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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

That's pure speculation, but quite possible. Corruption is nothing new in Washington.

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"?

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American Manufacturing never left. Total goods manufactured in the US peaked in 2018 and 2019. It dropped during covid but has returned to those levels now.

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.

> ...replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things.

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.

https://w3.unece.org/sdg/en/Indicator?id=166

I used to work in a factory (i was an engineer working upstairs, never on the floor). Employment peaked in the 1950s at just over 2000 humans - today there are just over 200 to make essentially the same output. The lazer cutter replaced 70 humans running saws with 3 to run the machine. The paint system is entirely automated with only off hours maintenance done by humans. And so on.

that is how the us makes more than ever with much small % I in labor.

American labor is low quality and high cost. China is no longer a guarantee of cheap and terrible like it used to be. If america wants to make shit again they need to compete on cost terms and quality terms.

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.

> American labor is low quality and high cost

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 have always been impressed by the very high quality of American engineers.

I could not have had a more opposing experience possible.

> American labor is low quality and high cost.

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.

Working a lot of hours and high quality are two orthogonal categories. Frequently at odds.

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.

Its my experience with US network engineers, system administrators, cablers, DC operators, business owners and a few other bits and bobs.

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.

At least internationally speaking, American products tend to have a reputation of being expensive, low quality and the company's marketing department is gonna try to find ways to squeeze even more out of you after a purchase, to the point of doing things that probably should be illegal.

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.)

> some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.

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 is low quality and high cost.

American Labor will never be cheaper than virtual slave labor.

There are more than those two categories - for example, Europe exists. So does Canada.

I would be surprised if there were any meaningful differences between American, European and Canadian labour.

Europe includes Germany, Spain, and Romania. I know Romania is far cheaper than Germany, at least.

Mindset is a big one.

Yes but there are barriers there that other countries dont have.

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.

The real question isn't whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. It's already in America. Only 50% of sold cars are imported.

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.

> Corruption is nothing new in Washington.

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.

> This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.

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.

Letting the politically connected company buy a presidential advertisement on the Whitehouse lawn is unusual, so is letting it exfiltrate nlrb data when facing cases from the nlrb. But most importantly it isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption. That normalizes it which is even more damaging. This corruption makes the worst corruption in the history of the nation look like a traffic violation.

The problem is that people have become so divided that the smallest of offenses by 'the other side' is blown up into the most egregious act since the birth of man, and the worst of offenses 'by our side' is turned into the smallest of issues, a technicality, perhaps not even especially real.

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.

The two women arguing before Solomon over which was the true mother of the baby each claimed the other was lying. One of them was actually the mother.

That both sides believe the other lies does not mean that both sides lie.

I don't believe that you believe that, in the circumstance we're discussing. I obviously could list basically endless lies of any contemporary political administration. Before the country became so polarized there were common 'jokes' that weren't really jokes like, 'How do you know a politician is lying?' 'Because his lips are moving.'

This is whataboutism. Everyone lies, power corrupts, but degree does matter. Sen. Murphy's speech does a good job of enumerating the big ones. One possible benefit of all this is that the left is trying to clean house to distinguish itself. If that actually happens using the moment to get them to put in laws to enforce it staying that way would be nice. A lot of Democrats regret enshrining independent districting boards in blue states because now they want to gerrmyander, but it is done. The rest of us have our best chance at increasing freedom by playing them against each other. Rather than letting them play is against each other like they have been. We all agree corruption is bad, and campaign finance reform is good I think. Democracy is a bit more contentious it is a matter of protecting individual rights while still letting the majority rule.

I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable. This is in large part because of partisanship but another issue is that we all value different things, and have different worldviews. For instance gerrymandering is an interesting thing, but I think it's entirely political theater, because there's a simple completely self-serving solution.

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.

> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.

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.

The point is that the example of 98 beans vs eating somebody's mother is obviously nothing like what we have in reality. We have different scales of offenses, many extremely serious in character, but there is no administration has been even remotely likely ethical and above board perhaps since JFK.

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.

WTF does this primitive incorrect argument that "banks were given hundreds of billions" - you make your whole post irrelevant when clearly unfamiliar with basic facts on topic you so furiously discuss.

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.

So would it be fair to say that you're claiming the bank bailout is the smallest of issues, a technicality, and perhaps not even especially real? I mean after all it should be called the "banking temporary investment", right...?

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.

Can you share a link to read more about this?

What is different is the scale and blatant nature of it with this administration.

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.

Yes.

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".

>The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary

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 nothing new in my city - people have been doing it for centuries. Warfare, famine, epidemics are nothing new in most parts of the world.

> Murder is nothing new in my city

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"?

As someone more on the left I would condemn and hope any politician of any party who engages in corruption is held accountable.

> Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it.

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.

You literally say "No i would never support murder under any conditions" and then you identified the condition, warfare, under which you support it.

Right and

> 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?

You're just throwing crap at the wall hoping something will stick. It has nothing to do with me.

The idea that people support murder in those cases is pretty crazy. You are living in an Internet unreality.

If you think murder it’s easy to define, go look at how many different kinds of murder are defined in the US legal code and how every country defines it differently. And military kills are excluded even though definitively I fail to see the distinction between a war and political violence - it’s just external instead of internal. What is and isn’t murder is surprisingly hard to define and you’re either using a legal definition that’s a political compromise of different ideas or your own value judgement which is your opinion and not necessarily one shared with others. Seriously - try writing down what you think murder is in 3 sentences or less and see how far you are away from the legal code in your country.

In the us there is often a disagreement if something was self defense or murder.

You're hunting for internal contradiction rather than addressing the serious issues.

> You literally say "No i would never support murder under any conditions"

I do?

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