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Comment by jackyinger | Hacker News Reader

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now?

My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full of lazy knuckleheads (and believe me I’ve got the stories to back this assertion).

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> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs.

There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is awesome, the pay and conditions are generally better and at their best can be incredibly intellectually stimulating. My Dad started out working in an industrial plant but pretty quickly ended up going to college to get a computer science degree because that job sounded way better than what he was doing...and that was way back when those kind of factory jobs were still a reasonable way to make a living.

I can somewhat agree with the Dirty Jobs philosophy that non-college careers can be valuable and the right choice for some people, and the world after all still needs crab fishermen. But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree.

> But it's really easy to slip into overly romanticizing those careers even to the point of suggesting they're better than getting a degree.

Well they are better in the sense that you can’t really outsource HVAC or plumbing work to India. The downside of course, and the reason that so many Americans fell out of love with the trades, is that we’re extremely eager to import foreign labor, legally or otherwise, to suppress wages.

The flaw is in putting these things out as alternatives to each other.

The future of manufacturing is in automation, but in order to do automation you need machinists and computer science. You need people who can design a machine that makes other machines, which is a physical device that operates under the direction of software.

Getting people to learn to code instead of learning how to build machines doesn't get it.

I agree you need a variety of skills and jobs, but "learning how to build machines" is just as white collar as learning to code. Particularly since the functionality of any modern machine involves just as much code as it does mechanical engineering. Don't get me wrong, mechanical and software engineering are completely different fields and we need both of them. But they're both unarguably college educated white collar jobs.

Yes and no.

Writing code is sitting in an office and typing stuff into a computer, all the way into production.

Making machines is a physical thing. You can do a lot of the design on a computer, but to do even that you need a handle on the physical reality of the thing that benefits from experience with the physical object. If you want a prototype it's something you build with your hands rather than something you run in a container on your commodity PC.

It's not just a matter of whether you call it white collar or blue collar. It's that the physical work is considered dirty and vulgar, even though it's something valuable and important.

Haas automation started in the early 1980s and was primarily successful because it leveraged the (new at the time) microprocessors to drive machine tools. I was there in the early 1990s, right when this silly article said that machine tool manufacturing was leaving the US.

There was lots of "making stuff" but the value of the company was largely the "office work" that happened off the shop floor, in the sales, support, development, etc. I'm not sure but I'd guess that 2/3rds of the employees were "white collar" jobs, even at a company that made machine tools

Exactly the point -- the dichotomy of "white collar jobs" and "manufacturing jobs" is a false one.

It was at least partially artificial. The GI Bill post WWII introduced millions of families who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college the ability to go to college. This set off two cycles, one of which is now those folks who went to college on the GI bill wanted to encourage their kids to go to college, which is well and good, but it also showed the economic value to a bigger mass of the country of going to college. Now that made its way into government policy as a result, so the government took steps in the 1970s and 1980s in particular to expand collegiate enrollment, which drove up the price of college which lead to Clinton signing a bill that gave us the student loan system as it exists today, which then fed even more enrollment as a matter of policy, but now universities too were in on the game, as that money is guaranteed which lead to bigger recruitment drives.

I'm giving a very high level synopsis here, but the snowball effect wouldn't have happened without the policy interventions by the government, in particular the student loan shenanigans

Artificial here meaning some men were able to afford it. Because only natural state is them wanting it, but being unable to get it.

In the UK and Australia there were huge incentives. I recall reading that the peak of the damage to the UK was in the late 90s early 00s when all the older tradesmen began retiring and basic shit like plumbing because scarce. Largely blamed on thatcher.

I'm curious if you have any links you can share on this topic. Thanks.

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs.

If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

Exactly. This is the problem with throwing all the money into “hot spots”. Growing the heck out of a few hot industries virtually ensures established ones will decline.

The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches.

They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.

[flagged]

The factories of today are nothing like the 1980s factories this administration thinks they are going to bring back. Go to FRED or any other economic data site and plot manufacturing output and manufacturing employment on the same chart. The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year. Meanwhile, manufacturing employment is around its all time low and declines every year.

"manufacturing as a service", however that may look, might be more of a fit for the modern economy...unless we really regress back to 1930

MaaS is definitely a thing and has been for a long time. Contract manufacturers abound in the US.

> The US manufactures more today than we ever have in history and it grows every year.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG

> Is that what you dream of for your children?

This feels like a justification for slavery and slave-like conditions. I assure you the conditions and salary in most manufacturing countries would cause riots in the US; but as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, who cares what happens to their children.

Imagine if I used this argument for 1850s plantations (the conditions in many factories not being much better). “Do you really want your children working on the plantations? Is this what you dream of for your children?”

The answer is, of course not; but that sure as hell doesn’t justify enslaving other people (whether literally in chattel; or implicitly with meager wages, long working hours, no other opportunities, and no time to learn alternative skills).

Two things can be true:

- you shouldn't want that for your children

- you shouldn't want that for their children

In a geopolitical context, those are separate discussions. It's not really fair to accuse someone of promoting slavery when they did no such thing.

Yep. People with this wild nostalgia for manufacturing are missing what actually produced those lifestyles. It wasn't the factory.

Pundits are going on fox news and saying that having a job where you primarily use a computer turns you into a woman. These people are not coherant.

The thing is you don't need to run a grueling factory that runs you ragged in the modern day unless you are trying to undercut the poorest economies in the world. People don't want manufacturing back here to try and dominate the world in manufacturing capabilities, they just want some minimal amount of local capacity for it, and for the people that do it to make a decent wage and have basic safety standards. Its not like the US is struggling to barely survive and couldn't afford the cost. But in order to do that and not have it become some grift by the owners from the government there would need to be hard limits on how much owners and investors can extract from it, which is straight up anti-capitalist and of course capitalists are vehemently opposed to any industry or business not operating under capitalist principles, doubly so if it is a state-owned business.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surve...

I would argue they know..

Fred Flintstone wasn’t just looking to work behind a desk though. He was looking for a promotion to management. In those days a desk job meant that you had some authority. You had worked your way through the ranks and put in your time. It was a sign that the company values you and you would be taken care of. Gold wristwatches and all that.

Plenty of people still work in the data entry mines, even though that’s a desk job. In a lot of ways being an Uber driver about as cushy as a desk job in terms of physical demand on the body, but it certainly isn’t a status position.

I don't understand why everyone on HN is so enamored with beautiful looking Apple hardware but doesn't understand that this stuff is made by people and machines that are also made by people.

At the end of the day if you want quality products and innovation you need to pay for it.

Outsourcing this ability to other countries saves you money up front but it costs you the institutional knowledge to do it at home and all the costs that losing this entails.

Because nobody would buy 3000$ apple products and we wouldn't be even discussing them. Apple got premium price, but not because they manufacture in US, they just have much higher profit margins, hence the valuation of company.Every buyer approved this with their wallets, knowingly or not

People do buy $3000 Apple products. You're going to be more specific and talk about price difference as a percent not an absolute value to make your point.

But let's be charitable and assume that you're saying that the price of Apple products will double if the cases are machines in America -- I don't think that would be the outcome.

What percent of the cost of an apple product goes to towards the aluminum case? What percent of that cost is the material, what percent of that cost is the milling machine, and what percent is the labour?

It's not foolish to want to maximize manufacturing capacity in America and minimize it in China. If you want to be able to beat China in an armed conflict then manufacturing is what will do it -- not software development.

The price of Apple products in the US is literally doubling as of today, so we get to test this hypothesis in real time.

My comment was regarding the manufacturing of the aluminum cases of Apple products, not the manufacturing of the entire device.

The cases are probably the easiest parts to potentially remake in America, that's mostly machining that can be automated pretty easily we know how to run CNC in the US still, but it's only a tiny part of the picture. What about the rest of the phone in particular assembly? the massive chip and display manufacturing?

I'm talking about cases be cause this is a these about 'the decline of the U.S. Machine Tool industry...'

A more realistic estimate would be 10X to allow for the cost of factory investment, raw material refinement and processing, and assembly by local semi-skilled workers.

Computers used to be made like this. The hardware cost the modern equivalent of tens of thousands to tens of millions, partly because the assembly workers were well-managed, well-trained, and well-paid. This was DEC's business model, and it worked well for a couple of decades.

Offshoring from the early 80s on allowed US corporates to double dip and explode their margins. Local workers were laid off and replaced with cheaper offshore workers, wages for most jobs were cut in real terms (with a few critical exceptions, like software dev), but the people who did have jobs had access to much cheaper imports.

Property became catastrophically expensive, but other sectors, including consumer goods, electronics, non-premium clothes, and domestic essentials like furniture became much cheaper in real terms - which took the sting out of the loss of the better-paying jobs.

You can't reverse that overnight without catastrophic damage, because prices will explode but wages will still be depressed.

You will be making domestic commodity products that have no market.

Reindustrialisation is a fantasy. You can't bring the factories back without reinventing the economy from the ground up and making all of the parts fit together in new ways.

That would take decades, and a level of strategic insight the US is completely unable to imagine for political reasons.

lots of people bought $3000 apple products more than 20 years ago:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/08/24Apple-Offers-Aggres...

more than $5000 in 2025 dollars!

Have much in the way of sales numbers for that? Smells like a halo product more than a major sales mover.

I don't -- Just my recollections FWIW. I remember when they were hot. I remember seeing them around. I still have mine!

My counterpoint would be the thousands of dollars computers people bought 20+ years ago that had not even a fraction of the utility of an iphone. My first computer cost me $2000 and it was obsolete in like 2-3 years. My cell phone that cost $100 that I bought 6 years ago still runs brand new programs fine.

There are an enormous number of people who would love to make $50k working a lathe in the US. Enormous amounts of them. But they can't. They're working at Walmart making minimum wage.

No one will take the risk of educating them to work the lathe.

Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry.

The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA.

And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning.

No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure.

Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.

The modern equivalent of working a lathe is running a CNC machine tool, and I would bet that if we suddenly killed off the tech industry and ramped up CNC machining in the US, the CNC machine industry would have far more former SWEs than former "lathe workers".

learning to operate a lathe for alot of the low-precision work that goes on for mass market production is really pretty easy. but those job are _never_ coming back, anywhere except places that lack sufficient capital or prototyping/research environments. you can program a swiss machine to take in stock from behind the head and dump completely finished parts in a tray at the bottom. depending on parts complexity you can easily vomit out 1000s of parts per hour with a single unskilled operator dumping out trays and loading new stock across several machines.

Yup, people have this romanticized 1950s view of a "factory" full of tools that they last saw in high school metal shop, employing middle-to-working-class people to run those tools making widgets by hand, and that simply isn't what a factory is in 2025. It's more often than not one poorly paid dude emptying out trays from a fully-robotic line.

If you try to raise the number of Americans that make $50k by shrinking the total domestic output, it's going to be laid-off mechanical engineers in those new jobs, not former sales associates, themselves now unemployed due to reduced retail traffic.

Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

This is the eternal evolution of individual labor.

But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution?

Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television!

It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society as labor gets replaced by automation, and even knowledge work gets replaced by machine learning.

But I still think great minds (and also the minds that get put in charge) should look forward and try to build a good future, rather than cling to a dying past.

>This is the eternal evolution of individual labor.

This argument of "fuck others' jobs, I got mine" works if you're OK with having a handful of prosperous cities full of multinational conglomerates with smart/educated people in the service industry, surrounded by slums of poverty, crime and homeless people on drugs who can mug you, as their industry blue collar jobs got offshored and they couldn't "just learn to code bro".

There's a reason countries with a solid industrial base like Germany are livable almost everywhere with a lot less income inequality, poverty and homelessness, and try to hold on to these jobs.

UK's deindustrialization is also another point on the map. Great if you work at some bank/tech company in London, not so great otherwise.

>Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing.

No one's arguing about going back to the stone age. But having moved nearly all manufacturing to Asia was a mistake, not only we lost jobs but also scale, competencies and bargaining power.

Remember the covid pandemic when you couldn't get masks initially because most were made in China and they were hoarding them all for themselves? What then? Use stonks as masks?

It would take you 10+ years of skilled labor savings in any case to afford a homestead capable of sufficient farming and hunting output to sustain a family. Because you are competing not with homesteaders but rich professionals or pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city.

Even if all of US became homesteaders this would likely still be at least a little bit the case, because foreigners would simply buy the property instead. Take a look at places like Spain, Portugal, etc and the high land prices are based on global competition not vs the low local wages.

> pensioned .gov retirees who want some escape from the pollution/crime/cramp of the city.

What is this stereotype? Government retirees aren't some elite wealthy class. IIRC government pensions haven't been anything to write home about since 1982 (or something), and are roughly equivalent to private sector retirement benefits.

Might just be regional. An insanely high proportion of my rural neighbors are people who did 20 years in the military and started receiving benefits around age 40 and were able to use those benefits to supplement a homestead. How many private sector people drew a pension at 40 and then double dipped? I'm not damning them for it, it's not like many in the military didn't work hard for that money, but it's incredibly difficult for a working class 40 year old these days to fuck off into a rural area and buy a homestead with rural salaries without something functioning as a substitute to that backing it up.

In any case in my rural homestead region there are mainly three classes

1) .gov pensioners 2) successful professionals 3) inherited property

The key to government pensions here I think is that they get benefits early enough in life that they are young enough to build and live a homestead life. At age 65+ you might be able to maintain an established property but buying something affordable (read: rough or vacant land) out and getting it up and running would be pretty rough for most at that age.

> How many private sector people drew a pension at 40 and then double dipped?

Military is a unique subset of government, and IIRC most people who join don't stay long enough to draw a pension.

When you said "government retirees," that brings to mind the civil service, which I believe is larger.

But it isn't just the military. There are government civil servants that draw pension at 20/25 years as well such as FBI agents. Makes more sense to say .gov rather than just the military.

If I had to guess, it has more to do with the type of person who is willing to save diligently for decades. Government work (at least until the last few months) tended to be lower paying but steadier. The type of risk-averse person who takes a government job is also more likely to save over time, taking advantage of compounding. Just correlated, in other words.

> But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution?

It's not "backwards in time." The need for machine tools didn't disappear. There's an essential machine-tool industry that the US depends on very much, it's just in places like China.

The problem is that the US is already behind in innovation on that field, and better machines produce better machines. So it’s “backwards in time” because you have to start manufacturing the shovel to start digging when your competitor has a backhoe. And even if you could somehow steal the design and build it you don’t have anyone who could operate it.

> The problem is that the US is already behind in innovation on that field, and better machines produce better machines.

That's not a permanent situation, proven by the fact that the countries that are now ahead in machine tools used to be behind the US in machine tools.

> So it’s “backwards in time” because you have to start manufacturing the shovel to start digging when your competitor has a backhoe. And even if you could somehow steal the design and build it you don’t have anyone who could operate it.

As aptly demonstrated by China: it's a lot easier to catch up than to develop at the cutting edge. All you need is a little bit of investment and will.

And personally, I think the government should conscript some crypto and adtech startups (and their employees) to build up an operator pool, because they're obnoxious and those people should be doing something useful instead.

>All you need is a little bit of investment and will.

We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.

> We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.

Oh, the fallacy that grinding harder and longer leads to more and better results. Do you think you do your best work when you're exhausted?

Also, 996 is more typical in China, hated, and I believe illegal too. That kind of thing is one of the (many) reasons their population is starting to collapse.

Deepseek begs to differ?

> Deepseek begs to differ?

Please not a non-sequitur like "some Chinese grind, so here's some thing from China, therefore grinding is good."

Show me the reason for Deepseek's success is people grinding for longer hours.

I could sit in the office that long if I had to and I would appear productive. However I need several hours of mindless meetings everyday as is because my brain can't engineer for 40 hours a week.

okay then tax and redistribute, don’t try to pick winners and do stupid industrial policy that makes everyone poorer.

Firstly, the number of people who cannot be a software engineer is not actually very large. There are a lot of really shitty software engineers out there. Unlike being a doctor or a lawyer, you don't have to pass a test that requires actually knowing material, you simply have to be able to convince someone to give you a job banging on a keyboard, which does not necessarily require one to have technical skills.

Not everyone can be a good software engineer, sure.

Among people who cannot be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a good software engineer, there are also very few people who can be a good machinist.

Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.

Bolting a bumper to a Ford is different from manufacturing the metal shape of the bumper itself, and a competent machinist is the person who both figures out how to turn a piece of raw metal into a piece of bumper-shaped metal, and also the person who figures out how to do so in an easily replicable way.

>There are a lot of really shitty software engineers out there.

That doesn't mean you'll get hired as one. Especially in the current market. There's a lot of shitty politicians out there, that doesn't mean anyone can just become a politician.

>Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.

Every job has some critical thinking aspects to it, even landscaping and construction workers, crane operators, truck drivers, etc that doesn't mean everyone wants to code, or can be a productive programmer.

I have plenty of friends form technical university, mostly mechanical engineers, who did everything they could to avoid getting into SW development because they just don't like it and they weren't good at it.

Until they lose a finger and can't do it anymore.

> Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. [...] For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

You're taking a swipe at factory workers, and elevating Software Engineers to the intellectual strata of doctors?

Most working-age adults can be a contemporary Software Engineer (even without LLM cheating).

For that matter, I could teach bright 12 year-olds to apply the technical skills that your average Software Engineer does (though that would be mean, and stunt their development).

You'd better pray that your doctor is much more capable and professional than your typical Software Engineer.

The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage.

It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

Currency rates are also a factor.

https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump...

> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”

https://archive.is/uvL5w

> The deepening trade war is raising speculation in financial markets that China may resort to aggressively devaluing the yuan against the dollar in a break of their policy of pursuing a stable currency.. A weaker yuan would make Chinese goods cheaper abroad, offsetting some of Trump’s tariff impact, and make it costlier for local consumers to buy US goods.. One big consideration for Beijing is the risk of foreign investors pulling their money out of China if the currency sinks.

I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

>I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

So why the broad spectrum tariffs? Why are we blowing up our trade relationships with Canada, the EU, UK, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and many many other countries who have been good, honest trade partners?

This isn't about China's sins in economic dealings. If it was, the tariffs would only target China and there is an explicit case to be made that indeed, we should be putting tariffs on Chinese made goods, the same pattern may hold true for India as well FWIW.

But our other trading partners have been very good to the American economy, and we blew that up overnight.

We left a vacuum for another economic force to fill now. All the nations we put tariffs on, not only will the tariff US made goods, they're now overnight going to be looking for a place to transact hundreds of billions worth of units, and China can now offer sweetheart deals to absorb that trade, and that weakens the US (and as consequence, western) alliances.

> I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

If if comes to pass that the 21st century is a Chinese one, it will be this long con that launched the whole thing: "We'll manufacture anything you want real cheap, just show us how to do it."

The U.S. outsourcing it's manufacturing to China is likely to go down as one of the biggest economic and political self-owns of the modern era.

No, the biggest self own is going on now. Even if you plan to bring manufacturing back, it was possible without shooting yourself into own foot.

And without making the rest of the world pissed

Even though I 100% agree with you, the one piece of merit here is that the world is pissed shows that they recognize they lost something. They would not care if we were merely shooting ourselves.

Now if they are pissed and totally lost trust then we are totally fucked. But if they are pissed and willing to negotiate then maybe something can be salvaged out of this. It would be nice to have 20th century hong kong esque zero duty free trade between the US, EU, Mercosur, Canada, and all the other friendly nations as a result of us all learning how dumb this is. But I won't hold my breath.

> The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage.

That's just a myopic regurgitation of free trade dogma that misses much. For instance: 1) the previous sock of American widget makers didn't become engineers, they got laid off with poor prospects; 2) it assumes a friendly free trade regime, which is unrealistic oversimplification; and perhaps 3) that "comparative advantage" is something real and not just lower living standards and laxer environmental and labor regulations.

> It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

The part you're baffled about is only baffling if you're ignorant of everything except free trade dogma.

The real baffling thing is why little to no distinction was made between allies and adversaries, low wage countries and high wage countries.

If you, as a machinist, can get to live in a lower-price region, go hunting and fishing or just traipsing through the woods instead of doing that next release drive, build or repair your own HVAC or PV array + storage and get to raise a family while doing so I'd say that's worth quite a bit of that discrepancy in salary. You'll get the added advantage of seeing your handiwork being used and lasting for years to decades instead of being replaced in a few months or never used at all.

Replace 'machinist' with a choice of other hands-on 'blue collar' professions for the same effect. Even better is to replace it with a profession which allows you to combine manual dexterity with software development.

Or do as I did and buy a farm which allows you to flex all your muscles - mental as well as physical.

I know laborers that make well above most “software monkeys” and don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make!

> don’t even get me started with how much heavy machine operators make!

$40 an hour in Austin Tx, a city with construction going on in every corner.

>$40 an hour in Austin Tx

Less than I make currently, and I don't live in one of the S/HCOL cities either.

And I know many laborers that work for wages that most "software monkeys" wouldn't do just to shit in a pot. If you are in software development you are far more likely to live in a more expensive area of the nation where trades have a much higher than average value. In places that aren't employing many software developers trades don't pay nearly as well.

No you wouldn’t. The trades will take your body. I work with field techs who are close to 50 and they tell me their bodies are not going to make it past 50 and not even close to retirement age.

Office work is so easy on the body compared to almost any job.

And techies face the prospect of becoming obsolete, with ageism rife.

Get out of sf and old techies are appricated. Of course many go into management but there are a few who retire and are doing just fine.

some places like it when we remind the kids that this new thing has been around several times before under different names.

I’m not in the SF or start up bubble so this is not really a concern for me.

To put a finer point on it: How's basing the US economy on advertising looking?

I went to college and eventually got a PhD in physics. I've built specialized machine tools. Yet I'm considered a schmuck because I didn't go into software development, and the software developers are considered schmucks if they didn't go into financial services or advertising. And none of that was about emphasizing college. Becoming a programmer doesn't require college.

And lazy knucklehead stories are part of the workforce culture in virtually every occupation and industry. I'm sure I'm the lazy knucklehead in some of those stories.

The west coast is in for a rude awakening when they realize that they can't win a war against china with code, and they don't have jobs because they don't have chips to run their advertising code on anymore because China took Taiwan.

Manufacturing is what builds up strong economies and it's what saves lives by preventing wars as long as possible and minimizes casualties on your side in war by fielding troops with more/better equipment.

Hard to imagine rebuilding a manufacturing economy while your scientists are fleeing the country.

If only the US had allies. But I guess it's hard to count on them when you're actively threading invasion!

A war with China won't be won with manufacturing. It'll be won by having allies.

If it actually comes to pass, you'll probably declined fighting the hot war, and opt for a cold one. But without allies it'll get real cold.

You can have all the allies in the world but if none of you have weapons and the means to make them you won't win.

Despite the popular narrative Europe still has a sizeable arms industry.

What Europe doesn't is the ability to quickly agree on anything. But when America calls consensus can be reached quickly.

At times 40% of the contingent in Afghanistan were allies.

Does America or Europe have the industrial capacity to produce enough anti-ship missiles to stop China from taking Taiwan?

Does America or Europe have the industrial capacity to produce enough ships to stop China from taking Taiwan?

The same allies that buy Russian energy? Yes such strategic masterminds.

If that is the strongest attack yoi have, you don't have much. At least they are not allying themselves with Russia, unlike America.

Canada could have been an ally too ... now it mostly hates USA.

Sucks that Trump is considering trying to repeal the CHIPS act then huh

And this isn’t going to change overnight. You know what I’m talking about.

Most of the good machinist knowledge in America has retired, if not already literally died.

And mechanical engineers in the US largely don’t have the hands on skill to really understand making these machines. Not that that can’t gain it.

But to achieve truly high precision (the pinnacle from which all other percussion is derived) is an extreme art form. CNC doesn’t come close. The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping: https://www.krcmachinetoolsolutions.com/machine-tool-scrapin...

Things used to be made better because people cared about making a good product and took pride in their work. This is especially true in the machine tool industry: don’t try to make it in the field if you don’t really legitimately care.

things used to be made better because of baumol cost disease and far fewer people having those things.

> The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping

No, it absolutely is not. Optics machine tools make things flat and accurate within a few atoms. Cheap surface plates are more precise than any human could hope to achieve by hand.

Hand scraping is remarkable- skill can get you ~micron cutting depth. It would be totally obsolete except that the rough crosshatch pattern it creates is useful for retaining oil. Modern tools, especially the most precise tools, are not hand scraped. Cheap clone knee mills are hand scraped. Single-point diamond cutters run on air bearings with no oil, because the oil gap in plain ways is too large.

Hand scraping is thoroughly limited by the viscosity of the marking fluid. You identify high spots by painting a flat blue and rubbing it on another flat part. If the whole surface rubs off then you can't tell where to scrape. The fluid does not spread out in single atom thickness.

> My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources.

Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists, they are designed by engineers. Machinists do not know how frames deflect or resonant modes or overconstraint or the other things that are critical in machine tool design. Machine tools are inherently dynamic systems where moving cutters cause feedback into the system. Being able to make something accurate under static conditions is very different.

Skilled machinists are very well aware of deflection and resonance. Operating a machine tool is not static in the slightest.

The average software engineer is working on A to B plumbing code to confer more privacy violating javascript onto webpages, not novel implementations of algorithms at scale.

Likewise the average machinist is not "skilled" in the way that most here are implying.

I can tell when a dirt bike is running rough, but that doesn't mean I can design the helmholtz resonator in the exhaust. That difference is engineering.

> Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists

But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.

Not really. Mostly they are built by machines. Extremely skilled machinists work in research or niche development, where they can solve new problems. Very skilled operators can tram a machine better, or eke out more repeatable clamping, and make slightly more accuracy out of an established process.

Their time is much better spent creating new processes or making low-run jigs and things.

I am an engineer, making physical stuff. I sometimes design things as well, I generally don't make it unless it is simple or the machinists are busy.

When they make it, they often have questions that turn into suggestions. I would say that any engineer that does not listen to their machinist is a bad one.

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now?

It looks really hollow, like we will be over a barrel when we experience a real embargo. I wish your brother all the luck in the world, I think his time will come soon because at the very minimum having guys like him on our team keep us from getting gouged to death.

Shoot yourself in the foot...guess we shouldn't have depended on that foot to walk for so long.

I have plenty of stories of programmers being lazy knuckleheads. The industry is full of them.

Well, that's a bit different. Laziness is a virtue in our field in ways that it is not in other fields. Math is a good example. Mathematicians are even more lazy than programmers. That's how they end up with shorter proofs than our programs and end up able to work lying down as well as just sitting on a computer.

This feels like cope; ignoring that there are multiple kinds of “lazy.”

There’s the kind that focuses on simplicity and avoiding unnecessary work to achieve the same goal (the good kind); and there’s the kind that just ignores necessary work and drags out the process delaying the goal (the bad kind).

There are plenty of programmers, and machinists, in both camps. Many programmers actually are lazy knuckleheads in the worst sense of the word - and, according to recent researchers, 10% of programmers self-admit to doing nothing at their jobs.

Well, I guess democracy has spoken. And so has the market as the do-nothing people continue to get paychecks and I collect unemployment.

This whole line of reasoning is so similar to consumers picking up chicken breast in a grocery store and not realizing that it comes from chickens somehow.

The US manufacturing base is extremely broad, deep, and strong. The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise.

> The onus is on you to try to prove otherwise.

You each made claims. You each have onus for them because you made the claims, not because someone says you do. That's how the burden of proof works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now?

Until this administration kicked in, historically high?

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now?

You mean the worlds strongest, most developed and most successful economy?

On paper. That's not to say we don't have the greatest potential for even greater prosperity but you can't eat stonks. Right now we are making good on promises to the boomer generation while absolutely dicking over the generations who are making good on the promises of old.

The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. We obviously can and do eat the fruits of our labor.

In fact we (being Americans broadly) eat only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the absolutely gargantuan amount of value we (being Americans broadly) create.

> The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it.

Strong, yes. Strongest by nominal, yes. But not strongest by PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Wealth inequality seems like completely perpendicular subject. What does on shoring lower paying jobs and ballooning the cost of goods do to help that?

Reminds me of a friend’s defense of the service focused economy: “I’ve got a PhD in economics”.

Sure services may be great when things are going well, but you can’t ONLY have services, and then go and blow up international trade and expect to have a good time.

well why would you want to blow up international trade to begin with?

Because a rising power (China) backed a country (Russia) which didn’t bow to the dominant power (USA) that enables international trade, and intentionally blowing up international trade agreements now allows the USA more time to rebuild strategic supply chains to counter further violations of the international order.

If the USA doesn’t have a secure industrial base and can’t reliably enforce the international order then there is no international trade.

> intentionally blowing up international trade agreements now allows the USA more time to rebuild strategic supply chains to counter further violations of the international order.

Sources?

>If the USA doesn’t have a secure industrial base and can’t reliably enforce the international order then there is no international trade.

The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now. Source where this is an issue?

The current international situation as understood by a lot of people in republican circles is outline in detail here:

https://youtu.be/vDBZeHhx3YE

> The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now

Yes, which is why many believe now is the time to revamp our industrial capacity while we still have strategic dominance.

The war in Ukraine has illustrated the importance of mass drone production, and we currently lack a lot of the direct capacity to make them. A lot of our military supply chains are also based too heavily on components assembled and manufactured in China and in parts of east Asia that could easily be disrupted and cripple our ability to project power and play the role we currently play.

You can improve all those things, even fast, without doing… this.

Tariffing close allies at the same time as likely or actual foes especially doesn’t make sense. And rather than this weird roundabout approach, the government can just… pay for things to happen. Like, they used to run weapons factories. If that’s the actual reason for this, it would have been a ton cheaper to just fire up a few government factories, continue and expand the chips act, and maybe ramp up some targeted tariffs and other controls, which would have been way more effective with allies on board. Or, they can start placing drone orders and handing out r&d contracts with specifications that they be entirely made in the USA.

You may be presenting a real perspective, and it could be entirely correct, and this still would be extremely stupid.

Yes, this is a real perspective. Again, I’m not endorsing the approach they’re taking, I’m simply explaining it.

I also don’t think even a moderate introduction of tariffs would have been viewed favorably. Reindustrialization is I think necessary/I agree with the desire to ramp up domestic production and secure supply chains in both America and Europe, but we haven’t done it yet because it’s going to be painful to reverse the current trajectory.

This could very well be a part of a kind of shock deal to get allies to know we’re serious as we negotiate down.

I’m not saying I agree with that tactic, either, and the complaints about the damage in trust are extremely valid.

That's... not how things will roll out. Sure it looks nice on some paper diagram my 5 year old son could pop out, but reality is way, way more complex.

Also, here its US who is doing massive 'violations of international order'. You know which order I talk about? WTO for example, US is founding member, an org specifically designed and accepted to handle this. Various international agreements between close allies. And so on, news are full of whims of one bipolar old man stomping left and right.

What is actually and already happening is that US will lose a lot of customers world wide. That Amazon cloud or tesla car or weapons (machinists heh) or literally any other US product ain't so cool or even acceptable anymore. What will happen actually that rest of the world will replace US products. Not just government, but regular people. Nobody wants to drink US whiskey or wine anymore. Nobody wants any US product or service anymore.

If you think 4% of global population (and just 26% of global GDP) can on whims dictate lives of 96% of mankind by force, well, that's like your opinion man.

The USA already dictates the direction of much of the world economy through its position in the WTO, and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities.

I also realize how incredibly complex modern supply chains are and how disruptive these tariffs are. While it seems clear to me the previous trade situation was unsustainable and going to break down without some sort of change of course, that doesn’t mean I’m in favor of the blanket tariffs or the way this was executed, and I don’t know whether it will work. I’m simply explaining the logic behind it, which is also more complex than just “a bipolar old man stomping left and right”.

Let me get this straight…

> That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities

So, rather than sell Europe weapons that we create in the United States, part of the “intention” of this policy is to cut off the European demand for our weapons systems and cause them to manufacture their own? How is that helpful to the United States and our bottom line? How is that at all in the US interests?

I agree that’s what is going to happen, but I see no evidence that it was part of the intention.

> So, rather than sell Europe weapons that we create in the United States, part of the “intention” of this policy is to cut off the European demand for our weapons systems and cause them to manufacture their own? How is that helpful to the United States and our bottom line? How is that at all in the US interests?

Are you asking why a single point of failure is a bad thing?

To restate what you asked: “if the USA weapons manufacturing capability is compromised and cannot sell weapons to approved parties, and said parties also cannot manufacture their own weapons, how is this in the interest of the US?”

What do you think?

> Are you asking why a single point of failure is a bad thing? >To restate what you asked: “if the USA weapons manufacturing capability is compromised and cannot sell weapons to approved parties, and said parties also cannot manufacture their own weapons, how is this in the interest of the US?”

You can't equate weapons manufacturing to server uptime or data center diversity -- it's fundamentally different.

In terms of what is in the best interests of the United States -- yes, having a single point of weapons manufacture and having that be the United States would very much be in the US interests. It would allow the US to dictate, even more than we do today, how the rest of the world operates. Although we have not been a single source for weapons (Europe does make their own), our role as primary supplier would be (and has been) very profitable.

How is it that we can afford to create the advanced weapons that we do? F-35, Patriot, etc? It's because we can spread that research and development cost across other (allied) countries, because they buy our gear instead of developing their own. Reduce the market for our weapons, and you're going to reduce the quality of our weapons and increase their per-unit cost -- both things that are very much not in the interests of the United States.

This was sparked by the remark that this was all part of the "intention" of the policy. Since that intention would by definition be very contrary to US interests, both financial and strategic, it seems dubious that this was the intention.

Dictated, past tense. As a result of these tariffs. And that part's not coming back even if everything got magically reversed tomorrow. That level of trust is gone, forever.

If capital doesn't get very mad and do something fix the fallout immediately, it will get very bad. You can't wait for things to work themselves out; they will not. It's as stupid as it appears on the surface. These people are sociopathic, vengeful idiots, they're mad at anyone smarter than they are, and they're going to destroy everything that's good and replace it with much, much worse.

There is no logic behind it, no matter how badly everybody wants there to be. Trump's brain is stuck in the early 1980's when he first had a subliterate fixation on tariffs, and he's never let go of the idea. I'm sorry that's it not more complex than that -- it would be reassuring if there was an actual plan that anyone not MAGA-infected would thought would work! But there isn't. This is them destroying America and taking down as much of the global economy as America can reach.

> and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities.

> I’m simply explaining the logic behind it

I really disagree most strongly that this is the logic behind it. You genuinely think Trump and his base want these tariff wars to encourage more manufacturing in Europe?

As a foreigner, the message that comes across loud and clear from the US is "America first".

I can't speculate what is really going on inside Trump's head or inside his administration, but one thing I'm 100% sure of, they really don't care in the slightest about Europe or any other country in the world for that matter.

The message is absolutely America first, and the motivation to boost the middle class through reindustrialization is a huge factor.

The desire to eventually back out of defense commitments in Europe is not in contradiction to that.

The political will to commit troops and to defend Ukraine simply isn’t there, especially not while Taiwan is looming. Wanting Europe to reindustrialize and handle it’s own defense allows America to focus more domestically and on potential wars more aligned with American interests (disruption of chip manufacturing affects America much more than Russian occupation of Ukraine).

I linked to a hoover institute interview with Niall Ferguson explaining a lot of the thinking. You can also just listen to what the administration has been saying themselves. You don’t have to agree with it, but the goal is reindustrialization of both America and Europe so America doesn’t lose it’s defense capabilities and so Europe can defend itself without relying on American support.

> The political will to commit troops and to defend Ukraine simply isn’t there, especially not while Taiwan is looming. Wanting Europe to reindustrialize and handle it’s own defense allows America to focus more domestically and on potential wars more aligned with American interests (disruption of chip manufacturing affects America much more than Russian occupation of Ukraine).

This seems like a coping narrative. The unwillingness to stand by commitments, groveling before Putin without receiving anything in return, threatening long-standing allies with annexation, and now the utterly moronic trade war (which is not based on any economic plan but apparently on chatbot output) are all weakening the US politically, economically and militarily, and giving countries like China a window of opportunity to act against it.

China has no strong allies, and its long-term goal has therefore been to isolate the US from its own allies in order to level the playing field. With each passing day, the US under Trump can indeed expect less and less support from its allies in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Despite all the hollow rhetoric against China, Trump is setting the stage for the invasion.

Had the US played its cards better, it could have had a booming economy, motivated allies across the globe, and tens of thousands of highly experienced soldiers from Ukraine's battlefields willing to return the favor in the war with China. Ideally, that would've led to China shelving the invasion plans. Instead, we see an embarrasing clown show, which serves as an open invitation to invade Taiwan.

Ok, I did watch the video. He does make a lot of points which sound plausible to a casual like myself.

I'm still sceptical. It's pretty clear that there is real distaste for Europe in the MAGA sphere. I really find it hard to believe that this is all an act, a ploy, to boost Europe's own economy. Everything I've witnessed about MAGA suggests this type of long range thinking is just a coping wish. I think it's much simpler than that. I think they have a real distaste for Europe, for a variety of reasons.

You are correct that there is a lot of distaste for Europe within the MAGA base. Although it’s important to note most of the distaste is about subsidizing their defense so they can have welfare states at the expense of US taxpayers, and a distaste for EU leadership. A lot of MAGA are friendly with other populist movements in Europe.

Again, I don’t think it’s an either or, and I don’t believe this is a ploy. The desire to reduce commitments in Europe and to have long term changes in trade is genuine.

The core motivation of the base is simple: middle America wants their industrial jobs back.

The motivation of advisors like the people at Hoover, military strategists and other intelligent higher ups is to deal with the weaknesses (present and future) that both Covid and Ukraine made obvious.

These are in alignment.

And yes, the MAGA base desire for a return of manufacturing came before the understanding of strategic weakness. That doesn’t mean the strategic motivations are a cope: I don’t think it’s a coincidence the bureaucracy were only willing to go along with this after both Covid and Ukraine discredited a lot of previously held beliefs about the state of the global order and the need for a course correction.

It’s also important to note politics and “cope” are basically the same thing. Everything is compromise.

The US didn't get to be the worlds global superpower out of nowhere. You formed alliances in the west and have pushed your global economic agenda for what, seven decades, with Europe going along with it (along with many other countries), including fighting in wars the US pushed for. That is what you got in return for your military backing. The US also didn't get into the cold war because of Europe,.

MAGA won't sell that though, it needs a different narrative. And this is the narrative it feels like this little exchange is pushing too, though forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you.

MAGA is acting as though the world isn't buying trillions of dollars worth of its services every year, that it hasn't controlled the global economic policy for decades, enriching itself in the process. Nope, MAGA is now claiming victim status.

Again, I'm explaining, not endorsing.

I believe the reason it feels like I'm pushing is that in a sense, I am: I'm not adding any caveats or disclaimers to that narrative or explaining why other narratives do or don't matter. I think counter narratives to the ones supporting these tariffs are already well understood by most people here. The original person I was responding to was asking why this happened (presumably because it seemed irrationally stupid, as I think it does to most people here), and what I'm pushing for is an understanding of the point of view which explains it. If you understand the concerns of MAGA and the strategic concerns of the US Military the tariffs make sense. They might not make sense in relation to other concerns, and maybe it's wrong to be so focused on those concerns at the expense of other concerns like relationships with allies. But they do make sense from that point of view.

In order to repair international relations with allies, the root causes of these tariffs first needs to be understood and addressed. If this is simply viewed as a madman irrationally leading a horde of rednecks to punish allies, and the other strategic concerns are just considered window dressing to excuse that madness, the grievances of those who empowered Trump will remain and the strategic weaknesses will continue to be an anchor weighing the US down and interfering with our capacity to maintain relationships and enforce international law.

The narrative of the MAGA base is that middle America and the rust belt was in fact victimized by global economic policy. The benefits you mention about the world buying American services and getting into foreign wars didn't benefit the MAGA constituency, it hurt them. Yes, everyone benefits from cheaper goods and America in particular is able to buy more of them due to the fact we issue the global reserve currency, but on net the average middle class American family in an industrial town lost more than they gained.

That narrative is not the whole narrative. I am well aware that there are more people in the world than just MAGA that are feeling the opposite about all of these tariffs, and they have legitimate grievances. But the MAGA narrative is not false. Just like the narrative about betrayal on the part of allies and economic partners is not false. Just like the narrative I presented about domestic supply chains and strategic weakness is also not false (and is the narrative I'm most biased towards/what I care about most). In order to look for a balance point that maximally benefits everyone, all of the different narrative threads need to be understood.

In order to prevent a repeat of this situation in the future (if any semblance of the previous order can be re-established after the US secures it's domestic supply chains and repairs it's middle class, and I have no idea what the likelihood of that is), any re-establishment of global supply chains needs to ensure it doesn't erode domestic capacity and that there's an actual plan for how to maintain the middle class through either some degree of protections for domestic industry or a more effective plan to transition the middle class into services.

I'm actually appreciating this discourse, thank you.

For what it's worth, being an immigrant to the UK, I've watched kind of from the sidelines as similar events unfolded here around brexit. I tried very hard to have sympathy for the views of brexit voters. The problem I have, and I have the same problem with MAGA, is despite having real grievances, is the overall narrative is just lie after lie. The MAGA administration lied to the whole world about "trade deficits", completely ignoring services. Maybe the story rings true for a particular voter, but it is a misrepresentation of the whole truth, or more bluntly, is a lie.

I understand very well that certain people have not felt the benefit of deindustrialisation. I do get it.

You say this:

> The original person I was responding to was asking why this happened (presumably because it seemed irrationally stupid, as I think it does to most people here), and what I'm pushing for is an understanding of the point of view which explains it. If you understand the concerns of MAGA and the strategic concerns of the US Military the tariffs make sense.

No. I just don't agree. They make sense if Europe wasn't consuming billions of USD a year of US services, and the US wasn't growing increasingly wealthier than Europe each year.

Trump is pandering to his base. That makes sense. But the tariffs are just a means to that end, and trying to ratonalise the tariffs in other terms, I just don't agree with.

In any case, I have learned stuff from this conversation. I'm not even saying I am definitely correct, there is a chance I'm wrong and you're correct, and I will keep an open mind about that. Thank you.

Likewise. I enjoy commenting here because it’s one of the few places online where there’s actually discourse, and I like to think conversations like these have trickle effects/lead to more cross pollination and rational outcomes. Your pushback is valid; there’s a very real danger of getting too much in bed with Trump’s base and letting dumb populism overrule any need for strategic pivots if this doesn’t end up working. There was also some interesting pushback about European market demand for US weapons being more important than supply chain security which I hadn’t considered from the strategic angle; I don’t think I agree that it’s more important than eliminating foreign chokepoints in US military supply chains, but that’s a point in favor of these tariffs being too blunt and extreme an instrument for addressing the need to boost domestic industrial capacity for the defense industry.

I’ll keep an open mind as well. I hope things eventually work out for the best, but we’ll see what happens.

Trump didn't tariff Russia tho

Quit the hyperbole.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-manufacturing-scor...

> Manufacturing constitutes 27 percent of China’s overall national output, which accounts for 20 percent of the world’s manufacturing output. In the United States, it represents 12 percent of the nation’s output and 18 percent of the world’s capacity. In Japan, manufacturing is 19 percent of the country’s national output and 10 percent of the world total. Overall, China, the United States, and Japan comprise 48 percent of the world’s manufacturing output.

thank you. the catastrophizing that makes up so much of this site is such a dead-end. seems people rather engage in sensational fantasy instead of understanding. cheers

Where is the disconnect between the US being the #2 manufacturer in the world and my sense of doom and gloom about Trumps trade-war attack on our trading partners?

I suspect it's this:

> Advanced manufacturing technology development can be found throughout the United States. In Indiana for example, Rolls Royce, which makes jet engines, employs thousands of engineers. Zimmer Biomet makes surgical products in Warsaw, Indiana, a city that has become a national hub for orthopedic products.

So much of what I buy as an individual is imported. My fruit comes from South America, my electronics come from Asia, my outdoor equipment comes from Canada (and the raw fabrics probably sourced from China).

Well, in a sane world we wouldn't have one man single-handedly blowing up international trade, and thus wouldn't be having this conversation.

Any system will fail if you deliberately put it into it's failure mode...

the US is the most diversified economy in the world, we do not only have services.

We've been coasting on advances made many decades ago. Most developed, sure. Successful? By nearly any metric you can imagine or make up. Strongest? Our economy is eaten hollow by termites. A stiff wind would make it crumble. Worse, there doesn't appear to be any path to true recovery... we can't create the jobs that people need to prosper, but if we could somehow do that we no longer create the people who would grow up to fill those jobs. What industry is it exactly that you think the United States dominates in 2025? What vital, 21st century technology do we have a monopoly on, or at least some undeniable marketshare of? Do we build boats or planes or cars? Do we make computer chips or garments or appliances? Our only saving grace might be that we're self-sufficient agriculturally, without that we'd probably already have starved.

Please provide real metrics to support what you've claimed above.

Tech is the obvious one, but there are lots of less obvious ones, like designing the things that are manufactured elsewhere.

It turns out production of most goods is commoditized and a race to the bottom (assuming free trade), so if you want margins that can support high salaries, you have to move up the value chain (read: services).

If we keep tariffs high enough for long enough, we will bring back manufacturing jobs. They will not be high paying unless unions artificially constrain labor supply. The cost of everything will be higher (relative to people’s incomes), implying a lower standard of living.

tl;dr: If we want to withdraw from the world economy we mostly can, but don’t expect to have as nice of a life afterward.

>It turns out production of most goods is commoditized and a race to the bottom (assuming free trade), so if you want margins that can support high salaries, you have to move up the value chain (read: services).

I know, right? When you go home and sit down on your Oracle database to relax, then go to the kitchen to cook your evening meal in an AWS Lambda, then afterwards relax a little more by changing into some spreadsheets, it really puts it into perspective: everything a person needs is technology and software, and who wouldn't want to dominate that industrial sector?

>If we keep tariffs high enough for long enough, we will bring back manufacturing jobs.

Sure, but we don't have a commitment from Trump's eventual successors that they will continue, let alone from the opposition party. In other words, everyone knows that it will not continue long enough... the only real question is how do they best mitigate the pain while it does continue short-term? Trump could easily drop dead of a stroke or heart attack tomorrow, he is not a young man or in great health. But even should he survive the full term, the clock's already ticking. Why would anyone commit to an expensive long term investment today, when January of 2029 it will no longer be necessary?

>They will not be high paying unless unions artificially constrain labor supply.

The labor supply is already constrained... demographic implosion is well underway. The only way to unconstrain it would be to import millions of people from foreign countries.

>If we want to withdraw from the world economy we mostly can,

Why would this be withdrawing? Who do you think we'd want to sell the products to anyway? No, I believe we're talking about switching our role from consumer in the global economy to producer. What do you think the Chinese could even buy with all the trade deficit cash they're squirreling away, when we don't make anything? Some large chunk of it is buying up stock, real estate, etc. Give them something else to buy.

>but don’t expect to have as nice of a life afterward.

I'm like a 8th class (or lower still) software engineer in a fly-over city, and even my salary's six figure. The rest of you I always figured were doing better still. So I can understand why you don't get that for most people in the United States, "nice of a life" hasn't been a thing for generations, it's mostly stories they tell each other that have been repeated since the 1960s that originated with their great-grandparents. I mean, I would've thought some of that leaked through reddit and other such forums, where they complain about working 3 Uber-Eats-style jobs and never having a day off, only to be able to scrape by in some shit apartment while wondering how to keep their crappy used car from being repossessed.

You swim in this little bubble of atypicality, never noticing that the cheap clothes on the Walmart shelf show up from the distribution center looking what we would've called threadbare just 30 years ago. That no one you know (even those earning like you do) owns real furniture even if they earn a salary like yours. Even the "fancy" McMansions that you see from time to time are garbage, constructed as if no one cares that they last longer than 20 years. How many of the consumer goods in your home can you lay hands on that aren't 50% plastic or more?

Nice of a life. Haha.

> No, I believe we're talking about switching our role from consumer in the global economy to producer. What do you think the Chinese could even buy with all the trade deficit cash they're squirreling away, when we don't make anything? Some large chunk of it is buying up stock, real estate, etc. Give them something else to buy.

Meanwhile over at the People's Daily, someone starts to type up "Why should we accept the Americans stealing good Chinese manufacturing jobs?"

> for most people in the United States

Now we start to talk about income inequality, and who exactly is having a nice life; but the minute you mention some of the policies of less unequal European countries, Americans go absolutely bananas and call you a communist. You might as well suggest doing something about the mass shootings, that's even more unpopular.

It the *right wing* Americans who go bananas calling you a communist. The left by and large wants to implement more social programs to reduce inequality and allow the growth of a middle class in our existing economy. You could probably say this is the crux of the culture war.

I have never understood this.

If everyone is educated, who is going to collect your garbage, fix your car, replace your broken pipe in the wall, cut down the rest of the tree that fell across the street, stock your groceries, sell you fast food, drive trucks across the country, build houses and buildings, pump septic tanks… I can keep going.

I don’t get it, never have. Education is not some magical bullet. In fact, having attended college and graduated with a now-lucrative job as an sw engineer, I can say I learned almost nothing at all in college because of the institution itself. At best it made me teach myself whatever was in the class textbooks. The professors mostly spoke English as a second or 3rd language and the TAs were even worse.

“Oh the culture, the diversity!” Meant absolutely nothing to me, I’ve had diverse family and friends since I was a child.

Did you mean to respond to my comment? I didn't mention education so don't really understand how it connects.

No one is saying to get rid of the jobs you mentioned. The goal is to make it so people working those jobs can provide for their families, have health care, have appropriate time off, and generally work with dignity.

And I should clarify that most of what you mentioned fall in the "middle class" category, including building houses, driving trucks, serving food, and pumping septic tanks. Cost disease (especially in housing and healthcare) has made these less stable occupations than they should be.

College education should be accessible and affordable for people who want to pursue it. I agree that it has been way over-emphasized in recent decades and had a similar experience to you. "Get an education" was a cop out excuse to paper over the structural problems occuring underneath (while tuition costs ballooned). For sure the pendulum has already started to swing the other way though.

To be clear, I’m not saying your or anyone else’s life is “nice.” I’m saying that however nice (or not) your life currently is, it will be worse. Those goods at Walmart will cost 30% more and still be equally threadbare. You’re mixing two things together, the declining quality of goods, and the places those goods are made.

Did you know you can buy premium clothes made in China? You can. Check out producers like Bob Dong or Bronson. Ironically, they make a lot of thick, quality clothes inspired by vintage US work-wear. The reason you probably never heard of them is buyers have to pay extra for that quality, and the appetite isn’t there.

The fact that everything you buy is cheaply constructed of cheap materials is entirely due to that being what sells. Most consumers won’t pay a premium for quality, so you have to go out of your way to look for it. Moving mass-market garment manufacturing back to America won’t change that.

If you just want to pay fistfuls of dollars for quality American-made clothing, you can do that today. Go buy yourself a $70 t-shirt from Lady in White. I’m sure we’ll be able to make shittier clothing cheaper, but it’s still going to be a lot more than shoppers are used to paying. You’re never going to get any American-made shirt for $4.98.

As to why tariffs constitute withdrawing: other countries can and will retaliate. China is not going to buy our expensive American-made commodity products, especially when they’ve got a 55% import duty on them, when they can buy equal or better quality things made at home or in SE Asia for half the price.

Even if successful, tariffs will make goods expensive. There’s no way around that. There is 0 reason to believe they will make goods any better. With reduced competitive pressure, quality is more likely to drop, if anything.

One of the "big things" people would joke about alongside solving world hunger was world clothelessness. People don't seem to realize that in our global economic state (at least a week ago) we solved that problem so hard that there's a pile of clothes in the atacama desert¹ (not to say it's without its consequences). Plastic microfibers are a problem I admit, but I would happily eat my weekly credit card(/s) knowing that far fewer people have to go naked. I for one hope that thrifting can fill the gaps, it may take a while to replace the 8000+ laborers that take part in making your white t-shirt² and maybe more.

[1] https://www.space.com/mountain-discarded-clothes-chile-satel... [2] https://www2.hm.com/en_us/productpage.0568593005.html

We can definitely do better than where we're at. But I'm not sure working in factories is so much better. I wonder whether people will like having things like steel furnaces and injection molders in their towns. Exporting the dirty, smelly, dangerous stuff to elsewhere is one of the most devious tricks we played.

Which people got the COVID vaccine first?

Why is HN in English and always talking about FAANG?

Why do kids all around the world play with Spiderman?

Asking for "vital" and "21st century" is a paradox, so maybe it's not what you really meant. But the proof of our success is all around if you're willing to actually look.

>Why do kids all around the world play with Spiderman?

So we sell children's stories, in a world where technology makes it possible to copy not just any single story, but pretty much all of humanity's stories since time began onto a tiny little plastic doohickey that you can hang on a keychain. And then anyone in the world can also make up a new story with those same characters, or draw a picture, or whatever...

That's our wealth? Wow. Even if I had stock in that intellectual property, it seems like it never really was property to begin with and that I'm heading for ruin.

Those three examples were a sketch of the picture being missed by the parent comment. We clearly export entertainment on a massive scale, regardless of one's personal judgment of it.

> But the proof of our success is all around if you're willing to actually look.

Get a slice of humble pie.

The proof of American failure is also all around if you're willing to actually look. Urbanism, health, environment, MAGA, Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan. Easy to cherry pick, turns out many of us who have the luxury of being able to work in the US if they wanted to chose not to do so, maybe with good reasons? "Most successful" is very subjective. "Dominant", yeah, you are.

I'm not saying there aren't grave problems with American empire. But the parents' take on this particular point is unsubstantiated.

What makes urbanism bad?

Car centricity is the main culprit

[0] https://m.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TheOkz8oF_I

As opposed to the beautiful car-free utopias found in suburbia and the countryside?

Suburbia is absolutely part of the problem

It's a shame you weren't consulted, I suppose.

> Which people got the COVID vaccine first?

U.K. and Sweden followed closely by Germany?

> Do we build boats or planes or cars? Do we make computer chips or garments or appliances?

I mean .. obviously yes? It's just that you don't make all the chips and cars on the planet. Or even all the locally used ones.

The US is mostly an astonishingly wealthy country that has somehow convinced itself that it's in the middle of a decline, while simultaneously avoiding facing up to any of the QoL questions which people routinely fight over on HN where the US average or poorer citizen might actually be worse off.

It's actually declining tho, it can't out grow it own debt, maybe spending less in military could fix that, doubt they gonna do it

The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world - it's just moved into high end manufacturing. One of the difficult things about the current situation is how confidently wrong people are about the basic facts of the US economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

Crushing unions is partly to blame here. I've got relatives whose families have been working in the mining industry for a few generations. They all lament the good old days that are long gone now.

There was a related hashtag that was banned for hilarious reasons.

how would increasing the cost of labor mean that we have more manufacturing jobs in the US today?

There are a lot of manufacturing jobs. In fact, the "Manufacturing" category is four times larger (12M vs 4M) in terms of employment than "Information." The primary interests of people working in manufacturing are higher pay and better working conditions.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=50&eid=4881#s...

right, but what i am missing is the connection to ‘more machinist jobs’. unions pretty much necessarily trade off number of jobs with average pay for that job, it’s the whole name of the game to restrict entry and wage negotiation.

Every single country on earth, except China, that has a more robust and profitable machine tool sector than the US has unions strong enough to make a social media libertarian shit their pants.

Indeed, the three countries listed in the report as being better than the US all have EXTREMELY strong machinist/metalworking unions.

Japan: JAM

Italy: FIOM

And Germany, with probably the most powerful union in the entire world: IGM

The problem isn't unions.

The problem is the parasite MBA class, shuffling memos and spreadsheets around to make it look like they're doing something.

Giving labor better bargaining means higher pay for employees and so they need to work less, which leaves room for more employees. Better working conditions also leads to a better and bigger pool of candidates who are interested in your work and industry. Giving labor more power also makes it far harder to offshore their work and the higher pay for everyone improves local economies and induces more local demand. Having wealthier owners doesn't help the local economy nearly as much as more prosperous labor, especially if they end up spending a bunch of that capital in investing in a foreign assets with lower labor costs, essentially throwing what could have been local economic investment into desperate foreign labor markets.

that is just not how microecon works.

raising the marginal cost of labor lessens the amount of labor hired. there is no scenario in which it leads to more people working the job. unionized labor did not make it harder to offshore - in fact it accelerated offshoring, automation, and a shift to manufacturing in the South of the country.

having lower costs of goods usually benefits the economy more than more prosperous labor (not necessarily the local economy), although the net welfare increasing thing is context dependent. in competitive markets, vast majority of labor cost decreases are captured by the consumer.

The unions got crushed, when the sovyeet union caved in. There main negotation power was the threat of a takeover by a of a viable economical alternative. It was just a illusion though..

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