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dukeofdoom

On some bright news. Thanks to declining American manufacturing (thanks China) The Detroit River has bounced back.

Giant 'river monster' fish found in Detroit River may be over 100 years old

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/sturgeon-fish-intl-scli/in...

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If you are ever in Portland (OR), it's worth a trip to the Bonneville Dam and Fish Hatchery to see Herman the Sturgeon:

https://www.dfw.state.or.us/resources/visitors/bonneville_ha...

Interestingly, the paddlefish is a relative of the sturgeon. Both are farmed for caviar..

> Thanks to declining American manufacturing (thanks China)

Spoken like someone who doesn't work in manufacturing...

(I'm not American so don't really have a horse to grind or axe in this race, but) why would an American working in manufacturing want American manufacturing to decline? Or do I misunderstand?

Somewhere in this chain, someone was being sarcastic.

Specifically, not all manufacturing processes have moved to China as I understand it, just the ones that tend to be made more problemmatic due to labor cost/environmental controls as far as I'm aware. I'm a bit out of date on my scratching the surface of that industry, but my understanding was things like NAFTA and regulatory requirements tend to lead to an absolute minimum level of parts (I'm bundling in resource extraction and processing into fabrication, which technically, I shouldn't be, that's supply chain management from the manufacturer's perspective) fabrication being done in the U.S., with the main focus being final assembly (read: relatively unskilled or labor conducive to being automated). The rest below a particular fraction needed to claim "made in USA", and thus avoiding some sort of import duty liability or some such. Some places like Boeing make sweetheart deals with suppliers internationally to gain political capital and better treatment incentivewise; other places just run after the cheapest source they can get away with (without robust attention paid to QC from the horror stories I've heard).

There's a bit of an inflection point, because some fabrication/production has proved problemmatic beimg outsourced. For instance, turbine blades for jet engine manufacturing fabricated from certain lots of Chinese steel have had failure traced back to elevated sulfur levels in the atmosphere in China that weren't accomodated for in the original planning. That's just one example I know of.

Take this with a grain of salt. It's a hobby of mine, not my primary day-to-day, so if I'm talking out my rear, I'd love to be corrected by someone inside the industry. I'm a logistics nerd deep down, so I love drinking in these types of arcane quirks of reality vs. in theory.

From an economic perspective the biggest losers of the dollar standard is manufacturing and the biggest winners is wall street. Wall Street had secular growth and manufacturing had secular decline from the adoption of the petrodollar and the dollar becoming the reserve currency of the world. Similar changes happened in Europe when the pound became a reserve currency (growth of Germany etc in manufacturing) and then the issues that surrounded relative decline in the City as a financial center till the Big Bang in the 1980s.

Reserve currencies create huge beneficiaries and losers (especially in “tradables” like manufacturing).

Different arguments on this subject:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-bring-back-u-s-manufacturing...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dollar-and-the-future-of-u-...

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