Making Central America rich solves the immigration issue that has caused much political divisiveness.
Of course many Americans will likely head south for a better deal:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/28/mexico-city-residents-angered-...
Fastest way to end ESG posturing I suppose. Although ESG concerns don’t typically include “made in America”. It’s not clear to me how that’s be an ESG thing.
The Foxconn fiasco in Wisconsin was a grift on many, many levels - but the labor part of it was never taken care of even before that whole thing blew up.
The reality is, if you were to manufacture something like AirPods (let alone an iPhone) in the US, you would be not only doubling or tripling your labor costs, you’d be getting shittier labor for your money. Not to mention the additional expenses and tariffs of having to recenter all of the material imports and parts into the US from other parts of the world.
I’m all for paying better wages throughout the world, even at the expense of profit margin or raised device prices. It’s a lot harder to justify paying more for lesser-quality labor and to upend logistics because of some false idea that “made in America” means anything.
> It’s a lot harder to justify paying more for lesser-quality labor and to upend logistics because of some false idea that “made in America” means anything.
Well it kind of does right? It's a geostrategic concern where certain components or products need to be made in safe harbors. Instability is bad for business, and the fact that we are discussing this proves the point. Made in America doesn't necessarily have to mean the rah-rah Eagles soaring kind of thing, it can also mean actual national security concerns relative to geopolitical and strategic realities that necesitate hire costs that outweigh other benefits.
Ok, but we have tried. A number of times. And it has failed. Ironically, foreign car companies probably do the best job with doing manufacturing plants in the US right now. But many of the experiments to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially with electronics, have failed. See also the Foxconn disaster in Wisconsin that cost billions but never got off the ground. And the attempts by Apple, Motorola and others to make products here. And the flat-out education crisis that has prevented more chip fabs from even being built stateside.
I’m not saying don’t try. But we have tried. And it has failed. Abs the quality of labor is more expensive and worse and I don’t blame any company for looking elsewhere.
> it can also mean actual national security concerns relative to geopolitical and strategic realities that necesitate hire costs that outweigh other benefits.
Ok, but “assembled in America” wouldn’t solve this. Almost every single part — the semiconductor, the memory, the screens, the screws, the plastic or aluminum housings, the batteries, the battery controllers, are made in China or Vietnam or Taiwan. Using minerals sourced from Africa or South America or whatever. So unless you can move the entire supply chain to this region (and we do not have the labor, skilled or unskilled to do any of that), a supply chain that has been carefully and meticulously setup for maximum tax benefits for all parties involved, what benefit is achieved of having a person in America assemble a phone with an SoC and RAM and an SSD that was still made in Asia? If there is a national security concern, that concern will exist whether the product is assembled in Texas or in Shenzhen. If there is going to be a back door, it’ll come in anyway.
Even the solution of building for fabs here (which we should do and should have started investing in at least a decade ago) is difficult because we don’t have the labor figures to staff this fabs. And those fabs are largely skilled jobs. TSMC and others are offering insane amounts of money to college grads to move to Asia to work in the fabs. Intel is way behind on building new fabs and part of that is labor-related. And although Intel is based in the US, it doesn’t make the chips that run in 99% of the world’s electronics.
I’m not saying there aren’t potential security problems. I’m saying that those will exist regardless of where stuff is assembled and that globally, being able to upend the whole state of supply chain and logistics away from Asia and into another geographic area is something that would take a decade on the low-end and the parts of the world that would be well-equipped to take on that sort of load (Vietnam, India, some parts of Central and South America), have their own major geopolitical struggles.
It’s a difficult problem to solve and we should absolutely be less reliant on one region for all of our manufacturing, but we need to acknowledge this isn’t a problem that can be solved quickly or that frankly, the US is well-positioned to solve at all.
The latter part of your statement is very poorly understood by most people on HN and generally the US. Having toured overseas factories that make goods my company contract manufactures... there is no way American workers at 3x the wages could possibly compete in terms of productivity. You're absolutely right, and while I somewhat believed this to be plausible before I visited, after actually seeing how products were made over there in "skilled labor" factories, it's truly insane.
Nobody in the US makes SMD parts anymore. It's all higher up in the value chain. But those parts, even if they're commodities, still need to be made. India is going for it which is why Apple is diversifying there instead of the US.
The US was never a bluetooth headphone manufacturing powerhouse. We make other stuff, and we should continue to make the high value goods we are specialized in, not consumer trinkets for low wages. Value added in manufacturing is far more important, and building headphones doesn't do that. Leave that to some other place.
I suspect that you have been listening to too much news entertainment. The US manufacturing industry is as big as it's ever been in terms of real output (not jobs). There has more than a trillion dollars in expansion since the pre-covid peak in manufacturing. The US is #2 in the world for gross manufacturing output, and in the top 10 for value add.
Because:
>> high volume low price manufacturing
Is not possible in the US or EU.
Next economic crisis here we come.
That's like saying computers are going to destroy a lot of jobs and cause an economic crisis, when in reality the opposite happened
Automation tended to kill blue collar jobs, and if you don't have job even cheap is expensive.
The next wave of automation will kill the higher value jobs too.
It wasn't necessary. You're conflating necessary with desirable.
The gap between the two is an increased profit margin, which is desirable for most corporations.
Further, the CCP is becoming both dramatically more hostile to business in general and more dangerous as a foe to liberal, democratic nations (including Taiwan most prominently), while simultaneously the financial cost of operating in China has continued to climb by the year (which is a trend that is unlikely to significantly reverse). The China discount for offshoring isn't nearly what it was 15-20 years ago.
The disaster that Russia is causing in Europe is a small hint of what China might cause in Asia in the coming decades. Russia's perceived capabilities weren't nearly what the West thought they were; China's military capabilities are more likely to exceed our expectations (in recent history China has more commonly followed the path of hide your strength and bide your time, as opposed to Russia's vacuous boasting), and it's backed up by a gigantic economy with manufacturing that Russia could only dream of.
I agree with you that automation doesn’t necessarily lead to a loss of jobs. It can create opportunities for whole new skills and job types.
The struggle has been, especially in the US, that we haven’t then properly prepared or skilled people to do the new wave of jobs that can’t be automated.
I always think of this article [1] from January 2017:
> When the German engineering company Siemens Energy opened a gas turbine production plant in Charlotte, N.C., some 10,000 people showed up at a job fair for 800 positions. But fewer than 15 percent of the applicants were able to pass a reading, writing and math screening test geared toward a ninth-grade education.
So out of 10,000 applicants, less than 1500 were even qualified to interview for a job, of which they only had 800 positions. That’s a problem but the solution isn’t to shun automation.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-...
while doers do, haters hate. It is complex.
This feels like people saying not to build a factory in the US because of Proud Boys, Antifa and MS13.
#2 Most drugs can just as easily be produced domestically by pharmaceutical companies.
#3 Of the drugs that can't be produced domestically, the Mexican cartels are just middlemen that can be cut out entirely. There's no reason drugs from Colombia need to transit Mexico.
#4 If you're worried about Colombian cartels - see points #1 and #2.
We already went through this with alcohol and organized crime.
You might want to reread his post or take reading comprehension lessons.
You don't see a lot of illegal speakeasies and moonshine stills around, do you?
I think coffee/tobacco is probably a good example of what can be achieved with legalizing drugs. It might be the path to it is a bit slow as there's a transition, but I don't see why other drugs couldn't end up similarly to coffee.
Heck, you could argue it for everything even. Why do fruits and vegetables farms don't feel like going the illegal production route?
I’ve never illegally bought drugs but I know people that have. I would not be comfortable doing it, but plenty of people are. Drugs, especially legal ones, are expensive.
I’ve never illegally bought fruit and I do not know anyone who has. I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable doing it. Legal fruit is not expensive.
Assuming we agree they aren't, why is that?
Or in other words, if we're saying it's because drugs are still too expensive and somehow illegal production can compete better on price, why is that?
Especially with weed, the process is so similar to any other commodity agricultural process.
> I would not be comfortable doing it, but plenty of people are
This seems transitory to me. If we take this separate to the price argument, I think it must be restricted to people that were already doing so prior to legal alternatives. Again, tossing the price factor out, I would suspect all new and future consumer would go to a legal source for purchase.
That said, the article talked about production, not wholesale. So it's not clear from the article that illegal sellers have risen, it's possible your street dealers have been impacted, but that legal vendors or byproduct makers are purchasing from the illegal supply chain still.
Cheap labor. Low threshold for consumers to pay a lot, potentially government subsidy.
Drugs have way higher testing requirements. In California cannabis has intense testing and labeling requirements. Fruit doesn’t seem to. Also taxes of course.
> would suspect all new and future consumer would go to a legal source for purchase.
Oh absolutely agree. I think there’s a cohort that would way the drugs but not be willing to engage in illegal activity.
Maintaining stores and supply chains and not a guy with a burner phone and a beat up Toyota driving to a parking lot probably raises costs too (compared to illegal drugs, not fruit obviously). Same at every step of supply chain. The costs are likely high for compliance etc.
"New Research Confirms that Migration Rises as the Poorest Countries Get Richer"
"As GDP per capita rises, so do emigration rates. This relationship slows after roughly US$5,000, and reverses after roughly $10,000"
https://www.cgdev.org/article/new-research-confirms-migratio...