American Factories Are Making Stuff Again As CEOs Take Production Out of China (nationalreview.com) 215
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a (paywalled) article from Bloomberg: There has been a sense in financial circles that the fever among American executives to shorten supply lines and bring production back home would prove short-lived. As soon as the pandemic started to fade, so too would the fad, the thinking went.
And yet, two years in, not only is the trend still alive, it appears to be rapidly accelerating.
"This is just economics," says one executive who made the move
National Review shared some telling excerpts from the article: The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year... There are massive chip factories going up in Phoenix: Intel is building two just outside the city; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is constructing one in it. And aluminum and steel plants that are being erected all across the south... Scores of smaller companies are making similar moves, according to Richard Branch, the chief economist at Dodge.
Not all are examples of reshoring. Some are designed to expand capacity. But they all point to the same thing — a major re-assessment of supply chains in the wake of port bottlenecks, parts shortages and skyrocketing shipping costs that have wreaked havoc on corporate budgets in the US and across the globe....
In January, a UBS survey of C-suite executives revealed the magnitude of this shift. More than 90% of those surveyed said they either were in the process of moving production out of China or had plans to do so. And about 80% said they were considering bringing some of it back to the US. (Mexico has also become a popular choice.)
And yet, two years in, not only is the trend still alive, it appears to be rapidly accelerating.
"This is just economics," says one executive who made the move
National Review shared some telling excerpts from the article: The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year... There are massive chip factories going up in Phoenix: Intel is building two just outside the city; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is constructing one in it. And aluminum and steel plants that are being erected all across the south... Scores of smaller companies are making similar moves, according to Richard Branch, the chief economist at Dodge.
Not all are examples of reshoring. Some are designed to expand capacity. But they all point to the same thing — a major re-assessment of supply chains in the wake of port bottlenecks, parts shortages and skyrocketing shipping costs that have wreaked havoc on corporate budgets in the US and across the globe....
In January, a UBS survey of C-suite executives revealed the magnitude of this shift. More than 90% of those surveyed said they either were in the process of moving production out of China or had plans to do so. And about 80% said they were considering bringing some of it back to the US. (Mexico has also become a popular choice.)
As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Informative)
Covid hasnt faded in China and isn't about to any time soon. Political risks are highest they have been in decades and the country is locked down indefinitely. Its uninvestable.
Certainly, but we also have to accept that while manufacturing comes back to the USA, it won't necessarily be with the same number of jobs as in China. There will be a a greater effort to automate where possible, partly due to higher employment costs.
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More of a demand for a living wage and better working conditions. Also while they say Mexico, Canada is also an option as well.
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Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there's a wage shortage. Another way of saying it is that there's a housing shortage, because there literally is that in many places, and housing costs have gone up significantly everywhere (and far more than anything else.) But employers aren't offering enough to live on, then they're complaining that they can't find workers. There's no worker shortage. There's a jobs-that-pay-a-living-wage shortage.
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No, there's an actual labor shortage. One look at demographic pyramid will tell you why. Boomers are retiring, and following generations are too small to replace them.
You can't buy new workers if they're not there. It takes 19 years to get a legal adult from conception to entry into workforce. You cannot accelerate this growth with more wages. Cloning of adults with relevant skills is very far away.
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes 19 years to get a legal adult from conception to entry into workforce. You cannot accelerate this growth with more wages.
We can accelerate it with immigration.
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Indeed. We need to stop exporting manufacturing to China and start importing China for manufacturing. What a genius idea! I'm sure your conservative ilk will love the idea of more immigrants.
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Another good idea is to start exporting manufacturing to central/south America. That way we diversify our manufacturing base without requiring that a bunch of immigrants uproot from their home country (with all the problems accompanying that).
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That's the main reason why US is one of the small handful of industrialized nations that has replacement generations in meaningful numbers.
Want to see a real problem? Look up demographic profiles of Germany or China.
But whether US can increase immigration to levels needed to sustain the new normal of very few children per woman is something that remains to be seen. Or whether other nations will allow US to drain them of their already small amount of youth.
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We can accelerate it with immigration.
Please, no. I see nothing wrong with a shrinking population, in fact, it seems like a responsible thing to do.
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Abortions aren't even a blip on that radar. Unlike pundits would have you believe, there aren't all that many of them, and if women were to have those children, they'd likely not have the ones they have later.
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there's an actual labor shortage. One look at demographic pyramid will tell you why. Boomers are retiring, and following generations are too small to replace them.
No. Just no. There is no labor shortage except in a few edge cases. Employers have been saying they can't find workers since I graduated college decades ago. They said it during the Bush (the first one) depression, they said it during the Bush (the second one) recession, they said it when people lost their jobs during covid. There is literally, in the truest sense of the word, no time when employers aren't whining they can't find people to fill jobs.
If employers were serious about hiring people they'd ditch the automated software which weeds out perfectly good candidates. They wouldn't worry if the person is a perfect fit, but rather someone close enough who could be brought up to speed.
But they won't. It's far easier to whine they can't find people, no matter the situation.
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But they won't. It's far easier to whine they can't find people, no matter the situation.
Whining about the lack of "willing workers" is a strategy for mooching government subsidies through lower taxes and temporary worker visas.
Also, a justification for outsourcing.
Preferably while mooching off the government on account of being a "jawbs pro-wider".
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If you look at my posting history you'll find I am against companies being welfare queens. If you can spend $3 billion to buy back stock in one year, you can afford to build your own plant without the taxpayers footing the bill.
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Employers have been saying they can't find workers since I graduated college decades ago.
That's because you're generalising. The reality is only specific employers have been saying that about very specific industries. And those industries change with changes in consumers behaviour and employment demographics over time.
I remember people saying they can't get enough IT people. I remember people saying they can't get enough engineers. I remember people saying they can't get enough hospitality workers or doctors.
I also remember people saying they can't get any IT jobs because of a saturated market.
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You're confusing narrative with reality. Narrative of "not being able to find workers (because we don't pay enough to attract them, but they exist)" and "you need to pay workers more to attract them (but there aren't any available, so all you'll do is increase inflation)" are both stupid. The difference is that former narrative is indeed a thing of last two decades, while the latter is now.
And reality of demographics doesn't care for narratives.
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No, it's still a wage issue.
Labor force participation is low compared to recent decades. Some of those people will never join the workforce, but there are plenty who would if you pay more.
For example, there's a lot of stay-at-home parents who would like to work, but daycare would consume all of their paycheck. So they don't work because it literally makes everything worse. Pay more, or offer daycare as a benefit, and those people would start working.
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Exactly this. It should surprise nobody that people will not work for a loss. But we live in an era of entitled employers. There have even been a few who advertised "paid internships" meaning you pay them to allow you to be an intern (admittedly very few).
It's funny seeing fast food franchise owners moaning about how much making sandwiches all day sucks and then moaning about how nobody will make sandwiches all day in return for minimum wage so they can make a drudgery free profit. Some even moan about how
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"I didn't realize I have to come in. Can't you just send it to me?"
That's a very good question. Why isn't it possible?
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They still have to return the equipment they're using now which means them (correctly) boxing up everything and having it safely sent back. That is an additional cost. Considering it would take days to get everything in its correct place compared to at most 2 hours, efficiency should take precedence.
Yes, we can if absolutely necessary get them on the machine without first signing into it on the network, but that is also an involved process which takes time. Far better to get everything done in one shot w
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it would be easier for you but a waste of 2h for each employee, multiplied by however many there are.
If it's 500 people, that's 1K hours of driving. It's more efficient to use a pooled resource such as shipping the devices to them using UPS or whatever.
As for returning the old equipment, I don't see a need for that to happen immediately, I mean, what's the rush?
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
Likely, but jobs create other jobs. For example, factory workers want to eat something for lunch, so a few restaurants will come into existence.
A manufacturing job doesn't just create one job position but there's quite a few that follow behind.
Re: As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends. Guaranteed availability is worth money. It may well be that the Chinese ot Vietnamese sweatshop can make it and ship it for almost free, but if you're not going to see it for months, if ever, then paying American minimum wage may be a net savings.
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You make it sound like it's a bad thing.
Would you believe that the average American worker is roughly about 5 times as productive as a Chinese worker? That is, the economic output of that one American worker equals that to around 5 Chinese workers?
What makes Am
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:4, Interesting)
Cheap labor is one thing. You also need a stable and reliable government. That's something you could get from China. Yeah, they don't exactly have the best human rights record, but who gives a fuck, they're stable. The same isn't necessarily true for every other place you could produce for cheap. Even if the government is fairly stable (like, say, North Korea), they may have a history of being kinda capricious and suddenly pretend they don't know you anymore if they don't want to.
Another problem you may run into is that the factory you build somewhere might get blown up because you paid the "wrong" warlord who couldn't protect it, or just didn't give a shit. Or suddenly a coup happens and whoever is next to rule the area says "thanks for all the nice stuff you built, but we'll take it from here".
Just because you could get cheap labor doesn't mean that you really want to invest in an area.
Re: As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:2)
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China is more than cheap + Mexico anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
I think some countries in Africa would be a good fir and would also take the wind out of chinas sail. There plenty of low skilled manufacturing. Not everyone makes smartphones. Plenty of pencil manufacturing goes on as well, as a low tech example.
There are many places with cheaper labor that China. China offered low wages, gov support, stability, and heavy investment in industry. So a pencil company builds a factory in Haiti. Can they get enough raw material? Can they ship it out fast enough? How much product disappears before it reaches its destination?
I was told a story from a tool executive. They opened a hand-tool factory in Mexico in the 80s (wrenches, screwdrivers, the stuff you by from HomeDepot). They did all the math and given the much lower wages and huge number of unemployed there, it seemed like a slam dunk. The best minds from McKinsey were advising them.
They begin construction with a local gov and were given tax breaks and all sorts of guarantees...then that guy lost reelection and now suddenly all sorts of permits were missing, but it was hinted that a campaign donation would get them straightened right out or some check written to some person. OK, so they were hit by some bad graft before they even got started...
So 2 years down the road, the factory is constructed. They're fully staffed and they're making tools at 1/4 the cost of their previous Midwest plant. But...their production line shuts down about once a month due to power outages. So they have to invest in larger backup generators that can run the plant for a whole day without power.
Now here's the kicker. They've accepted that they can now only make a tool at 1/2 the cost of their midwestern plant, which they're winding down production for. The bargain tools were now being made in Mexico, but the professional-grade tools were still made in the USA. Part of their marketing was proudly saying "made in the USA" back when that meant a lot more in the 80s.
OK. Now about every 2-4 weeks, their shipments from the Mexican factory to their American warehouse were reporting shipments coming in light. They installed security cameras at their 2 locations and fired drivers, but still never found why a truck would leave the factory with 10,000 units and arrive with 9,900. Sometimes trucks would disappear. They spoke with law enforcement and got no results.
The same happened with raw materials going inbound. Also, local suppliers said they could deliver a fixed amount of raw steel at a specified cost...but those were both unreliable and prone to wild price fluctuations. So that's why China dominates.
They're cheap, yes, but many places are cheaper. They're predictable and stable. They ask for any bribes up front.
When the gov decides they want a factory, they invest in roads, ports, raw materials, etc to ensure the success of a business. In Mexico and many other countries, the local politicians were short sighted and only interested in graft. They didn't care if you succeeded or failed. China, with its central planning, knows that your success will bring more investment and make you more dependent on them. Their graft is slow and methodical and even symbiotic.
Like the proverbial frogs being boiled slowly, they boiled American companies VERY slowly...maybe they didn't even boil them. I'm not even sure. However, they dominate not because they're cheap, but they invested seriously to ensure of the success of anyone who invested in them. They made sure permits were ready, roads were built, raw materials were readily available, ports had availability and all infrastructure was in place.
China took business seriously.
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Informative)
they don't exactly have the best human rights record, but who gives a fuck, they're stable.
Except they aren't so stable. Xi is threatening Taiwan, cracking down on HK, antagonizing all of China's neighbors, creating a Mao-style personality cult, and (worst of all) going after actual capitalists like Jack Ma, not just oppressing Muslims and migrant workers. It make not take much for domestic unrest to flare up or for an incident in the South China Sea to trigger a flurry of tit-for-tat diplomatic actions that end up shutting down trade.
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Yeah, but that's a fairly new development. Or rather, yeah, they've been shaking their fist at Taiwan for the past 40 years but only now it looks like they could actually act on that whim, probably encouraged by the success Russia had in Ukraine... beats me why that would be encouraging to anyone, but it seems that they are.
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I view the Russian action in the opposite way. China has a clear demonstration that the world almost unilaterally opposed Russia's invasion, responded with economic sanctions, and pulled businesses out of the country.
China certainly has the option of invading Taiwan, but not only does that create a risky war, it's pretty much guaranteed to cost them normalized relations with some of their biggest international markets.
Russian's invasion of Ukraine is the best thing that's happened recently for Taiwan.
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Yeah, sarcasm travels really badly across a written medium, twice so in a foreign language...
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I view the Russian action in the opposite way. China has a clear demonstration that the world almost unilaterally opposed Russia's invasion, responded with economic sanctions, and pulled businesses out of the country.
The world didn't "almost unilaterally" oppose the Russian invasion. Most didn't care and just had their UN diplomats vote to condemn the action since not doing so might expose them to the risk of sanctions from the rich Western countries that did oppose the invasion.
If anything, I'd say it'd be pretty much the same kind of vote you'd get if the Palestinians had filed a UN resolution against Israel.
The result may well be different if China invaded Taiwan. China is an important economic "partner", for better
Your point about homelife is irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
It's still more investable than Chicago. Or Baltimore. Or the urban areas of LA. What do those areas all have in common? 85% of all children have no father in the hom. And oh, they're black, which is not itself the problem, it's the lack of fathers and the complete dominatino of the culture by single mothers with men only being "baby daddies" that make them unstable.
Ignoring your racism and flagrant stereotyping, let's say your statement is 100% accurate and true...I lived in the South Side of Chicago for 6 years while getting my degree, so I can say firsthand your stats are very wrong even back then when it was worse....
...very few...most commute 30-60 minutes, so you can build anywhere and find workers who will drive to the job.
If they built a factory on the South Side of Chicago, they'd just hire people from the burbs to work there. What percentage of Google's employees do you think actually live in Mountain View? What percentage of Microsoft's live in Redmond?
People don't want to build factories in urban areas for a myriad of reasons:
1. it's just logistically difficult to buy enough land, tear it down, and build what you want. You can usually do it cheaper in the rural South, saving on the land costs, inspection costs, local contractor costs, etc. It's cheaper to buy an empty lot near the interstate. Simply getting an excavator or bulldozer into an urban area can be very challenging and costly.
2. People in the city stand up for their rights regarding labor and environmental practices. In the middle of nowhere, people don't have as much power to stop you from dumping toxic waste into the local river. If you're caught dumping toxins into Lake Michigan or the Chicago River, 2.7 million people will be affected and will certainly have something to say about it. If you want to break labor laws, the local officials are more likely to do something about it because Chicago has a diverse economy. A rural hick town with nothing but that factory has less leverage in negotiations to push back.
3. Finally, with rising automation, cheap labor is less crucial than reliability. Sites are chosen more for their ability to run production lines continuously. How smoothly can you get raw materials in? How quickly can you get finished products out? Chicago is a city built as a railway hub. When trains were the main means of moving cargo in the USA, they were the top choice to build a factory. Now that semi trucks are more popular, other places can compete more effectively.
Today's factory rarely relies and an army of humans and more on technical sophistication. You clearly have negative views of Chicago, let's be honest, black people. However, your quasi-white-supremacist argument really has no relevance. Jobsites are chosen based on logistical characteristics much more than the moral character of their residents.
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That's why there so much "oh, no, needs to be a joint venture with a domestic firm"/technology and capability transfer/Great Firewall restrictions t
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:4)
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Actual conventional war between US and China is rather unlikely.
An economic war on the other hand? Not only likely, I'd say it already started.
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"The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year"
Seems to me that 116% of nothing is still nothing. Trade balance dropping or at least domestic production rising faster than import of foreign goods US Production is mainly goods that are so capital intensive that labor costs are not relevant, or production that can be so automated that shipping outpaces limited labor cost.
A true turn-around would be a massive resurgence of the production of FMCG in t
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... it's better to be jobless than insert a screw in a phone for the rest of your life.
I'm all for helping people out if the job they have isn't covering their bills, daycare, etc., but if there's a job available, and you don't take it because you feel it's beneath you to do, you deserve no public support. You don't get to live off my tax dollars because you aren't able to get your dream job.
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Yes, and amount of societal control necessary to make sure only the truly needy get help would cause the Conservatives to whine incessantly. Then they'd get their lapdogs on the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. Then they get a bill passed to allow assistance as long as it is doled out from a "Christian" organization. If you don't believe in the god they've created for themselves and you are screwed.
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Informative)
It's not only that. China simply isn't a trustworthy business partner anymore. And note how I say China and not Chinese companies. These companies may want to be, but they aren't allowed to by the CCP. They will steal your designs, copy them and sell them dirt cheap while pretending to work for you. They have a history of stealing R&D and so far, the damage didn't outweigh the profit, but we're passing that mark now that people have less money and will rather reach for the cheap knockoff, not because they want to save money but simply because they can't afford your expensive brand goods anymore.
With manufacturing back in the US, not only does it protect your investment and your R&D, it also means more money in the pockets of your customers which enables them to buy your stuff again. Because believe it or not, they know that the cheap Chinese knockoffs are crap. If they could afford the stuff you make, they would gladly do so.
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been saying for the last ten years. China is not your friend; they never have been.
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Yeah, you know how it is, CEOs and other retards need a tad bit longer to learn.
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Oh CEOs know going in. The problem is that in the short term they get millions more in the short term and don't have any incentive to care what happens after that.
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Nah, CEOs only care about the next quarter since that's all that matters for their options.
It takes a lot longer than that for moving to China to burn the company, and they'll probably have pulled their golden parachute before it hurts the company that much.
Re: As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:2)
Yes and no. The trend of factories coming back to the states started 15 years ago. As the 2007 gas spike made it suddenly unaffordable to ship. Factories take decades to move. Covid and current gas prices are acceleratong a trend started a long time ago.
A trend driven initially bybthe Chinese government policies of stealing tech.
Combined with it is no longer the source of cheapest labor
Re:As soon as the pandemic started to fade (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also running out of working age people. One child policy came home to roost. Chinese work force is now more expensive than pretty much all the nations around China, and notably more expensive than Mexican work force.
And Chinese factory owners are struggling to find workers even at those new high wages. All while the Chinese economic model of "shove capital into anything that produces jobs regardless of viability, because workers who have no work go on Long Marches, and that's how current leadership got their jobs" is failing due to lack of capital. As seen in the slow collapse of the real estate market and increasing funding demands from local governments that traditionally raised capital from land sales to real estate developers.
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I think China wages are only high nearer to the coast.
If you go further West, I think they are relatively lower - for now.
But of course that brings out a bunch of other issues regarding logistics to move things to and from the ports which will be 1000s of km away, especially if a province or city in the middle gets shut due to covid. Not to mention the extra cost / complexity in logistics, even if everything moves smoothly.
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We're talking about factory worker wages. Most of the manufacturing is concentrated in specific geographic areas such as Guangdong province. The rest of the nation gets their growth primarily from investments, which is basically recycled income streams from the small handful of actually productive provinces.
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Covid hasnt faded in China and isn't about to any time soon. Political risks are highest they have been in decades and the country is locked down indefinitely. Its uninvestable.
It took Russia to invade Ukraine for corporations to realize that authoritarian regimes can go batshit crazy on you at a whim, so they might not be the best countries for long-term investments.
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And one million dead people from Covid in two years is testament that you are full of shit.
Although the Americans are mad on american made (Score:2)
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There was a time when American made meant the best for a lot of things. Hell, even American cars were the best through the sixties. Chrysler of all companies used to be a technology leader!
The seventies is approximately when everything went to shit in the name of faster cheaper more profitable. We outsourced all the production that was no longer profitable here when you had competition. In the USA you see a sharp decline in quality of most goods at that specific point. Cast metal replaced with sheet, sheet
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Well, we want cheaper and cheaper. A TV set in the 1970s when my parents bought their first one was around 300 or 400 bucks. About the same it costs today, right? The difference is that my dad pretty much also earned those 400 bucks a month, To me that's closer to a day's income.
That's the difference here. My mother had kitchen appliances that lasted for years. Decades even. And they better, considering that their price tag. Today you pay 50 bucks for a mixer and wonder why it breaks within a year. Well, 50
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Companies were not driven by quarterly profits as much in the 70s, they didn't need to sell you a new one every year to keep the numbers up. The fridge my parents had in their garage lasted for over 60 years, you just can't buy anything like it anymore. It was eventually ruined by rodents, not because it stopped working.
Like this but it was pink:
https://midcenturychicago.blog... [blogspot.com]
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That's the difference here. My mother had kitchen appliances that lasted for years. Decades even. And they better, considering that their price tag. Today you pay 50 bucks for a mixer and wonder why it breaks within a year. Well, 50 bucks is pretty much also what she paid for hers. Only that those 50 bucks had a lot more value back in that day.
You can't expect quality when you are not willing to pay for it.
Indeed.
Fortunately, there's a fair bit of kit where you can pay extra and get the reliability, by buyi
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The computer screens I'm sitting in front of right now are from 2005. 22", non-glare. Cost 800 a piece back then. But given their lifetime and the quality I got out of them throughout that lifetime, I dare say they were eventually not only cheaper but also of higher quality than a series of cheap ones.
Same for those Sennheiser 363Ds. Had them for about 10 years now. Still working. Still great. Only thing I had to switch from time to time were the ear pads because ... no matter how you take care of them, eve
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That was also the point of the rise of the attitude that corporations should be managed for the shareholders instead of for the health, vitality, and lifetime of the corporation. In the game of what came first, the chicken or the egg, I believe the start was when corporate raiders started forcing this new attitude on healthy corporations.
Oh, I've read this one before! You're one of the guys who bought into the Japanese Threat in the 1980s! That was hilarious. The Japanese economy was looking good and, the novelization of that went, "They plan ahead in decades! CENTURIES! While American corporations are just looking at NEXT QUARTER! We are all doomed to become slaves of the Japanese Empire!"
Which all turned out to be true, of course, but shut up and enjoy your soylent green, grandpa-san. You can shout at clouds after dinner and your nap.
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I believe the 70s were when smog controls came into being, which was a real problem for American car manufacturers. It went downhill, quickly... ...and the rest is history.
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Not in my lifetime. We bought a Honda. The sales people treated my mother like a real customer. Good warranty. American made were teens picking up dates.
My anecdote differs from yours: Hondas suck. Have two. They break more than my Chevy did twice their age and the dealers don't acknowledge that my report of the issue for the past three trips should be respected even though we are just now out of warranty.
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True. I've been buying a motor from an American manufacturer for 15 years. What I used to get for less than $200 is now around $325 and instead of a 16-20 week lead time, it's now 35 weeks. What's worse is that a different motor from the same manufacturer is no longer being made and a substitute would be three times as expensive (from $200 to $600) and they want $10,000 NRE and $5000 for tooling. It wasn't always this way. Not too long ago, they were willing to make certain modifications e.g. output sh
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Wishful thinking. From what I can discern, nearly nothing is or was done by robots. About the only thing that robots do are produce semiconductors and weld and paint cars.
The US has a deficit of skilled labor to operate things like milling machines. That is how stuff is actually produced, not by robots, both in China and the US. If you're lucky, maybe with computer numerically-controlled machines.
Re:Although the Americans are mad on american made (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, quite a few people still doing full work days on the shop floor. When people on slashdot think of “automation” they really mean “lights-out manufacturing” ie fully automated no people required so just turn the lights out and let it run. Wikipedia claims there are “many of these” but I’ve never seen one. I know they exist but whenever you read an article about the topic, you hear mention of a 3-d printing facility in australia, certain rooms in TSMC or Intel, and one Japanese robotics factory. In other words, a lot of people talk about it, but not widespread yet.
The US government tried to design a lights-out facility for vehicles. Musk tried for something like 95% automation at the beginning of Tesla’s scale-up effort and abandoned it. Hairless beach-apes are still required.
Time for some protective measures. (Score:2)
Now would be the ideal time to pass legislation that would ensure a certain amount of production is retained and/or diversified amongst many nations. Like it or not, the supply chain is in fact a national security issue which means it must be made to be robust enough to avoid another massive collapse, even if it incurs additional costs to businesses. We've seen that there is in fact a single point of failure and it's high time we rectify the situation.
It might be "economics" now to make things in the US b
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I'm pretty sure they are going to be recycling the water.
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Legislation isn't the answer; private business can respond much more quickly when the next issue comes up.
The shortsightedness of "private business" (mostly publicly owned multinational corporations) is precisely why this problem exists.
If you think the multinational corps do anything except for optimize for ideal conditions and then come begging to the government for help when things get mucked up then you don't know multinational corps. The free market does not optimize for being robust, it optimizes for profit. Claiming anything else is an idiotic libertarian fantasy.
If the supply chain is a national security issue, why not strengthen shipping?
Simple, no single shipment is so valuab
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Red China is no longer a reliable trading partner (Score:2)
JIT (Score:2)
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It doesn't mean "no spares anywhere ever" in theory, and when done by competent companies.
But in practice, it means "no spares anywhere ever", because the vast majority of management is incompetent. And selling off that warehouse gooses this quarter's numbers, making their bonus much larger. No matter how needed that warehouse is when supply chains don't operate flawlessly. That's the next guy's problem.
Wishful statistics (Score:2)
116%. Wowee! Except that is probably just a return to normal after pandemic shutdowns. The US does not have the skilled workers or knowhow to make most things that are made in China at anything approaching the price from China. US manufacturing is mainly for big ticket items, like the machines that make other machines.
War with China (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think China has to be crazy if they think Russia is doing a good job in Ukraine.
And considering that alot of fabs (TSMC) are in Taiwan (with promises to blow them up the moment a Chinese soldier steps foot on Taiwan), I think China will have to consider that they will have alot more backlash / self inflicted economic problems with no chips from Taiwan.
Not to mention sanctions and probably an ongoing guerilla warfare in Taiwan for the long term, even if they manage to capture the whole island.
War with China is not an option (Score:2)
It's also about automation (Score:2)
This trend has been going on for years. Higher shipping costs and supply chain disruptions accelerated it, but there's another big reason: labor costs just don't matter as much anymore. Manufacturing is way more automated than it used to be. Companies spent 40 years chasing cheap labor around the world. But a modern factory only needs maybe 10% as many workers as it did 40 years ago. When labor isn't your main cost anymore, you start optimizing for other things like shipping costs and the speed of gett
Collapse of supply chains (Score:2)
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America has finally become the s_hole country where no one is paid a living wage or gets proper medical care. Perfect conditions for mass manufacturing.
I'm replying to this because although I think you're both overstating the case and trolling us, I also think you have a valid point. Upward mobility has decreased hugely in the US in the past few decades, the middle class is steadily shrinking, and corporations have more and more influence over the government. So not only has China become less attractive for manufacturing, America has become more so. The results will be interesting, at least for some values of "interesting"...
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I took a new job that pays nearly $30k a year. Unfortunately the insurance is high deductible, $10,000 fucking dollars. Any minor outpatient procedure is going to wipe out any gains. I had to get an old tooth filling replaced. My dental insurance paid $19 and I paid $56 for the office visit out of pocket. Why am I even bothering with insurance if they can't even kick in a full Andrew Jackson note.
Currently I have an infected molar that's impacted and has to be removed surgically. Can't wait to see what that
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Should have said $30k more a year.
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You're thinking about the 20th century. The robots are coming. We'll be building factories that build automated factories. We still need food, though. Modern huge monoculture fields that uses huge machinery and toxic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers is killing the environment. It's time for food forests and permaculture, which will take a whole lot of human labor, and will be a whole lot more satisfying than factory work.
You're thinking about the 20th century. The robots are coming. We'll be building robots that can pick fruit and pull weeds, which will eliminate a whole lot of human labor, and it will be a lot less necessary for our overlords to permit a large population to exist.
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You're thinking about the 20th century. The robots are coming. We'll be building robots that can pick fruit and pull weeds, which will eliminate a whole lot of human labor, and it will be a lot less necessary for our overlords to permit a large population to exist.
Exactly. People think the ultra rich will still need plebs to maintain their lifestyle but that’s not true. Real AI and cheap automation including humanoid androids means humans will be undercut in price forever. The ultra rich will just own the self replicating factories that produce all the mansions, mega yachts, and other toys. With direct manufacturing of novel designs, or even entertainment on demand what good are the plebs? Humans will only be needed as sex slaves or for entertainment.
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Robots may actually obviate the need for pesticides and herbicides. They can continuously work the land to remove undesirable pests.
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Not if they are made in China!
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Robots may actually obviate the need for pesticides and herbicides. They can continuously work the land to remove undesirable pests.
Any technology can be used for good or evil proportionate to its power. Sadly, we need to stay on top of things to benefit more from reduced pesticide use than miniature suicide bomb drones or automated gun turrets.
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You're thinking about the 20th century when automation mostly reduced manual labor (the nearly 100-fold decimation of secretaries in the early 80s being a noted exception). It's not just the low end jobs that are in danger. For example, we now have AI that is much better at reading medical scans than the average human. Those are $300K yearly type jobs. Another example is found in the banking and financial industries that expect to replace more than half of their analysts with AI and other automated tools in
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What are we doing again with saviours ... hmm ...
Right! I remember! I get the wood, you get the nails! Meet you here in an hour!
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Thank you for this comment. I don't understand why it isn't at +5 Informative. All of those companies that are considering moving manufacturing back to the US probably never accounted for the possibility of reduced Chinese tariffs. They will probably all go bankrupt. Well unless we can spread the word and get their CEOs to read your comment. Good news is the CEOs probably all read /. at -1 so they are sure to see this and their b
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" address inflation by removing Trump-era tariffs"
way to pick on small detail on Biden's agenda and inflate it argue it is his game plan for inflation. Nothing he does will bring down the price of oil, something he understands but Republicans do not.
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I thought this strategy coming from the Biden administration was well known. There is a recent article at CNBC [cnbc.com] covering it.
President Joe Biden could soon introduce a modest relief package to roll back some U.S. tariffs imposed on China in a bid to tamp down inflation, said Clete Willems, a former top White House trade negotiator.
I personally don't think adjusting tariffs will have a meaningful effect on inflation, at least not to lower it. It will most likely cause a medium term impact the working class, as domestic investment dries up and pressure rises on international shipping fleets and fuel usage for transportation heats up.
Politically it a mistake as mid-term elections receive a lot of Democratic voter tu
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