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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.

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Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.

Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.

Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."

You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.

that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.

> For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.

So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous, monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a shit about. Wonderful.

I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can openly be.

You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us: better lives for themselves and their family. If they're working in a factory and not the alternatives it's because they passed something else along the way that was an even shittier option than that.

> You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have.

My statement is in reply to those who are unconcerned about exploiting desperate societies.

Short of going back to a society of married families with a single income, there isn't really a solution to keeping everyone working and making an income though. Without jobs, we revert from a modern society to a third world nation.

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