If you don't have the factories, you lose the expertise | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have the factories, you lose the expertise

lemire.me

42 pointsibobev11 comments

I've learned to mistrust or even ignore the advice of these analysts. In the past they said "we need to make everything in China because it's cheaper." Now that we've discovered the drawbacks (as stated in the article) they're claiming "we can't make it here anymore because we've lost the skills to do so and we therefore must keep importing from China despite the drawbacks."

These analysts are the reason the West is losing the economic war being waged upon us. They're always cozying up to China and it's making me suspicious of them.

How can we wage war when 80% of the stuff in our weaponry is made in a foreign country which could turn hostile at a moment's notice?

> These analysts are the reason the West is losing the economic war being waged upon us.

If there is a war we started it, but I don't believe there is one, I believe we're losing at the game we invented, and that's hard to swallow. The west used to have ressources, brains and armies, now we're running out of all three because we took them for granted. It's not like China took these from us by force, we gave away most of it

They’re not purposely cozying up to china, they are just short sighted. like all US policies and politics. china is playing a loooooong game. we are trying to win this quarter, this year, etc.

What is the economic war being waged on "the West"?

The U.S. suffers from a geopolitical bubble which operates like a financial bubble. Inside the bubble, global nations rebuilding and trading without the U.S. reserve currency is perceived as war. When it reality it is just the natural course of countries and economies after WW2.

When it was the USA doing it, leading the world in manufacturing, taking industry from other countries, that was just good business, efficiency, exceptionalism, and the world would have to accept it. Now that it is someone else taking the lead, it’s wrong and unfair and a very bad thing.

> In 2000 there were 17.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. The peak was 19.6 million, in June 1979.

The graph right above that clearly shows the peak was 22 million in 1979.

> From the early 1980s to 2000 the count stayed high, apart from the recessions. China joined the WTO in December 2001. By 2010 manufacturing employment was 11.5 million. In August 2026 it was 12.6 million.

The graph shows it was around 1997 when it went into a deep decline, and was still in that decline when China joined the WTO.

> Jensen Huang’s account, as Joseph Steinberg reported it, is that American manufacturing jobs declined because the work was outsourced.

I don't know how much I trust the opinion of someone who doesn't know his own address: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

> There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. ... One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

Not knowing your ZIP or phone number is genuinely insane. That's not even a skill! How does this person operate - do they even know their last name?

> If you don't have the factories, you lose the expertise

If you use AI, you lose expertise too! Retaining expertise isn't a one pony show, it can be done even when externalities work against it, shallow thinking can only do harm here.

This is a very confusing read - hard to understand what the main point the author is trying to make.

Is it that you can't effectively offshore just the factory production (and keep designing from California), and the flattening in manufacturing productivity + job losses is caused by offshoring chip development to China?

This reads like it was written by an LLM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com