insofar as they are religious minorities in a Christian majority country. But 70% also support Modi, who definitely doesn’t have a multicultural vision of India: https://theprint.in/india/49-of-indian-americans-back-pm-mod.... One rule for their own country, different rule for someone else’s country. Similarly, most Muslim Americans support gay marriage. But not in their own families: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....
That’s why liberals like immigrants. When they seek to change American culture, immigrants like my parents think “well let the Americans do what they want.”
This is in fact why the republic is structured as it is, should we pretend people are inherently good and switch to a simple democracy that can vote for its first genocide next week?
It can be useful to think of immigration as a species of (or perhaps just analogous to) the Monte Carlo method [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
From Time magazine's summary of Clinton's remarks — which are spot-on:
<quote>
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.
</quote>
The Time piece includes the transcript of the full remarks.
https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorabl...
* With the usual caveat of assuming that nonconformance to those beliefs doesn't cause harm to other "people" — and on that, Blackmun got it more or less right in Roe.
Isn't that like a losing team saying, "we'd have won the championship if only our star player hadn't gotten hurt"? Or, "I've got mine, so pull up the ladder." Immigration is a fact, and beneficial in so many ways — including, IMHO, a more-liberal electorate. If MAGA types want to shut the gate to try to preserve their political power, they need to offer better reasons than they have so far.
Methinks you have an overly-idealized notion of how democracy works (or at least its U.S. variant).
[0]https://twitter.com/Eric_Alterman/status/1634971075334508544
> The Clampetts bring a moral, unsophisticated, and minimalistic lifestyle to the swanky, sometimes self-obsessed and superficial community. Double entendres and cultural misconceptions are the core of the sitcom's humor. Plots often involve Drysdale's outlandish efforts to keep the Clampetts' money in his bank, and his wife's efforts to rid the neighborhood of "those hillbillies". The family's periodic attempts to return to the mountains are often prompted by Granny's perceiving a slight from one of the "city folk".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beverly_Hillbillies
Or maybe I just spent too long on calls with executives who were trying to find the best place to source "non-value added labor" (the ideal proles are interchangeable cogs, ideally without any benefits) that I forget that they sometimes try to hide these things.
Stupidest thing economists got people to believe. That it's a good idea to export industries like manufacturing that benefit highly from technological progress. While keeping those most subject to Baumol's Cost disease.
Bonus: Prioritizing overhead industries like adshit, finance and insurance.
Interesting to see this migration of manufacturing back to US+ now that Chinese manufacturing costs have caught up to Mexico (which is a MASSIVE compliment btw - a lot of North American high value manufacturing such as in the automotive, medical robotics, and IC space is done in Nuevo León, and China has caught up).
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2003-11-12-33-mexico-s-6729...
http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf
Plasticky goods probably yes, but for electronics assembly, it's already USD 2500 a month for a good experienced assembler.
The supply chain to manufacture generic plastics (most concentrated around Guangzhou and moving to Northern Vietnam) is different from the supply chain needed to manufacture generic pharmaceuticals (mostly concentrated in Himachal, Hyderabad, and central Maharashtra) is different from the supply chain to manufacture medical robotics (concentrated around Tijuana).
Cost of labor isn't the only variable when these decisions are made. Decisions need to take into account business continuity, availability of expertise, availability of suppliers, etc.
This is why low value manufacturing began moving from Guangdong to the Haiphong Delta in the mid 2000s and 2010s, and is now moving to Laos+Cambodia.
And this is why intermediate parts manufacturing (the kind which china is very competitive in) is returning to Mexico - incomes and costs in China have caught up to Mexico, which was the proto-China before the Peso Crisis and China's entry into the WTO. If I'm paying the same in labor in both China and Mexico, I may as well save money in logistics and taxes by reopening my plants in Mexico.
The story of manufacturing returning to ASEAN and India is the same - the factories that South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese companies built in the late 90s/early 2000s moved to China by the mid-2000s, but started either returning to Malaysia (electronics, plastics, automotive), Thailand (electronics, plastics, automotive), and India (plastics, pharmaceuticals) or began opening greenfield such as in Vietnam (electronics, plastics).
The return of manufacturing in South+SE Asia was due to trade wars the Chinese govt initiated against Korea (bought THAAD against NK, PRC didn't approve which sparked a mass boycott against Korean products in China), Japan (Senkakou/Diayou Islands standofd which caused a massive boycott against Japanese products in China), and Taiwan (a major Taiwanese origin KPop singer began pushing for Taiwan Sovereignty which sparked a mass boycott against Taiwan in China) in the 2012-2017 time period.
This led South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to initiate their "Look South" policies to decouple their economics from China. SK and Japan largely succeeded, but Taiwan lagged behind due to internal political acrimony.
And low end is hardly coming back. This has be said many times in the past during brief alignments, then by the time we’ve tooled up the rug is pulled out from under us and a new 3rd world nation is doing it for 1/10th the cost.
This is not easy for me to believe even with the desire for a rosy outlook. Those who know know this was bs before.
There are fewer and fewer of those all the time, though. Manufacturing is now starting to move to Africa because Asia has become more expensive. I don't think there's anywhere left to go after Africa.
If I can get an ePacket from AliExpress for a $0.50 item without paying shipping (and presumably where the shipper didn’t eat the shipping+tariff costs either, those costs not being worth it to make at most $0.50), presumably there’s a way around both of these things.
Also, insofar as your argument would seem to generalize to any country’s domestic imports, this makes it “too strong”, and therefore suspicious as economic theory. There are plenty of markets outside of North America that can be served overland or with not-so-powerful ships from developing-country suppliers. (Africa can sell to itself, and to Europe, and the Middle East. Many South American nations can sell into Brazil. Obviously, you can drive a truck of t-shirts from Thailand or Vietnam straight to China. The Philippines can ship pretty cheaply to Japan and Taiwan. Etc.)
So why do these countries still have domestic factories? Why does Germany still make cars? Why isn’t China outsourcing electronics production to Vietnam? The same arguments should apply to them, even more strongly than it does to America. But we don’t see the same effect.
I remember there was drama[1][2] around it during Trump's administration.
It might not be so ridiculously cheap once 2025 comes around and they've finished phasing in price increases.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union#2019_Ex...
Anyways, long story to say that anecdotally prices haven’t really gone up at all. At one point they started charging VAT on orders (21%), but the switch to private delivery hasn’t seemed to increase prices.
He said that the Garment District is "never coming back." I suspect that this could be extrapolated to many other industries, for the same reason.
The issue is that the infrastructure is gone. Not just the physical and logical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure[0], as well.
Social infrastructure is ignored by everyone, but I think that it's the most important type of infrastructure, and the most difficult to [re]build.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/infrastructure/
I think you can find a few who still do such things in maker spaces, as well, but it only seems to be taken up by people who are already gainfully employed in things that make a lot more than low end manufacturing work.
Rip my favorite shirt? Leave it on the counter with a note and my wife will have it fixed by the end of the day ... Love my wife.
Maybe you mean people who do or used to do it professionally?
How many people do you know that could turn raw fabric into a dress? I have can do the simplest repairs and even used a sewing machine a few times but that’s not particularly useful to a garment factory.
Sewing/dressmaking is a lot like woodworking. Being able to visualize things well in 3D is an asset, but also having good tools helps as well.
It's fairly obvious that people think that these folks can be replaced by software, but they say the same thing about engineers.
Also, entire communities were built around textile mills and transportation/consolidation/intermodals. When we shut down the Garment District, and shipped all the work overseas (and my friend freely admits his company did the same), it destroyed these communities. Lot of skilled labor left, and stopped training the next generation.
And, to answer another question, I don't have to "prove" anything. I was simply telling something that I heard from an extremely relevant source. I'm sure as hell not going to ask my friend to "prove what he said," for the convenience of Internet randos.
Basically, it's the social structure that is built around a community's Raison D'etre, or reason for existence.
This is schools, housing, curriculum (there's a reason that RIT is based in Rochester, for example), as well as oral and learned tradition.
"Tribal knowledge" is a dirty word to efficiency nerds, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and is highly effective, for a reason.
There are entire districts, known for the finest $WHATEVER. Lübeck, Germany, is known for marzipan (I don't really like it, but lots of others do). Bordeaux is known for wines and cooking, Afghanistan has some of the best opium, etc. Some of these are due to climate and soil, but others can be lost to other areas (Sonoma, for instance).
They may have great soil, but they also have great farmers, who have been handing their skills down, for generations, etc.
Once that is gone, there ain't no making new ones.
You haven't made a single compelling argument as to why we cannot also rebuild social infrastructure.
Much of this social capital requires lots of folks being interested in something since they were young and "playing" at it. Play is an important way to learn and understand it. Also I believe social capital requires adults to respect and take interest in the item, as children often take their cues from that.
That said, I wonder if industrial clothing manufacturing requires that much social infrastructure? That industry seems to move very couple of decades to a new country with the cheapest labor.
...and I don't have to.
Have a nice Easter/Passover!
For our own sanity we have to believe we have at least some handle on the reality unfolding around us - but even a cursory examination shows this cannot be true. Our lives are so brief, so localised, when set against the totality of all that is, was, and will be. Instead, as we shape the world, the world shapes us, and it is this emergent collective consciousness that conspires to give us all that we have.
How easily do you think a new team of the same size could come in and restart operations? Most likely it would take a long time and a lot of capital before that company was productive again.
That's what the parent means by social infrastructure: institutional knowledge--all the stuff that isn't written down anywhere.
The NASA-industrial complex that built the Saturn V rocket is largely gone: The engineers, factory workers, etc., who had the necessary knowledge — much of it tacit — are retired or dead.
But even if you fixed that the sub component infrastructure isn’t there. The raw fabrics are simply not available here so even if you did pay labor of 160/$ a day you would still not be able to get raw materials
We should greatly simplify the pipeline to raw textile to end user.
Give people something todo in the evening but passively consume other’s emotional dynamism via TV, YouTube and TikTok.
We make it cheap in fiat dollars to use up a shit ton of resources on enriched middlemen roleplaying American civic life.
It’s gonna cost a lot because their buying power isn’t going to get deflated, that’s for sure. Keep public access to commodities mired in legal obligations of recent history, yet more roleplay in accordance with tradition, which tons of money is put into reminding us we must obey.
We’re such a wacky culture of willful ignorant while proclaiming to be data driven and science minded.
Same with New Balance. Their shoes compete with Nike made in Asia, and are MIUSA.
We've just become addicted to cheap crap shoveled into Walmart and Amazon.
You fail to show what exactly in a social infrastructure inhibits clothing manufacturing or other industries.
One example that may come to mind is a possible cultural refusal of jobs offering low wages - yet there exist societies in which it is difficult to find personnel for menial jobs and yet clothing manufacturing still thrives.
Define “strategic.”
If you mean a vital military asset, remember that clothing factories were an important industry during the wars (including the Revolutionary and Civil wars, in the US).
Military uniforms are critical. Ask any soldier. Just a couple of days ago, a friend that is an ex-marine, was telling me about the marvelous gear he had for winter exercises in Lake Tahoe. Watch any show about the siege at Stalingrad, to see what improper uniforms can mean.
If you mean a vital financial asset, then think about the economic vitality that is created by any industry. All the factories, brokers, marketers, transporters, etc. Lots of busy little ants. The garment industry is huge. My friend is extremely wealthy from a fairly small, undistinguished corner of it.
If we think of “fashion,” as a flighty, will o’ the wisp “hobby,” then consider the amazing amount of money sloshing around the world, from it. I’m not a fashionista, and the company that my friend owns isn’t really a high-fashion outfit. They do high-quality “every[wo]man” clothes, for reasonable costs. If you spent an hour, talking to him about the logistics of his operation, your jaw would hit the floor.
Many folks would argue that alcoholic beverages are an unnecessary, and possibly immoral, product, but, once again, we have an enormous industry around it. I have a couple of other friends and acquaintances that are fairly wealthy, from selling booze. Prohibition taught us a pretty big lesson.
Many folks would say that advertising, mobile games, and “vanity apps” are “not strategic,” but I’ll bet there’s a ton of folks here, that would take issue with that statement.
I sometimes wonder whether that’s long-term truly the case. When I see various advanced aramid weaving processes and techniques designed and built in the US, I wonder if they had to scale a dizzying skills and operational mountain by themselves with the lack of a US domestic textile industry, or whether there isn’t much of a cross-fertilization in the entire journey from R&D through scale-out mass manufacturing.
I’m personally inclined to believe an innovation-oriented, Burkes’ian Connections-style society is only feasible when the Brownian motion of ideas occurs within a dense fabric of interplaying, fractally-complex industrial relationships between a massive number of different industries.
Turns out textiles is sort of the cheapest industry. It’s unique in that it requires capital in the form of machines, but doesn’t require a high skill labor force and the machines tend to be highly portable. So it ends up being an industry to follow if you want to know where the cheapest labor is. Basically what happens with textiles, is that every so often the standard of living in a country goes up, and the factory owners look around to try to save on labor, and hope to find a cheaper place to move to. What’s sort of interesting is that there aren’t many places left that have enough political stability that owners are willing to risk moving equipment to that are cheaper than bangledesh. This was like 10 years ago though, I’d be curious where textiles are located now.
The Bangladeshi textile industry will continues to remain for the foreseeable future, but textile manufacturing has started to return to India now that unskilled manufacturing wages are starting to reach the $150-200/month mark globally. When Bangladeshi and Indian unskilled labor starts going for $300-400/montn it will move to Nepal and then Eastern Africa (or Pakistan+Myanmar if their politics stabilizes).
Read “How Asia Works” for how things actually work in industrialising a country and its stages.
Countries actively choose to seek to develop an industrial base and they start with textiles. Then they evolve their industrial base to a higher income industry, and they let go of textiles over time.
That’s how it happens in an organised industrial development plan. In disorganised industrialisation, you have everything going on at once and you get Brazil.
There are so many layers to this. At $15 per hour minimum wage the math simply does not add-up. People are not willing to pay enough for clothing to be able to support mass US or European manufacturing. That cork was put on that bottle a long time ago. This, BTW, is the case for lots of other sectors, not just clothing.
“ Grupp [ the owner] is publicly committed to Germany as a production location and advertises that all raw materials for the clothing are purchased in EU countries, that all production takes place in Germany, that there has been no short-time work or layoffs for over 30 years, and that Trigema guarantees employees' children a job or apprenticeship.”
Quality is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdIz21P7zE
At a certain point of automation, America’s energy-cost and proximity advantages outweigh its cost of labor and regulation. This tradeoff as a whole occurs against margin, which is why we’re seeing middle manufacturing reshoring.
Shipping things via train or boat is stupidly stupidly cheap, even across the planet both ways.
Totally agree on shipping. There are other benefits to proximity, from lower geopolitical and supply-chain risk to tighter integration with design and the customer (due to enhanced information flow and lower latency).
Unfortunately, human hands are still much cheaper than machines.
I see a fair bit of manufacturing in Chicago, and I don’t see any of these equations changing in the way that this article purports them to
There's a reason why low-end manufacturing is not heavily automated no matter where it occurs - automation would likely be more expensive than using humans.
Also importantly automation tends to be expensive to reconfigure - for stable product lines where the same general processes are in use for years at a time, and product variability is low (see: cars) automation is highly successful. But for product lines that are more fly-by-night (see: most fast fashion) the reconfiguration cost of automation makes it even less practical.
Retraining a group of humans is vastly cheaper and easier than reconfiguring a fully integrated automated assembly line.
Totally agree. Just pointing out how the trade-off is rebalancing the margin at which reshoring makes sense down, and that this is a trend one can expect to continue as industrial robots get better and cheaper.
The real limitation is still programming and training the robots. I'm just entering this field, and its fun but yah it takes a team of expensive talented engineers to do it. Especially if you're automating to a higher degree. The progress with AI has been huge but I'd guess on the order of a decade before its commonplace.
Drive and cam shafts, bearing sleeves, rebuilds and reworks are all still unmatched in quality and remain largely american. Waiting 4 months for pajeet or Mr wong to float the parts over from a scrapyard masquerading as a machine shop versus sending a skilled onsite mechanical maintenance tech to rebuild an excavator blade or bucket sleeve is a no brainer.
Petroleum and mining industries have zero tolerance for a service or product without a stateside relationship
Terrible scripting and faked moments, but still interesting for the good and the bad.
The USD couldnt function as a reserve currency (from the perspective of the US) if the US didnt run a massive trade deficit on purpose (import way more than you export). That's very hard to do if your manufacturing isn't happening outside of the US in countries that you want to be dependent on the USD.
The day manufacturing actually makes a significant comeback to the US is the day that the US lost it's status as the nr 1 world power: the day the USD will stop being a world reserve currency. It would be extremely bad news for the US geo-politically and economically.
I can't say there's anything wrong about it. Do we want people in developed countries toil in sweatshops?
- Tech multinationals are moving out of China fast. Apple is mandating Foxconn to move 50% production lines to India by 2024. And anticipates 50% iPhones out of India bu 2027 https://techwireasia.com/2023/01/india-is-anticipated-to-pro.... Most of the downstream apple supply chains in China have all left for Vietnam. Dell is going to cut all ties to China by 2027 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dell-made-in-china-us-exit. HP and LG is quietly exiting as well. Samsung has already left China a while back.
- China factories are closing left and right, and there's actually a long line of labors going back to countryside to farm, or waiting to go to Vietnam to work. You can see in Chinese citizens videos such as https://www.youtube.com/@ZGQSL https://www.youtube.com/@realchnrecord or English channels like https://www.youtube.com/@chinainsights4458
- According to the office for national statistics in China, for jan/feb of 2023 http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202303/27/t20230327_38464161..., car manufacturing profits is down 41%. non-metal products manufacturing profits is down 39%. chemicals manufacturing profits is down 56%. electronics manufacturing profits is down 71%!! In fact, all businesses have dropped 22% in profit. This is supported by empty malls in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, as well as 50% collapse in real estate prices in Tier 1 cities.
- There are 7 stories high stacked shipping containers in all major ports in China. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c...
1. Apple is moving some of its assembly capacity out of China but the article itself mentions that they’re still dependent on component imports from China.
2. Dell has a plan to move manufacturing of products for the US market out of China. That’s hardly cutting ties.
Similarly Samsung may no longer have assembly plants in China but that says nothing of where the components are manufactured.
Even if you paid for everything other than rent for a low skill worker, America and Canada are priced out of manufacturing based on rent/housing alone.
This is a huge reason why low skill labour can't come back.
Which is ridiculous given how much space they have
I've been saying for a while, if everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
The next frontier will likely be electricity price affecting OPEX. ( it has always been the case but never gotten media attention ) For the rest, read [1] alephnerd's answer.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35502944