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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> As we all know, manufacturing in the US has been gutted and is now largely based in developing countries

We all know it, and yet it's not actually true. America is the largest manufacturer in the world.

The main that happened is America switched from making many multiples of cheap item, to making smaller quantities of much more expensive and complicated items.

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The CNC mills have revolutionized small production runs. For example, it used to be very hard to restore old cars for which parts were no longer available. For example, decades ago a guy down the street restored some old Mercedes limousine he showed me, and I asked him how he dealt with the unavailablity of parts. He said "oh, I just made them" and showed me his fully equipped machine shop in his basement.

That can now be done with a simple CNC machine.

A lot of shops have sprung up that apparently have libraries of CNC designs, and they manufacture the parts on demand.

I suppose I should change the language of my post to say that "manufacturing employment has been gutted", as that is what I actually meant.

You are correct, there has been a resurgence in manufacturing in the US. The issue is that these new facilities are much more autonomous then their predecessors, and they are not going to result in pre-1980 manufacturing employment levels. While output may reach record highs, employment won't.

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