Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Manufacturing has never really declined in US, not in absolute terms.

It's simply facing the same fate of agriculture: automation.

Politicians want to sell to people they can bring back manufacturing jobs, but it's not like in china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand. It's all automated everywhere.

View on HN

Have you seen that SmarterEveryDay video about trying to make a grill brush in the US? That obviously would’ve been possible in the US 50 years ago but is borderline impossible today because every manufacturer laughs in your face and just says “make it in China, we can’t help you”

This is the most recent of those videos:

https://youtu.be/vS6HEes8daw

(edit: seriously? Who downvotes this. The preceeding comment mentions a video, I share the source, wtf. Don't shoot the messenger.)

Paid actors mostly.

  > it's not like china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand

That was true a while back but less so now. Chinese companies are moving to "dark factories", which can function autonomously without humans (hence no need for lighting).

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1jci...

I think you've misunderstood the sense of the comment you're quoting

They mean it is not the case that in China they make these things by hand.

> Manufacturing has never really declined in US, not in absolute terms.

Is a factory making 2GB RAM chips twice as productive as one making 1GB RAM sticks?

Because if manufacturing output is merely constant while chipmakers’ output has skyrocketed (on paper, as PCs went from 32MB RAM to 32GB over a few decades), other manufacturing output must have fallen a great deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com