What it would take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing might | Hacker News Reader

What it would take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing might

axios.com

17 pointspetethomas24 comments

I get why the government is keen to do this, but what sane citizen wants to live anywhere near those factories they want to bring back? Nothing like contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc, etc. Not to mention they'd surely be built with automation in mind to rug pull and wishful thinking about job creation. No thanks.

The factory work doesn't pay as much as Nursing careers or Building Houses for carpenters, plumbers, roofers, etc.

I have a feeling factories will use H1B Visas to bring in immigrants to do the work and fire them as soon as the H1B Visa expires, and hire all new H1B Visa workers.

I don’t think factory worker is quite a covered specialty profession…

This seems to confirm one of the premises of Capital by Marx, as this only works while there is inequality in the global market.

As purchasing power in China grows, their labour costs grow because they start demanding similarly unpolluted environment, and dirty production will start moving to the next country.

Is it not the answer that you demand a clean production or stop using products which cannot guarantee it? The fact that consumers do not apply this logic means that NIMBY can only take you so far, because if we accept polluting production, some humans will have to deal with it somewhere.

> contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc,

Ah yes, who can forget everyone's experience at the Denver, Colorado zoo, a 10 minute drive (or 30-40 minute bike ride) from a massive oil refinery operating since the 1930s. Same with the Rocky Mountains, totally polluted and gross by the likes of factories like Coors. Definitely stay away from those places. Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, CO? With so many factories up there and everywhere around, what's going to get them first, Colorado's water, air, or rain?

Look up on the hillsides as you drive west on I70. See those yellowish piles of rock? Mine tailings leaching arsenic and all kinds of bad stuff. Take a tour of the Argo mill in Idaho Springs. They'll let you look at the rainbow colored water running out of that old mine. Rockies aren't totally polluted but it's not rosy either.

Pity the kids getting jobs in the ol' Argo Mill. Exactly what the article and OP are lamenting: trillions of dollars of investment in 1800s-era mining for gold, that rare earth metal vital to national security. No sane person would ever want to live in the Rockies.

That's something of a modern viewpoint. If you hike in the Rockies, you'll find that a lot of the bronze survey markers on top of mountains are stamped "Bureau of Reclamation". Mountainous regions weren't valued except for extractive purposes until recently. Why do you think Long's Peak and the Mummy Range were available to be converted to Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915?

Better than your kids having to move to China for upward mobility, which is the way we're currently headed.

> Better than your kids having to move to China for upward mobility, which is the way we're currently headed.

I see, we're currently headed in the direction of falling skies, imminent nuclear threats and various other nasty Godzillas which, of course, urgently require more sacrifice from the population for more "preventive" wars, both trade and kinetic, so that the value of assets concentrated in very few hands can grow faster.

It's really urgent, honest! These same hands benefited greatly from globalization, but now, on the way back, it's your turn to sacrifice for their continued benefit.

The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to nurture multiple suppliers for critical items?

Cheap electricity. Like a 10x-15x reduction.

We can't change material cost at the moment, but this is something we could have influence over. Recycling steel and aluminum would be dirt cheap. We'd leap even farther ahead in training AI models. We'd reduce carbon emissions from shipping. So many beautiful outcomes.

I can dream. If there's one upside to the AI boom, I hope we see a plethora and overbuild of power infrastructure and a second coming of nuclear energy. Alas, both blue and red hate nuclear when both should love it.

So cheap electricity will come by building out the most expensive source of electricity?

Sigh. You are the reason we can't move forward.

But surely he has to be right here? If nuclear power is expensive relative to other ways of getting electricity and not variable, then it surely can't bring prices down?

or are you imagining nuclear power as some sort of variable base load for renewables, using some sort of improved plants or something?

US industrial production is actually quite strong https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ip100_f2.svg

Fairly modest tariffs and incentives would probably swing things. It needs to be planned ahead though as training and building factories takes a while. One reason China is strong now is they trained a load of engineers 20 or 30 years ago.

How do you compete with China? You loose on regulatory costs before you even consider anything else.

Don't compete with China. They're merchantilist for one, and if you want environmental standards in manufacturing, you can't negotiate free trade agreements with one party states.

TPP was an attempt at this.

To start with, they’d have to be willing to pay more in Walmart for us made goods…

I can’t read the full article, but the snippet (6%gdp/$2T) seems not that expensive? And you could read that either way ”cheap so we should do it” or “if we end up needing to do it, we can do it”.

Cost is one thing, time is another. You’d need massive investment in trade education and then wait 20 years. See vocational education in German speaking countries as an example.

Meta-question, are all Axios stories written by clankers or do they just have an editorial policy that they have to look like they are?

Rebuilding US manufacturing might would take the same thing that built it in the first place. Very high universal tariffs.

https://archive.ph/erHoE

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