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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however

Especially when you gut the DoE and make zero effort to invest in either higher education or trades training.

If US wants a manufacturing revolution it needs to start with an education revolution.

I don't see how the US can compete with China on sheer production and access to manufacturers and suppliers of tech, compared to cities like Shanghai, Qingdao and Shenzhen, among others. It's like a candy store for engineers. Building a single plant just isn't economically feasible when you have so much uncertainty from the chaos at the WH. Not to mention, this will take a decade or much, much more.

A better way (IMO) to do it would have been tax incentives to build US plants to move manufacturing back in the US, have research university programs as feeders for tech innovation centers, and funding for technical colleges to expand their programs for skilled labor needed instead of gutting multiple agencies that would have overseen/guided this expansion. And oversight, of course. And attainable goals set in contracts to receive funding, not just, "here's a pile of money we'll forget about in 4 years."

Your only mistake is thinking those institutions are filled with competent people rather than being a jobs creation program for the inept

Digikey, McMaster-Carr. Lots of other options. they might not have a store front in your city, but they can get you everything you need for reasonable prices.

Those are distributors and there is only a handful of them.

In China they have the manufacturer down the street from the distributor who is down the street from your factory.

With Digikey we are paying $80 to overnight a $5 part from Minnesota. We need to be able to go send a guy to pick it up in an hour.

No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.

It's not JIT, it's that planning works on months advance notice like you mention is in large part because the supply chain is global and shipping takes a lot of time. When digikey has a month lead time because some component is out of stock, it often means "It's going to take a month for this to arrive from the factory".

In China, you can just go down the street to the factory.

As for shipping overnight, it's incredibly common in R&D and repair.

Only if the factory in China will make that thing today. If they are one their New Year holiday (I forget what they call it) you won't get anything. If they are busy making something else you won't get anything - unless by human factors you can convince them to work for you instead of meeting their promises to other customers.

Sure, but you don't have to wait 6 weeks for a cargo ship.

The concept of having centralized full-chain production for enormous productivity boosts is not some wild concept, it's ancient and well known. Industries have clusters because it benefits everyone in the cluster. The US has very few and weak manufacturing clusters.

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. It's economically irrational for any given individual to pursue vocational training in a field where there isn't a job waiting for them at the end. You can make the training in these fields available, but without the jobs, who will bother using it?

One of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in is that the federal government has been subsidizing higher education beyond diminishing returns for decades. Simply removing the mechanisms to do that would be a net improvement.

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