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Person above is pointing out that even Tesla isn’t 85% USA
The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.
With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?
Of course manufacturing jobs left. Replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things. Americans have moved on to Services jobs (many of which are poorly paid) and Knowledge Worker jobs (many of which are highly paid.)
Even industries that are traditionally thought of as solid blue collar (Boeing, Ford etc) are producing more, but with way fewer people.
Fundamentally of course, automation is cheaper, and more consistent than human labour.
Naturally the US does not make everything. Nowhere does. Some industries resist automation. Construction and some agriculture crops spring to mind. The high cost of US labor makes these attractive to foreign labor. Mexico for example produces 80% of produce that is cultivated or picked by hand.
Incidentally foreign labor doesn't have to be executed in foreign lands - the primary industries for undocumented (and hence cheap) labor in the US are agriculture, construction, child care and so on. Things that cannot be automated.
(On the agriculture front, the major outputs are crops that can be automated, thing wheat, corn, chickens, pigs etc. The major imports are things that are more labor intensive to harvest, like vegetables and flowers. )
So no, factory jobs are not coming back. Because they were replaced with robots, not foreigners. You may see local production increase though as more robots come online.
Some manufacturing was replaced by automation, but most of it was not. The jobs still exist, just not in the US. Worldwide, a much larger number of people are making things.
In China, manufacturing jobs account for 29% of total employment, according to UN data reported by Our World in Data.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/manufacturing-share-of-to...
I had to use that source because China is hiding data now and the original source at the UN no longer lists any data for China.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-data-youth-une...
Nonetheless, the UN still reports that many countries have more manufacturing jobs (relative to total employment) than the US. China, if 29% is correct, has the most, but almost all European nations also have more than the US.
that is how the us makes more than ever with much small % I in labor.
Honestly the biggest issue I have seen with US companies trying to manufacture goods is that they tend to only target US customers. Especially at the low end.
There must be some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.
I keep trying to buy local self pub (as in proper self pub, not just Amazon POD) books from americans and the half that actually permit foreigners to buy their books have actively stopped permitting their promotions to be accessed by foreigners.
I used to try to buy hobby stuff (militaria etc) from americans via eBay and 90+% of them would explicitly tell ROW to get bent in the listing.
And etsy postage from yankistan? Forget about it.
Kickstarter postage from the USA? Often as much as the product.
Speaking as a non-American, this is just not true. I have always been impressed by the very high quality of American engineers.
I cannot comment on manufactured goods though, but I think if the US rebuilds its mid-level industrial pipeline, quality would be amongst the best in the world since Americans generally hold themselves to a high standard. I don't think there is a need to be so negative.
I could not have had a more opposing experience possible.
That is the opposite of my experience with software engineers, and my observation of the work ethic of most Americans in a variety of professions makes me think the opposite is true in pretty much every industry.
I think "American labor is low quality and high cost" is one of those things people think must be true about some other industry besides the ones they've seen, kind of like they think the news is inaccurate when it reports things they know to be false, but accurate when it reports on other subjects.
That being said, topic here is low paid manufacturing where people dont want to work. Not high paid seeked positions. You can't compare them.
Something near 100% of the US telco industry I could not find a polite word to describe. And its very common for obvious deficiencies to be laughed off as normal and acceptable.
>Work Ethic
Lets start with "Listening Ethic" and "Understanding Instructions" and maybe "Work Ethic" will become relevant.
This is in contrast to European designed products, which are expensive, but usually are high quality, work really well and last for much longer. (In exchange, the user experience does often feel like it was designed by someone who is way too technically minded/thinks that all UX innovations past the 80s or 90s should be treated with extreme prejudice, whether that's good or bad.)
International rates (or the system that runs it) were decided a long time ago. The international postal system was set up so that all developing countries (which still includes China) are subsidized by developed countries.
American Labor will never be cheaper than virtual slave labor.
Its lower cost than serbia, where you need to either register a business locally or help the staff out with taxes.
But its higher cost than canada, where people just sort of dont fuck around and get on with things.
And in some circumstances the lack of regulation can make things more expensive. Or at least, lack of regulation + lack of respect for norms.
I had a customer insist on using a particular tower climber for cabling, but the guy had no idea about cabling or network engineering. He was "cheap" in that he didn't draw a large wage, but he was actually expensive because he needed so much hand holding. Later I found out he had several 500M + runs of Cat5 that could have been 3 meters and a switch.
In fact it seems a fairly uniquely american thing that some bloke will go off and do a lot of """work""" and then hand over an absolute pile of dogshit that proper engineers need to come in and resolve. The shit I have seen american network engineers "produce" that needed to be cleaned up by expensive consultants would curl your hair.
Its because americans try and do everything with slave labor that they are so damned expensive to deal with.
If I engage a cabler in an Australian or Canadian data centre, they tend to find a fault and fix it in the first instance.
Literally never happened for me with yanks. Its always 5 visits, back and forth, arguments about responsibility, providers closing tickets before they have resolved anything, and engineers that dont understand the difference between light stats and BGP neighborship.
So the question is whether these tariffs will increase the number of cars manufactured in this country, and whether that increase is an acceptable trade-off for making the cars sold more expensive.
This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.
Regardless, that wouldn’t make it okay. It’s weird to claim that it’s normal.
> The real question is…
No, that’s a separate question. Not the “real” question. The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary because it’s so economically damaging that Trump’s successor (of any party) will remove it, if Congress doesn’t get there first.
This isn’t bringing manufacturing back to America, it’s making America a toxic and unpredictable place to do business.
Rules that favor a politically connected company over others is absolutely business as usual. It's the foundation of the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry.
This is why you might think that isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption, because I assure you most on "the other side" would rather disagree with you. Consider that a President gave banks who were failing, exclusively due to their own greed and reckless investing, hundreds of billions of dollars in an unprecedented scale bailout, and would then go on to go give 30 minute "chats" to these companies after leaving office for $400k a pop, making himself tens of millions of dollars out of it.
I'm trying to avoid more contemporary issues precisely because of my first paragraph. But I will say that overt corruption and weaponization of various institutions was perceived, by many, as exceptionally widespread in the previous administration. That's largely why November turned out the way it did, and similarly why many were so surprised by it. People increasingly live in two different realities and the hyper-polarization of media is heavily contributing to this.
That both sides believe the other lies does not mean that both sides lie.
First off imagine an ostensibly completely fair system where each district was somehow made up of a random person within a state. Contrary to intuition, you would have actually just created the most gerrymandered system imaginable, where a party with only 51% of approval within a state would end up with 100% of representative seats, winning each and every district by 51%.
So counter-intuitively you do intentionally want to pack voters of a similar type into certain districts to create a fair system, which leads to all sorts of weird things, including the "solution"! It turns out the most fair system is to intentionally gerrymander! If you let each party with at least e.g. 1% of the vote take their turn creating an intentionally gerrymandered district for themselves (you can only 'district' your own voters), the self-maximizing solution is to create a 51% district in your favor. But if you mathematically work this out, this actually creates a perfectly fair (as close as possible to x% voters = x% of seats) result in the end! I can give an example if you find this unbelievable.
So all the rhetoric about trying to solve gerrymandering is mostly just theater and gesturing. The solution I gave is not some huge secret, even if most people are not aware of it. The only argument against it is that x% voters = x% seats is not desirable, but I think that's a rather fringe view. Geographic stuff doesn't mean what it used to, especially when there's millions of voters per district.
Yet this is what we do at every election.
It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.
You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.
Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.
And the issue you're not considering is that we all subconsciously, if not consciously, discount the wrongs of those we prefer while blowing up the wrongs of those we dislike. I hate to use contemporary examples, because it's still so emotionally charged for most people - but I think there's too perfect an example not to here, and we've probably scared off everybody else by having responses with more than 100 words anyhow.
The last administration essentially turned the White House into the latest remake of Weekend at (B)ernie's. And they did this in complete collusive coordination with the media, and aggressively attacked and defamed anybody who tried to call them out on it. A person who fancied that administration is largely going to discount this because in the end the arguable net result was not much more than that advisors in that administration ended up playing a much more executive role than they would normally have.
But if you look at it from another person's perspective, it was a complete undermining of democracy that emphasized that the "independent" media is functionally identical to what we pejoratively refer to as state media in adversarial countries. And the response to people saying and seeing what was happening before their eyes (as, for instance, when the President would wander about in a senile stupor) was nothing short of 1984 - "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
One person's molehill is another's mountain, and vice versa.
Those money were loaned and were returned back with interest, so US government actually earned some good money. Do you understand each word in that sentence and its overall meaning?
I am not defending banks and their too greedy and frankly idiotic behavior in any way, but if people keep ignoring absolutely basic facts about topics they so desperately want to discuss this has no bigger meaning than ie evolution vs creationism discussions with religious fanatics.
I'm sure if Tesla, through their own excessive recklessness, did something that ruined countless lives and sent them spiraling towards bankruptcy, only to be saved by a not-a-bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars from the government, repaid some years later with token interest, you'd feel the same.
Yes, 'well connected' counted in the past. Now it's "buy my crypto thing directly" or "talk with me about exceptions to the tariffs".
If there was a faint whiff of something untoward in the past, this is the Augean Stables.
For some weird psychological reason though a lot of people seem to prefer that the corruption is explicit and open perhaps because the hidden aspect of it makes it easy to imagine more nefarious things happening while when it's blatant like this it's easier to minimize it with a "what's the big deal, it's just a little tax cut for Tesla".
It was also widely regarded to obviously not happen before it happened, despite Trump's explicit statements that it would happen and also his past tariffs from his first term.
Frankly, who gives a damn what's widely regarded?
Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it. Governments employ soldiers to do it on demand. Gang members and mafiosos use it as a tool. Sometimes people even celebrate it, such as equating body count with success in war.
The problem in politics is that everyone seems to choose a side, then apply that same kind of double standard. Rules for thee and not for me, as it were.
Edit: but of course, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." So it makes sense that the behavior would be similar.
> Warfare is entirely different.
Not so much. A lot of people are already talking about civil war. If political differences escalate to that point, how many will mourn the loss of lives from "the other side"?
No they don't. If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.
Warfare is entirely different.
> If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.
Fails to define murder and focused on organized crime vs what if it was your best friend, wife, close relative etc. it’s easy to claim how you’ll react in an abstract scenario but revealed preferences often show something happening very different in reality than what people claim about theoretical situations publicly. Oh and as if it wouldn’t matter who the victim was. What if it was someone bullying your child viciously for months on end? What if they claim it was an accident and now you have to pick which story sounds more plausible?
And does “not overlook it” mean they cut ties with that person, turn them in, visit vengeance upon them?
The idea that people support murder in those cases is pretty crazy. You are living in an Internet unreality.
> You literally say "No i would never support murder under any conditions"
I do?
IMO, if gov manipulation benefits citizens; e.g. creates meaningful jobs or opportunities for citizens, then it's not corruption. The difference is night and day. Where was the outrage over massive government contracts handed out to Oracle, Microsoft, etc... under previous administration? What about all corporate tax breaks? These are purely self-serving and the magnitude of the harm done to citizens is far more significant. It's dishonest to turn a blind eye to those and to focus on trivial policies which actually work in the interest of citizens. Here, the benefit to Tesla is just a side effect.
His wealth is what enabled SpaceX to exist.
Musk's Neuralink now has enabled a paralized man who could not communicate to operate a computer with his mind and thereby communicate with the world.
Neuralink existed for years before Musk. If it weren't him, the researchers would have continued with other investors or govt grants (Trump gutting the NIH recently notwithstanding).
Compare this paltry evidence of benefit with the massive damage being done by the Musk-directed DOGE group, and it's clear billionaires being able to use their money to buy influence over govt is a net negative for US citizens.
Starlink. The one that connected the N Carolina hurricane victims when FEMA failed, and then again in Los Angeles.
NASA can now launch missions at 10% of the cost, due to SpaceX.
> Neuralink existed for years before Musk.
According to Google: "Neuralink, an invasive BCI company with a short-term goal of treating various neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with the intention of creating another “layer” to the brain to complement the functions of existing layers like the limbic system and the cortex."
It's now working on restoring sight to the blind. What a monster Musk is!
BTW, the value of his companies is what investors value it at. Surely they think they are worth it.
The US will shortly be in a doom loop of spending, which will have far worse effects.
A funny thing about SpaceX: I used to work around the space coast in Florida, and the scuttlebutt there was how often the employees had to work around Musk.
Apparently he would breeze in, make uninformed suggestions, and the employees developed processes to limit his damage.
Go outside, touch some grass, and contemplate that Musk is just a dude with a lot of money, not some singular genius or the savior of humanity. Once you do that, you can ask yourself if he's even the best billionaire to be running these companies.
I generally agree with Musk's politics but I wouldn't want all billionaires to share his politics because that would be dangerous. Unfortunately those on the left do not seem to understand this; they keep trying to force total consensus. Which is the biggest evil, total consensus is more evil than any idea you could come up with.
Most ideologies are distractions to get people upset over specific unimportant ideas so that they don't get upset over the massive evil, creeping ideology; the ideology of "total consensus over important ideas."
Full consensus is evil incarnate, no matter the specifics. Its stickiness; inability to adapt to reality is what makes it evil. Without opposition, there is no room for independent thought.
Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...
International trade agreements and political over-engineering of the global order are to blame.
US is clearly not the only country.
I guess other aid agencies are already busy with their existing programs and can't easily step in when the country with the biggest GDP stop suddenly.
Edit: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.
Americans consistently overestimate how much is USA helping others.
From my prospective everyone hates America, but weirdly wants to migrate here at he same time. (Except for the online minority who threaten to leave but never do)
The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?
> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
It seems like they actually plan on cutting it, so I don't think your argument has any weight.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
And if $240 million is trivial, they can just send it to me instead.
But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.
I generally agree with Musk's politics
And what is your definition of consensus? If everyone strikes a compromise, is that evil ? If majority strike a consensus, is that not consensus; that is, does it have to be total in order to be called consensus?
Is majority a consensus? Of course people agitate for getting full victory
So when there’s broad agreement that something is a good idea like, I don’t know, making sure the water is drinkable, your reaction to that is it’s “evil incarnate”?
This is false dichotomy. Our only options are not either a single consensus, or a balance between good and evil. We can have a balance of reasonably good intentions, too.
I had a think for a while about the least bad billionaire, and I'm going to go with Taylor Swift. The worst thing she does is have an astronomical personal carbon footprint, which is true of all billionaires.
The guy paves the way towards totalitarianism, but please, tell me about we should have people like him because it prevents totalitarianism.
The elite mainly follow Trump now - find one who is willing to stand up to him and Musk. That would be contrarian - courageous, in fact.
https://mynorthwest.com/mynorthwest-politics/tesla-tax/40815...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...