Hacker News Reader

Comment by gurumeditations | Hacker News Reader

American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.

There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.

View on HN

> A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.

So like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Tencor? The global leaders in semiconductor machinery are predominantly American, with honorable mentions for the Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Dainippon Screen) and Dutch (ASML, ASMI).

Most of the equipment is made stateside, e.g. Applied Materials manufacturing is in Austin.

> America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.

The "America is doomed!" rhetoric is older than the hills and, while we are in decline as the global hegemon, economically we are still as vibrant as ever. Last year KLA Tencor opened a second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan... not in China.

It may be a bit overblown but it’s not wrong. We should invest in the future of engineering. I doubt you’d say that statement is controversial.

The second sentence has nothing to do with the first and is universally true. Everyone, regardless of the state they are currently in or their current trajectory, should invest in the future of engineering.

The first statement is an extraordinary claim for which extraordinary proof is required (especially as a direct response to a post explaining how the opposite is true).

> There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids,

Working on factory production lines does not require a bachelor's degree. Germany isn't assembling cheap power tools either. One reason is that labor costs are too high, and requiring low skill jobs have a college degree does the opposite of helping that.

> let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.

This isn't true. USA has some of the best EEs and programmers in the world.

> This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.

TSMC is sending recent American college graduates to Taiwan for 12-18 months of internship/training, in preparation for work at the TSMC fab in Phoenix, AZ, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29676073

That’s pretty short for actual education on those kinds of processes, sounds like they have found the raw engineering talent they need at US universities. They then send them for a short stint in Taiwan to learn “the TSMC way” and then send them back.

I don't know if that's a fair assessment, really. While it's not economically viable to pay American wages to put drills together, we do make things like jet engines and CNC machines here. The complexity has to be high enough to justify the high cost of labor. If you can build something from raw materials in your garage over the weekend, then it's probably not worth paying someone's mortgage, health insurance, and 401(k) to get it done.

Health insurance. Which manufacturing companies in other countries don't have to deal with.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could buy kits from Milwaukee and assemble them ourselves?

> A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.

You mean like how Standard's US factories makes automotive parts? https://youtu.be/JhqaaYNgCO4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com