[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota)
There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day.
Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends?
That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
Some two bit code monkey screeching "it's not my fault my code shit all over the production database when something upstream of it got a little wonky, I coded to the spec I was given" is no different than some dumbass middle manager or MBA at HQ who's intentionally making the system more shitty for negligible, but measurable, savings so they can fuck off into the sunset with their bonus for hitting KPI before it all comes crashing down.
Ergo, any decision which saves dollars and time in the present but increases future risk looks good... in the present.
It's always surprised me that businesses don't attempt to quantify risk in an effort to produce a more balanced decision function.
When I was in aerospace management decided to move our fixture guy to a part time contractor instead of meeting him on his salary increase request. Almost every step of the factory other than some sub-assemblies were dependant on the fixtures, the fixtures needed to be constantly re-calibrated, etc. And there was no other fixture guy in the area. We fired like the most important person in the entire factory and hoped he'd stick around for part time contract work. I was no longer working there before it happened, but the first time a fixture needed calibration but he had other contract work, that whole section of the line is down at like $200,000 a day until he can come in. Like OK you scheduled him for the normal maintenance, but what happens when a forklift hits a fixture and he's off at some new clients site for 3 weeks? Or the AC goes out and the heat takes everything out of tolerance before you get it cooled off again.
And with JIT manufacturing having fixtures down throws off the schedule AND you don't have capacity to catch back up because you have capacity for the barest minimum you can get away with. These guys are very very important and yes it is terrible if we don't have their skills available on demand.
But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.
My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.
Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.
>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.
We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.
Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
Manufacturing in the same city starts just below $20 and also gets scheduled raises for sticking around.
1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken.
2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage.
3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal.
Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again.
As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
We’re arguing over importing a massive underclass when 5 families control 50% of the wealth and 2 people have private space programs.
Let’s just tax the shit out of them, instead?
That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows.
I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go.
I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
4. ...
5. Profit!
Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.
If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
There's only four things [Americans] do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
I know kids in the target demographic have a place in their heart for them but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
You're twisting my words to move the narrative goalposts. Nobody complained about diversity in movies (otherwise I wouldn't have praised Rush Hour and Blade). The complaint was about US movies today being solely built around a toxic form of diversity checkbox ticking, masquerading as entertainment, which is not interesting to anyone outside the US crowds of movie goers who care more about seeing $CURRENT_DAY political issues in their movies instead of recognizing entertainment as being fantasy escapism, which causes the US to loose soft power abroad, and judging by how they flop at the box office, US viewers aren't interested in paying for this slop either.
>most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
Source that they're slop?
>but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
The prequels were considered shit at the time because they were compared to the original masterpieces, but compared to the modern Star Wars that Disney shits out today, they're basically gold. They ended up ageing like wine due to how bad we have it today.
>You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
What's your point here?
The superhero movies that have filled that niche are by any measures wildly popular.
In contrast, "Maximally efficient is minimally robust."
Something that business intelligentsia propagates should be given extra scrutiny. Why should you assume that statement about core competencies is correct, a priori? We have lots of evidence that statement isn't true in general. And we have mountains of evidence that such statements tend to be more incorrect the longer a time horizon you account for.
Vertically integrated businesses aren't rare. Everybody loves being a fabless chip company--until an earthquake or a pandemic hits. Designing chips was not a core competency for Apple--until it was and suddenly you have the M1. GE outsourced water heater manufacturing and lost their core competency to design them. etc.