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.
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.
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).
- 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.
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.
I would argue they know..
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/08/24Apple-Offers-Aggres...
more than $5000 in 2025 dollars!
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.
Office work is so easy on the body compared to almost any job.
some places like it when we remind the kids that this new thing has been around several times before under different names.
It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$40 an hour in Austin Tx, a city with construction going on in every corner.
Less than I make currently, and I don't live in one of the S/HCOL cities either.