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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I think, the issue is about producing the same stuff people already buy overseas.

Can you make a shirt for 10 cents in the USA? Probably, if you get innovative on automation and remove most human labour you might get there in a few years or a decade, but not tomorrow.

If you can get creative with new solutions those products solve, you might get a foot into the door.

What does the shirt solve for a customer? Could there be a (better) alternative that could be built in the USA?

But yeah, you won't compete on price...

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Once you produce everything for 10c locally without human labor, those unemployed human laborers won't buy your 10c thing because they are unemployed. You need more to bring back the production: bring back the employment as well.

There is plenty of employment in the US. What there isn't in the US is employees for someone wanting to pay less than $12/hour - and to get that low you need to find a small rural town in the middle of nowhere with nobody else paying, which in turn means you can only get at most 200 low wage employees in your factory, and you are risking someone else moving in offering more pay. Or you can go to China and pay much less (I don't know wages in China, but I'd guess under $5/hour), or some other poor country and you can pay $1/hour.

Are you arguing against the automation here? Because if so it seems we could bring back a lot of employment by simply getting rid of machines, but would we really be better off? Is it better for humans to spend their short lives working as telephone operator, knowing it an entirely pointless job?

If you're not arguing against automation then I think we need to think about what happens when we expand your timeline a little. Are there really enough 'employment' jobs that can't be automated for billions of humans of different intelligence/physical abilities?

With the automation expanded to the extremes it becomes obvious that you need a new system, society, you name it, a new way of setting up everything. It's not that humans love being a phone operator or creating yet another GUI, but they definitely love to be able to eat. And also love to have a purpose in life. I currently don't see much happening along those lines.

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