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Comment by gowings97 | Hacker News Reader

Millennial here, 3x Trump voter.

"Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change."

The majority of Boomers are liberal - the demographic shift you perceive is not going to work out the way you think it will. Gen-Z is increasingly leaning right, especially males.

Most people just want a 2018 era car (there's diminishing returns for vehicle technology at this point and average vehicle selling price trajectory, Post-Covid, is unsustainable) at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired.

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> Most people just want a 2018 era car ... at a decent price - something with a six cylinder engine that can be easy serviced / repaired

I've talked to a lot of people about their cars and car choices over the years, and that's not what people want. You can look up some surveys too, although quite a few results are obviously from one survey, you can dig a bit deeper and find older survey results or segmented surveys. What people don't really mention: engine, maintenance, servicing. I think for most people those things aren't that big of a deal, modern cars have satisfactory performance and longevity when compared to cars pre-2000. What people say they want: heated seats and steering wheels, places to charge their phone(!), car play or android auto(!), space and safety for kids and dogs, something that looks nice.

I don't think price is a mentioned factor because right now it seems like you pay more for pretty arbitrary stuff.

I want what you want, with a manual transmission for preference. It's just not what most people want.

Yeah, I have zero interest in an electric vehicle, nor a new ICE vehicle. They are all shit boxes designed to monetize everything they can from remote start, to your GPS location, to heated seats. No thanks, I'll take the 2004 Tacoma getting 16mpg that will run until the body rusts off.

So we shut off cheap EVs from China so American car makers can charge as much as they want without changing their behaviors.

America doesn't have competition. You're prices aren't going to get cheaper. Meanwhile in China internal competition in battery chemistry and packs has massively dropped costs.

It's sad when the groups we call commies have a more open market than us.

Unfortunately we're going to wake up to that too late.

Arbitraging US manufacturing to Asia and pocketing the profit has led to current predicament where we have an economy of healthcare workers, people in software, bartenders/service people barely scraping by, and skeleton crew of blue collar labor holding up domestic manufacturing. That manufacturing labor force makes make vastly lower wages than two generations prior. The vast majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck - again, this was a labor arbitrage facilitated by US Companies and politicians from both sides. This is where there is a bit of horseshoe effect between the left and right when it comes to labor/jobs/the economy.

America is a farm - the US consumer is the product. The only thing that has gotten cheaper over the last few decades are consumer goods from Asia. The US auto industry is more or less an oligopoly - none of the OEMS, outside of Tesla, are seriously interested in competing on price.

Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, it’ll be automated primarily, and Americans don’t want to work the manufacturing jobs that already exist. You’re arguing for status based pay through work identity (“good manufacturing jobs”) when you should argue for living wages regardless of job, unions, and universal healthcare. 80% of US jobs are service based, that is unlikely to change, especially as healthcare grows with 4M Boomers retiring per year.

If American auto companies aren’t interested in building affordable EVs, why are we harming US consumers by preventing them from buying imported EVs? Because, as you said, farming profits for US legacy auto. I want to buy high quality, affordable Chinese products. I don’t want to buy lower quality US products solely because of cronyism and ideology to protect their profits using trade policy.

https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/05/13/g-s1-66...

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tariffs-ma...

What’s your perspective on manufacturing capacity being necessary for national security?

The U.S. has moved to service jobs because they tend to have the highest margins and capitalism is going to do what capitalism does. That is, unless specific guardrails are enacted to protect other societal interests.

That it’s important, but should be automated and understood to be cost inefficient. The cost inefficiency is a readiness premium. But when you have admin officials saying iPhone manufacturing is coming to the US, that isn’t what is being advocated for. China is the largest producer and buyer of industrial robotics for manufacturing, for example. They are built to build, this is not what the US is advocating for.

Do you think this admin would put the necessary guardrails on public private partnership manufacturing supply chain infra to prevent it from being strip mined or otherwise extracted for profit and not be available when needed? I do not, but I do support treating such manufacturing supply chains as critical national security interests. Maybe we’ll get another shot in a few years when competent folks are in control, but maybe not.

I agree with most everything you’ve said, but a lot of manufacturing for critical stuff is not automated in the mass-production sense. There are tons of small batch manufacturing in spaces like aerospace, electrical transmission, etc. that are probably considered critical and already difficult to get US companies to manufacture.

Agreed! But, again, I ask who is going to work these jobs if Americans have said they don’t want to? The labor market has been propped up by immigrants for the last half decade, and this admin is not friendly to immigrants. There are already not enough Americans who will work the manufacturing jobs that exist today (or the jobs going unfilled are outcompeted by higher wage service work).

Americans are cosplaying, they are not serious in this regard. If they were, they would be filling these jobs they say are so desperately needed, and manufacturers would pay whatever market clearing wage is required to fill said jobs. If they wanted good paying jobs today, they’d unionize. Way easier than waiting for manufacturing to come back (which will take years, if at all) and maybe have a shot at one of the few manufacturing jobs that are created.

China delivers results because they have the will to, Americans just want status and vibes.

(Purpose of the system is what it does, watch what people do not what they say, etc)

https://www.plantengineering.com/manufacturers-grapple-with-...

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/immigration-economy-jobs-gr...

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

>The labor market has been propped up by immigrants for the last half decade, and this admin is not friendly to immigrants

Illegal labor to boot. Huge percentages of construction jobs in the US are (or were) filled by illegal immigrants getting paid low wages. It's not clear how those will be filled in the short term.

This is a thing that I've noticed that some folks just can't understand: Nobody is going to leave an inside job for an outside job.

At least not a meaningful amount of people.

I now have a great office job but I grew up farming, ranching, doing construction, roofing, worked at dairies so I've seen first hand who is working these jobs.

It's not white Americans. This is something some people just can't understand. They just don't seem to grasp that the folks doing these jobs are either temporary labor brought in from other countries or illegal immigrants. The reason is because there isn't enough domestic labor willing to do these jobs.

>Nobody is going to leave an inside job for an outside job.

>At least not a meaningful amount of people.

I would say this is true, or generally true, if the pay for the trades stays where it is. If plumbers start making $80k+ out of school, and master plumbers start making $200k+, etc. many would leave their inside jobs for construction.

Americans are not going to leave AC and a nice office for $18 an hour.

Bingo, again. If you pay them, they will come.

We won't pay them because we are hooked on the idea shareholders deserve everything.

I wasn't talking about the trades. I was talking about farm labor, general manual labor, etc.

Think farms, dairy, meat packing, etc. Entry level positions that americans will not go anywhere near.

The three sectors that are most at risk: construction, agriculture, and meat-packing. (I might also put in-home health aides in there). Ironically, these essentially subsidize the costs that Americans feel the most: food, housing, and healthcare.

To support your point further, I’ve worked in manufacturing and the there was a lot of competition to fill the well-paying union jobs. The low-pay non-union jobs, not so much. I also worked in automation, which turned lines that previously had a dozen jobs into lines that had a couple.

Bingo. If you pay them, they will come.

If you pay them, they will come. No is going to work in a plant making $20/hr. There are no shortage of people trying to get into unionized / Big 3 US automotive OEM plants making $60-70K base, $100K if you work at a plant making an in-demand vehicle that's running three shifts/overtime, but those are only a handful of those right now.

You really are missing the forest for the trees with respect to cheap stuff from Asia and completely gutting our capacity to manufacturer from a national security standpoint, and totally ignore what effect the gutting has had on manufacturing in the other 50% of the Country living outside of metro areas.

It's nerd-sperging - "I want cheap shit but I don't want to think about the externalities like hundreds of thousands of people that live outside of metro areas overdosing on opioids because their way of a middle class life has been destroyed or national security, because I discounted / ignore them because I life in a perfect world where I just type on a keyboard all day and get paid more than 95% of Americans and I want a perfect EV."

Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.

The last administration fought for the greatest support package ever provided to rural Red America since the New Deal with the Inflation Reduction Act (putting renewables, battery, and EV manufacturing in their states), and these people still voted poorly. So, forgive me if I have no empathy for people who will vote the country into the ground. Let them pull bootstraps.

> Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.

I support cultivating domestic high tech, high throughput manufacturing capacity, just with as few humans required as possible.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/03/clean-energy-gene...

https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/its-conservative-states-t...

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25042572/e2-clean-eco...

A Texas salesman discovers the truth about 'Made in the U.S.A': no one's buying - https://www.npr.org/2025/05/18/nx-s1-5399796/a-texas-salesma... - May 18th, 2025

A lot of people buy Jeep Wranglers (built in Toledo), Grand Cherokees (built in Detroit), Chevy Tahoes (Built in Arlington), Ford-150 (built in Dearborn Michigan).

You don't know what you're talking about.

You keep citing things as if you are trying to brute force something into existence - you have zero comprehension of the American consumer. You cannot pass a poorly named Inflation Reduction Act (which had the complete opposite effect btw) bill and reshape the consumption preferences of half the country for a consumer product that they have a strong 100+ year emotional connection to.

Half of the American consumers have _ZERO_ interest in EVs. Period. They don't want them. 77 Million of them voted for Trump. The other half are split between coastal tech bros that already have EVs, Boomers that buy PHEVs / EVs, and normal families that might be interested in EVs but after hearing the tradeoffs, decided to buy a Honda or Toyota because they're reasonably priced and reliable. From a OEM Product Planning standpoint trying to juggle the investment between ICE and EV (if you aren't Tesla) - this is the worst of all worlds. Tesla claims the vast majority of the EV marketplace and there isn't enough volume/interest to justify the billion+ investment in EV programs to pick up the scraps. No one has made money on EVs in the US except Tesla. That will continue to be true.

Oh, and whatever happened to the supposed massively deflationary pricing that was supposed to come to batteries? Turns out when you cordon off China from the supply chain and source materials from Australia and South America, you've completely lost any ability to continue to reduce battery prices.

This isn't China - you cannot mandate consumer preferences, although I'm sure you'd love to.

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