There are lots of companies who standard ranges are made in China, but they also have a Made in America/other for their premium range.
That way customers who are less price sensitive can choose to pay more. And those who can't still buy regardless.
I think you just answered your question by yourself without realizing: the signs are that an adversarial conflict might come up - so be prepared for it.
It is an unproven criteria that it is reasonable or possible to expect to produce the munitions and equipment for a conflict during the conflict if it's the sort of near-peer thing people usually cite for this - i.e. rather you go to war with what you have, and you're unlikely to rebuild that advantage in time if you don't win then.
Which is the point: localizing a bunch of industries on that basis may not make any sense, compared to simply stockpiling from the cheapest accreditable sources.
There always is a bill - and business is helping the enemies of liberty to prepare. They are not interested in peaceful coexistence, quite contrary, the conflict is a carrying pillar to upkeep societal/tribal structural integrity. And war & peace is a defector game- only one needs to defect to put the others in the same position as the defector. So "business as usual" with non-free block aligned nations- will always be long-term collusion with the enemy.
There are some premium brands that can (partially) pull it off like KitchenAid but that’s an exception.
Fine products but shady behavior to say the least.
I've actually seen arguments that this is so strong it loops back around to discouraging American manufacturing. Is there any "Made in America" loving consumer who wouldn't be happy to buy that lamp?
Perhaps they need to have everyone agree on labeling that fairly describes the product but is still flattering enough to motivate consumer decisions.
He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch.
The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one.
Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...
Why pick one with a significant, unpredictable, often unknown flaw. Where if it happens you end up needing major surgery?
And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
Ah, yes, magical plastic molecules. Exactly what I want between fire and my food.
I'm just about the last person to give a crap about microplastics but cooking temperatures and long weird hydrocarbon molecules are where I draw the line.
>And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
This is true for just about everything.
Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?
I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?
Look, I love Destin, watch all his stuff recommend it all the time.
But I'm never going to buy this product, it's just too expensive for what it does compared to the alternatives.
And I know he knows that. He's clearly at least 'not stupid'.
So something isn't squaring with this.
Lots of smart people get hooked onto extremely specific solutions that aren't even improvements.
I saw it in software development with many things (VIPER and SwiftUI both reduce development velocity compared to MVC and old-school Interface Builder); I've seen it with Musk trying to do tunnels even when roads would be cheaper and safer; there's also (infamously) Juicero; and in the UK in the 80s there was the Sinclair C5.
That said, is this really an example of that?
Myself, I barely use my electric barbecue, so I don't know the best way to clean things (it's not yet become dirty enough to bother cleaning). But I have seen the brushes he's complaining about, and I have not previously considered using tinfoil, so it's not a completely crazy idea that people might want a better brush.
Some people care more about getting exactly the right thing, even if the value proposition is weaker. They'll pay significantly more for apparently trivial differences, because they don't want to buy something they're not happy with; they're spending money anyway and why put up with something they don't want if they can afford something they do want?
Neither of these people are strictly unreasonable.
The current US administration claims to be concerned about domestic manufacturing and so on, but hasn't even mentioned this issue at all.
As a small operation, there are 0 affordable resources at my disposal to fight IP theft.
(IANAL) This may fall under a DCMA-like concept where sites are not responsible for 'user content'. The 'user' in question is the vendor and their 'profile' of sellable items is the content. Similar to how eBay is not (?) responsible for the items put up for sale.
(Not saying this is (morally) right, just describing the situation. I would really like to see some accountability as well.)
Personally I strongly prefer knockoffs. Same quality, but cheaper.
He just happens to be in Alabama, but the principle applies to someone in Massachusetts or Hawaii as well.
There was a book making the rounds recently that also details some of the discussion around skills being the thing the west exported: https://appleinchina.com/
The author readily admits in a podcast that while Apple plays a big part in the story it's a clickbait title because no one would buy a book titled something along the lines of "supply chains and China."
Decent (if superficial) interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc
PSA: the si parameter, along with pp, are for tracking purposes. Consider trimming them when doing a copy-paste if possible.
>faux fur lining for the cover, which would still need to be imported from China—adding another $100 per unit.
How is the cost of a part the same as the whole product?
The foam for the beds is extremely compact when vacuum sealed, and is used in tons of other products.
The standard fabric cover is also probably produced in massive quantities for other products, and also folds down to be quite compact.
Faux fur is basically only used in blankets, pillow and toy linings, and depending on how dense the "fur" is, may add quite a bit more volume (a bigger problem if shipped to the US from a separate supplier than the foam).
With that said, $100 does seem rather steep for the cover. I'm assuming they had to use a specialty version to make it more rugged than the cheaper stuff used for other products to be pet friendly.
My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are..
Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive
People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!)
That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging
Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns)
Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :)
There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11?
I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
In liberal arts nobody comes close, but the "value" of that is largely explained by "networking" (network effects if we're to be charitable :)
In theoretical research, gap is rapidly closing.
In hard sciences research, I only see clear supremacy in capital intensive areas. Guess that's where the footguns were aimed at.
The classroom teaching is a mixed bag
Funny though I used to be proud of the Chinese language collection at my Uni which is one of the greatest outside (any) China and I still am but once I got really interested in the Chinese language it hit me that it's like 1% of what they have at Beijing University.
My favorite recollection in that place was going through Ken Wilson's notes. IIRC there was FORTRAN. Most interesting was a proof of Dyson's conjecture. Cant really remember because it wasn't that useful. Thought it was weird that he left-- gossip says it was the wife-- but nice that some people still bothered.
Institutions rise & fall. Become cringe. Achievements can endure, but only thru the effort of wider communities to distill and distribute.
From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence.
Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today.
Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have.
Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society.
From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house.
Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out.
The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking these people want you to use. They want you to doubt every institution and have some anecdote about why it is the right way to think, when in reality it is the doing of a few elites, not institutions that are largely made up of people like you an mean. They want culture war between us instead of class warfare against them.
Perhaps one day people will start paying attention to the wealth inequality gap and realize what is going on... but increasinly unlikely if you demonize and undermine academia
Saying "the entire institution of higher education is not collectively responsible for this specific bad economic policy choice" is somehow equivalent to saying "we should go kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect the poor Kurds/Palestinians/Israelis/etc"??
No; even leaving aside your apparent (and wild) misconception that "academia" is a unified, monolithic body akin to the medieval Catholic Church, unless you're willing to dial down your rhetoric to something less self-indulgently overdramatic and engage with actual reality in a vaguely reasonable manner, I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion.
Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now.
I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
Which one is easier to nab?
The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990).
So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.
I don't think people understand how fortunate the US is to be reasonably uncorrupt/have a solid rule of law, have the world reserve currency, and for the most part be where any company in the world would prefer to be incorporated. That type of branding is impossible to put a value on.
Unfortunately the US is currently speed running to remove these advantages. Luckily it takes time for large money outflows to occur, and hopefully US law can hold in the meantime.
Maybe I’m just paranoid, and I know it doesn’t happen overnight, but my goodness… that keeps me up at night.
Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.
1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992)
2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote
>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
--Snow Crash,1992
Why should you care about a quote from any time period? Because it expresses something well.
Why should you care about an older quote? Because it expresses something well enough to have endured.
You think China can't write microcode?
You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense.
High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered?
Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?
As of today China hasn't totally, or indeed really, caught up in the first 3. (Think about why). You might argue the Eurozone is up there in music but then you remember TikTok isn't quite YouTube.
High speed pizza delivery is the most hilarious because it's the only material domain that they won't make progress at (in the foreseeable future). They have better EVs better batteries and maybe better food (in general). Just not pizza because pizza is pizza, and drones still lag behind the fastest nuclear bike when it comes to shipping frozen pizza from Shanghai to your doorstep (is there even a market for frozen pizza in Hong Kong?)
(I'm glad he didn't mention games at all because it would have been the obvious one in 1992, but wrong 2025)
Snow Crash is positing once the mechanical and geographic advantages flatten globally you’re left with services of some sort - media, logistics, software: FAANG. It doesn’t seem far from the mark.
I wouldn’t be dismissive of the minds of the past. They’re in the context that leads to your present and have a unique perspective. The filter of history means the books that bubble up are from the most insightful and brilliant of their era, which means effectively the signal is clearly separated from the noise unlike the presents analysis of itself. If you want to understand what’s happening now read the science fiction of yesterday.
This. It's like everyone collectively forgot. If that time period had the internet meme culture of today, “Made in the USA” would've become one the same way "Made in China" did.
Capitalism wreaked havoc on quality goods, while prices skyrocketed. Then when given the chance, they all packed up shop of their own free will to create even cheaper goods while politicians did nothing to stop it, and in-fact incentivized it.
Now we blame those countries for "taking away" manufacturing, when it was the greedy capitalistic US company CEOs, shareholders and US politicians who did it, while those countries simply capitalized on the opportunity and built themselves up.
The point is, people say they don’t like Chinese made goods with one side of their mouth while the other side is saying they don’t really care at all as they continue shopping and purchasing these Chinese goods. Walmart and Amazon really laid the groundwork to the point that the SHEIN and Temus of the world happened. Consumers just don’t care about any other than price
When hyper-productive sectors, say, tech in the Bay Area, start paying top dollar, everyone else in the same talent pool eventually needs to follow suit.
Even industries with stagnant labour productivity, like K-12 education, have to hike their wages to attract and retain staff. They can't offset these higher costs with efficiency gains, and that's where the "disease" kicks in.
If you think this is caused by a common currency, consider labour costs in developing countries which use the US dollar. Do those costs go up when labour productivity in the Bay Area goes up?
A valuable dollar kills exports and high paying sectors brain-drain lower paying ones.
The problem is the concentration of money and talent (the US trajectory is basically just software and finance now) leads to an inability to react to changing conditions and a deep dependence on foreign nations.
If China did something wild and pulled the plug on all US exports, the great minds filled with years of software and finance would be pretty much useless for stabilizing the situation. You want a diversity of smart people in many industries.
They are right now sure, but the scenario as quoted in the previous post could just as easily have risen from China's side as a response to some geopolitical drama and the US would have been just as unprepared for it as it was for the current self foot shooting. A strong manufacturing base is a national security asset and the US has mostly allowed it to rot out. Some niches have been propped up by defense spending like weapons design and manufacturing or military shipbuilding, but even those are downstream industries that need a general base to stand on that they no longer have and it shows.
Another thing foreign makers did was be more flexible to needs. Some great brands refused to reduce quality, but they were so focused on quality at low prices that they were not responsible to needs. They started making things in batches which reduced costs but if you want a different model you had to wait for that batch. If you have to order something a year in advance while Taiwan can get it to you in a couple months (including shipping via boat!) for some that mattered.
Foreign manufactures often did innovate more as well. Sometimes features on the foreign product were enough better (for some definition of better) as to be important for your needs.
Note that for every example above you can find a company in the US that has been doing exactly that "bad thing" and they have survived against foreign competition. Every product is different, with different needs. The real failure is always not recognizing correctly what is the correct path for you. Often there is more than one "correct path" mixed in with the bad, but you can only choose one. Sometimes a competitor choosing one path fills the niche of that path and if you choose the same both of you will fail.
Loss of cheap manufacturing resources may be a end of ZIRP- like event for consumer goods.
All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
Advocates for a Soviet style centralised economy exist, but they aren't common.
Marx himself, prescriptively, wasn’t all to specific beyond the distant end-goal stateless system and the immediate next steps in contemporary states (particularly, in terms of a detailed agenda, Germany, but he made some commentary on some steps other places.) But even where he was, plenty of people that share his critique of capitalism either don’t see his intermediate term prescriptions as realistic areas of concern for organizing current effort, or don't see them as mevessarily desirable at all.
State-owned liquor stores pay rent or own property.
Grocery stores are a business with 5%-8% margins, how much more should they cede?
The more simple question in my opinion is whether state run liquor stores are an overreach. The industry is already heavily regulated as it is, state stores sure seems like anticompetitive behavior.
Any country which did not abuse their citizens or subsidize their businesses became noncompetitive.
And why would you use old school taxis when uber/lyft were offering $5 rides in a 7x7mile area, and how could old taxi companies compete when they are forced to compete with people not bound by market forces?
Irrelevant since the point is to grow US manufacturing, not manufacturing in "countries besides USA and China".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-1jc1oDRk
(Yes, this video is framed and has Italian subtitles, but all the others I found do weird things with panning and clipping to evade censorship filters, and I believe that his body language is an important part of the delivery.)
How true is this? Is this financial sleight-of-hand? We assemble the parts after the hard part was already done?
As someone who works in US manufacturing, let me qualify that by saying "There is a lot of know-how in senior citizens in the US". I really cannot overstate how me, a guy in his late 30's, is consistently the youngest engineer by decades when doing site visits.
I think Coca Cola might be a counter example if we look at how they procure their sugar.
If that isn't enough, imagine you are choosing Hard mode by sourcing non-China, and your competition chose Easy mode.
Their proto assembly turn times were only a day better. Unless something has to be done in the US for some specific reason (export controls or contractual reasons), I don’t see how to justify doing it on-shore.
I've tried aisler instead of jlc/pcbway twice and I regret both orders. For more money I got the boards later, of worse quality and with bad customer support experience when one of my orders was lost.
Sorry but they simply are not anywhere close to the chinese options.
On the other hand if I already know I want to use a product I search for it on youtube and if I find a video with coupon in the description from a channel I know (or least seems decent) I use it. Make the advertisers think it works and pay more, and I get a discount.
I want what you say to be true, but I'm suspicious, unless something has changed recently. My research indicates unless you're looking at 10k+ quantity, it will cost OOM more than Shenzhen. But, I'm not familiar with the specific services you mention.
Can you make a shirt for 10 cents in the USA? Probably, if you get innovative on automation and remove most human labour you might get there in a few years or a decade, but not tomorrow.
If you can get creative with new solutions those products solve, you might get a foot into the door.
What does the shirt solve for a customer? Could there be a (better) alternative that could be built in the USA?
But yeah, you won't compete on price...
If you're not arguing against automation then I think we need to think about what happens when we expand your timeline a little. Are there really enough 'employment' jobs that can't be automated for billions of humans of different intelligence/physical abilities?
My dad worked in a steel mill all his life so that me and my siblings didn’t have to. We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Industrialism has ipso facto become the soup du jour for thr agrarian myth. The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor. It’s also terrible for just living in general. My dad basically turned the lights off on a steel plant. That was 20 years ago and the land it was on will be unusable for even landfills for another 100 years. It was on a river and the river still smells like chemicals, and fish routinely die when passing through that area due to chemical runoff from the land.
So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
I’m not saying that I don’t complain about my work from home job or that there aren’t negative effects but good luck weighing me getting carpal tunnel or taking anxiety meds to the stuff that industrial labor does to your body and our living environments.
To the second question, not everything in the modern world is going to be clean and green. If you want things like steel, plastic, computers, etc. there's gonna be some dirty manufacturing involved. No way around it.
To the first, ideally every country wants some amount of self-sufficiency, or at the very least, some amount of redundancy. Remember how badly the world's pants got pulled down during Covid?
And finally -- frankly, not everyone is capable of more than unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Supply-chain redundancy with a side-effect of employing people who might otherwise have very little in the way of employment prospects? That's a good thing!
Manufacturing may be a lot more important to future job seekers.
Which is perfectly fine to do for some time if the salary is great. Which it should be, considering the high productivity output from those kind of jobs.
Steel mill workers of your dad's generation had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers of today's young generation.
Young people are supposed to work hard and build up their wealth so that they can change to a less taxing job when it's time to make a family. Not waste their time in academic institutions for 20 years and then work for a low salary.
I don't see how you could say this with a straight face. We know at this point that factory jobs inflict physical damage to the body, a priceless artifact that no wage could replenish. I find it difficult to address your last paragraph as it's just not based in reality. Anecdotally, many people I know who take an hourly wage at factories never shift elsewhere. There is no waiting, and often they will start their families younger than their salarymen equivalent, 30 years ago or now. Perhaps they failed by your standards?
I've done my fair share of these kind of jobs in my life and my body is great. You can do it for some years while you are young. Yes – if you do the same job your entire life you will destroy your body. Especially if you do not take care to listen to it and adapt how you work and how you exercise.
Young people should work hard and be paid well, that's how a healthy economy functions. Not by having manufacturing based on foreign slave labour.
Anecdotally, I know many people who started on the ground floor and then moved on to management or sales with experience. Or switched jobs and careers. People switch jobs all the time, staying at the same post for life is mostly a thing of the past.
And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.
Looking at what was done in the early to mid-1900's isn't a good guide to the current state of things. We've learned a bunch since then.
Steel makes a lot of mill scale and slag, but those are generally inert. It’s a physically dirty process, but not a chemically dirty one, unless I’m missing something?
And certainly nothing I’m aware of there would make it unsuitable for even landfill.
I guess you get a lot of heavy metal slag?
I do know that I drove by the old site a few years ago, and you can see the outlines of not just the buildings but the machinery because the dirt is a different color, and there's either no or very little grass or just stubborn weeds growing in those areas.
Most office work is not terribly satisfying. It turns out that work is work. And while working in AC with a coffee maker is "better" than sweating it out over a crucible, the drudgery is the same.
I spent some time with a large group of teenagers at a summer camp where the kids do a lot of the work, including activity scheduling and such. I worked in the cafeteria kitchen, which was hot, hard work. But the kids that were doing the administration kept coming over to offer to help: mop, sweep, serve food, whatever. I tried to take a mop bucket away from one of them, and she said "I've been staring at spreadsheets all day, I want to do something."
It's not 1850 anymore; we don't have to have industry be dehumanizing quasi-slave labor. If we decide to, we can make things in America again without Triangle Shirtwaist-style horrors.
That said, have you worked in the kind of factory that will come back? I did a summer stint at my dad’s steel mill as a 19 year old. I’m proud of that summer but that work took a lot of me. When other friends were out doing things, I was too exhausted to hang out. The money wasn’t great either. And that’s a microcosm of most of those older worker’s lives. Many drank heavily. I’m not bemoaning them at all or their work.
I’m just saying that the early 2000s wasn’t the 1850s either.
I don’t deny there’s a better life than office work but let’s not gloss over the kind of hard - as in, really hard - labor that industrialization requires.
Most people wouldn't mind hard work if it's rewarded with home and family. It's the idea that we have to work in a sweatshop and live alone in a fifth floor walkup that makes people pause. To avoid that situation isn't easy, there are a ton of factors involved, but it is possible. In the end, a country that doesn't make things is a country beholden to others.
Rarely is “made in the USA” just a bit more expensive in my experience.
A lot of it is top down, pushed onto customers by the industry. It's very hard to find timeless classics these days, we are given trendy bits that change every year to speed up obsolescence so they purposely look kitschy.
Overall, it's worse in just about every metric other than "I can get this fun shirt online at 2am for $6."
Yes. Ask some of your older relatives who remember that time how often they got hand-me-downs or patched old clothes up and compare it to the wardrobe of an average income American today.
We had cheap clothes 10 years ago, then Shein and their ilk showed up with even cheaper clothes, and people flocked to them in droves.
And you can still buy good quality clothes, $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality are readily available. But who wouldn't want to have 10 shirts and 5 pants instead?
If you have brand names for polo shirts, jeans, and chinos that are durable and long lasting, please share them because I can’t find them. I have yet to place a test order at Bill’s Khakis, I should do that.
Other than jeans, shoes, socks and underwear, I haven't worn through or grown out of anything in forever, nothing to pass on really.
That said, the textile collection and resale industry is huge; stuff gets sorted, parts go to secondhand shops and charity, part gets baled up and exported, parts get recycled, etc. Same with electronics, it ends up in low-wage countries in Africa and south-Asia where there's thousands of people processing it.
I think you’re conflating a culture that did not see everything as disposable with a lack of wealth.
The hard stats since I looked them up:
Median income increases by 1/3 in inflation adjusted (“real”) dollars from late 80s until 2020. The country is definitely more wealthy.
Choosing to buy more, cheaper, clothes is as much an example of consumerism, as anything else.
Absolutely not.
What we have today is the ability to buy/own tons more "stuff", much of which is cheap junk. That does _not_ translate into better quality of life.
Nope.
I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.
So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.
Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
We can get it back, at least the more interesting parts of it. If this movement was being sponsored by another political party, as it used to be the case, we would see a complete inversion of the journalists defending and criticizing it.
If you factor in building factories, building supply chains, training workers, and regaining lost institutional/tribal knowledge, you’re looking at a monstrously expensive endeavor that’s going to take a long time. Probably at least a decade end-to-end, shorter in some fields and longer than others. No level of tariffs or overconfident statements on social media can change this reality.
And as a cherry on top, companies are supposed to set this all back up without help from the government, despite it being so expensive and time consuming to do so, and despite Chinese manufacturing having benefited immensely from its government pouring vast sums into bolstering its manufacturing capabilities to reach its present position. What corporate leadership is going to see any of that as reasonable or remotely a good deal? They’re more likely to play up investments they’d already planned to make during the previous administration and wait for another dice roll come next election.
TLDR it can happen, but not on a short timeline and not without government incentives to smooth over the massive costs of bring it back.
Put simply, back in the day everyone earned pretty similar pay. Nowadays pay is much more spread out and lots more families make way more money than they would have 40 years ago. The market really loves these high earning households (not billionairs, I mean $100k+) and naturally gravitates towards catering to them. The $60k households get left out.
Now take a look at Walmart's margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit.... Their gross margin is ~25%, with a net around 2%. Even if Walmart decides to eat the tariff cost out of patriotic duty, anywhere near a ~50% hit to supply chain costs would put them out of business. Heck, even a few percent would require a huge business restructuring, if it were even possible.
So prices are going to be higher - it's a given. In the short-medium term, the tariff tax is simply a large regressive transfer of tax obligation onto consumers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-price-increases-item... | https://archive.today/4Kcqf
In the US (and Europe) manual labor is expensive, so to make something you need a lot of automation. Once it is automated the next step is enough volume to pay for the automation (which needs expensive engineers).
Of course maybe this will change. Basic textiles were one of the first things we automated 300+ years ago, but we are only able to go from a bunch of cotton to a bolt of fabric today. As I write this making a shirt (or dog bed as this story) seems beyond what we can automate. Maybe a little investment will fix that, maybe not. I'm not an automation engineer so I can't tell you how solvable the problems are.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130552239/robot-folding-laun...
Everything else is ultimately just inclined planes and a power rod pulling on levers, which is the stuff that was solved with the Jacquard machine and a whole industry of competing models of sewing machine before we even had electricity let alone electric servos.
It's possibly already changing? 3D-knitting (of shoe uppers is what I have noticed) can make some sewing redundant. How far that can be taken remains to be seen.
ah there are already sweaters made using this technology it seems: https://www.oliver-charles.com/pages/3d-knitting
Textile mills in Bangladesh are able to pay $0.025 US cents per kwh, and factory laborers can be employed for about $150 a month. From their main port to the US west coast, when sent by container ship, costs about $0.10 per sq m. There is no universe where anyone else can compete. It's not within America's comparative advantage anymore.
If America wanted my money, it wouldn't behave in such a blatantly hypocritical manner. Either we're a free-market society or we're going to take care of each other. We've prioritized crying over business owners for decades while letting people go homeless. Fuck those businesses; where were they when the homeless needed advocacy? They chose to spend their time trying to complain about society rather than contributing to it.
If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
I don't know about "superior", but they're certainly going to sell more ice cream.
I think recently we've decided it does? Look at Uber versus licensed taxis, Airbnb versus licensed and inspect B&Bs, and many more.
I get what you're saying though, and if there was the will for it then the unlicensed business would be fined such that it would pay more in fines than the cost of a license. It just seems to be going the opposite way.
>has the "market" decided that the [unethical] business is superior
Yes, because anyone half paying attention on the ground instead of scrolling self-righteous internet content all day knows that price is actually king above all else.
$18 ethical ice cream cones taste great, but not as great as $4 ice cream cones.
To ground this in reality, look at the insane rise of Shein for clothes.
America itself operated "third-world style" for centuries.
These are the sorts of things small companies can actually make and be successful making.
Are they representative of the economy as a whole? Maybe not - the majority of that spend is going to go towards housing (~35%), transportation (~17%), basic food (~13%), and (somewhat surprisingly) insurance/pensions (~12.5%). Those are all incredibly competitive.
High barrier to entry, legally challenging (lots of bureaucratic red tape and hoops), already dominated by large companies with economy of scale in their favor.
So that essentially leaves niche, high margin, products as the ONLY products a small company can competitively make.
So it you want to be a small company selling a physical item... this is the market you tend to play within. You make an expensive niche/luxury product with a limited appeal but higher margins.
We already get plenty of news about how the large corporations say they are going to respond (prices will go up).
A better example I've seen is machinery, like construction equipment. Some contractor on YouTube points out that a Chinese skid steer is every bit as capable as a US made, but that 25 - 33% of the price. If he had to buy US made equipment he wouldn't have a business.
These are things that nobody needs. They are the poster children for mindless consumerism, feasible only because they are made in overseas sweatshops.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
What we want is wood shop and machine shop classes.
Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts.
Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.
This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.
The "made in USA" stuff is bullshit, the policy people DNGAF. The people actually making stuff are screwed. This about about shifting taxation from income and capital gains to consumption.
But companies have been incentivized to offshore production for decades. In many cases policy decisions have immensely rewarded them for doing so.
The end result is those countries (mainly China) have grown into infinite scaling machines. It probably won't unwind any time soon.
But anyway, half of all global coal production is consumed in China. I hope they will manage to get rid of coal in the next 20 years.
...
>There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
I heard a very compelling argument (at least to me), that the difference, as you say, isn't the labor. The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US. The difference is ramp up time. If you have a product ready to be built, you can get it to market much faster manufacturing in China than the US.
As an example, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada took about 2 years (June 2014-July 2015)[1]
Tesla Gigafactory in China took 168 days to construct (January 2019-October 2019)[1]
The cost of the factory construction, materials and labor, isn't the biggest loss when deciding where to build your factory. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of not manufacturing your product for 15 months and the potential of losing any first to market advantage if you have competition.
The time to get your product to market, especially if you're a new company with no income operating on investor money, the time spent trying to manufacture in the US can sink your company. The cost difference is much more manageable and, depending of the product, can often times be overcome by the price of shipping.
[1] https://manufacturingdigital.com/digital-factory/timeline-te...
Those percentages don't make sense to me. 5% and 8% of what? Final assembly? Labor costs are also built into all material costs in the supply chain.
That just cuts out a layer in the distribution chain. The part you want is probably manufactured not too far away.
The US used to have manufacturing cities where you could get everything you needed in specific industries. There was the New York City garment district for clothes. Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, writes in her autobiography, "Quant by Quant", about her first visit to New York with a native guide. She was getting things set up for manufacturing in days instead of the months it took in the UK.
Detroit had cars, of course. Most of the auto parts suppliers were nearby. Now, the US auto industry is very spread out. "Trenton Makes, the World Takes" is still on a huge sign in Trenton, NJ., but it's more nostalgia then reality. Waterbury, Connecticut had watch manufacturers and other mechanical precision devices.
Those centers of industry are mostly gone. Even Hollywood is in troublel
I'm a small farmer and can sell my garlic all day for $1 a bulb. But it's A LOT of work. If I bump the price to $5 less people buy but that doesn't mean I get to give up and say, "oh well, can't produce in America I guess... "
Lol, Americans :(
And that's why I don't really foresee that kind of manufacturing coming back here. In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave, you need a large labor force that will accept some form of sub-par living conditions. But if you can't earn a living wage, you can't afford to participate in the economy in a way that supports the manufacturing, and then you're back to those mid-century slums.
I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, my main point here is, I didn't really put together how much of early 20th century American manufacturing relied on chronically drunk homeless men.
From 1930 through 1970, it was less common but just as tolerated.
MADD did what Prohibition could not.
I do wonder if this is an inherent "craving" or just tied to the reality that Americans cannot really afford things anymore
The middle class being eaten means that most people have much less discretionary spending, so every single purchase must be a bargain
They are never actually equivalent goods though
They are cheaper goods
Yes, there is "cheap" clothing. No, the more expensive clothing isn't necessarily better. A bog standard t-shirt is a bog standard t-shirt. With a minimum of quality control, and anything on top of that is not adding to the utility of it.
The machining revolution really hurts a lot of the idea that labor in is indicative of quality.
"Cotton fiber quality is shaped by a mix of genetics, growing conditions, and field management techniques. High-grade cotton relies on precise measurements of fiber length, strength, and micronaire, along with maintaining proper color and cleanliness throughout its growth. These elements play a key role in determining processing efficiency and market value across the supply chain."
At the most basic, if one farmer harvests his cotton with no consideration of the above issues, whereas another farmer carefully studies, prepares, tests, etc based on the above considerations, wouldn't there be added value and added cost of production?
I personally believe that in a past era, farmers intuitively learned these factors and competed with each other to make their best harvests, and the bog standard t-shirt got a quality buff as a fringe benefit.
Whereas nowadays, the farmer has to drop quality for quantity to compete with digitally-connected markets.
https://cottongins.org/blog/ultimate-guide-to-cotton-fiber-q...
And, indeed, if you look into high quality cotton supply, you find there are relatively few names.
A lot of dumb "just so" tales in economics are willful miscategorization of desperation as choice.
This is a great way of describing it, I like it
Incidentally, I'm starting a new business model to capture this market opportunity, I call it "DAAS", desperation as a service
It's where people pay me their excess money and get nothing in return, increasing their desperation
Wait, isn't that called 'campaign finance'?
The problem with competing with entrenched market interests is they can use their economic advantages to make the market impossible for newcomers to enter leading to de facto monopolies.
Selling your labor? You want high wages, unions, worker protection laws, etc.
Buying something? Now you want to cut wages and bust unions, at least if you tend to choose the cheaper item.
It's also lack of environmental regulation adherence. China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance. I read about companies paying for scrubbers to be installed in factories and when a team comes to take a tour, still with original filters and low run hours.
While China does have an advantage over northern states in labor prices it's not why it's so cheap.
Chinese turbocharger suppliers have lower labor costs and therefore BYD, Changan, Great Wall and others have more pricing power vs GM and Ford products.
But my broader point is that their entire supply chain is comprised of lower labor cost inputs. Whether it be the EV batteries, the windshield, or the air valve in each of the four tires.
Tangentially related China is located in the region with largest economic growth. Power is shifting from Europe and North America.
Counterpoint: China is the undisputed leader in renewable energy technology, including battery storage. I don't think they are doing it purely for environmental reasons, but they are doing it.
I had a friend move his factory to China because the packaging and other costs were so much cheaper. I wish I'd asked for a breakdown. He didn't factor in/expect wages to be much of a savings.
Or you can look from it from the opposite direction and imagine what would have happened if there was full freedom of movement between China and US (i.e. no visas etc) and thus an actual free market for labor. If you expect workers in such situation to steadily migrate from China to US but not vice versa (at least until cost of labor equalizes), this implies that the workers in China are somehow worse off in absolute quality of life even when accounting for relative cost-of-life differences. That is, if the relationship between two countries wasn't economically exploitative in some way, we wouldn't need to restrict the free flow of labor at the border.
If you pay less in wages, goods cost less.
If you have less environmental regulations/ignore them, goods cost less.
Yes, they are the leader in renewable energy tech. They have also cornered the market with regards to the rare minerals that are some/most of the inputs. The link is not a coincidence.
I don't know if that is also the case in China.
Sounds like average American gig worker.
China's advantage is, and always will be, that the costs of labor in US are bloated by a huge amount of overhead for every working resident
In 2023, the BLS reported that benefits alone accounted for about 31% of total compensation, with wages and salaries comprising the remaining 69%. [1] This 31% includes direct costs like health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave.
Now in addition, consider employer-paid expenses that are not benefits or employee compensation: FICA, FUTA, SUID, SDI, FMLA, etc. That depends on your geography, but it can be up to 25-40% additional costs [2]
The all-in cost is at least 35% or more in additional spend [3]
In addition, none of the above capture indirect costs of compliance/overhead, with varied state and federal schemes.
As you can see, we are at a range of ~35-50% of additional costs for each new hire
Now, importantly, try to imagine the effect of this bloat at a national level: Every US business is effectively carrying deadweight of additional ~35-50% costs on its pricing decisions to its customers. Why? Because the bloat is embedded into every domestic input, like raw materials, services, utilities, you name it. This cost spike may impact a few foreign industries dependent on US inputs, but it certainly explodes over US shores, spiking prices of the inputs that most US producers depend for their final goods and services. Now think of what happens to domestic costs of doing business and operating a physical business in US.
So when your cost of production have additional ~35-50% overhead because of all sort of market-distorting mechanisms, blaming china for "cheap labor" is a convenient scapegoat, when in reality the blame should be on US policy of making our jobs artificially expensive.... to fund the state bloat.
[1] https://www.bluedotcorp.com/blog/2023-trend-the-rising-price...
[2] https://www.sba.gov/blog/how-much-does-employee-cost-you
[3] https://www.footholdamerica.com/blog/what-is-the-real-cost-o...
Who's the psychopath ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/books/review/apple-in-chi...
Guess who's uninsured? Its not the META employee with fertility benefits.
Satire is whomever cannot see why Trump would be voted by the working class: whomever thinks the status quo was to the benefit of the lower, blue collar class... while the middle and upper class ride their (untouchable) govt benefits (SSN) to a secure retirement because the elite class has a secure bureaucratic job (while the lower classes struggle to find 1 part time job).
Meanwhile, the chinese eat the lunch of the working class who see their jobs being exported abroad, because no employer wants to pay for subsidies/retirement/salaries of an elite bureaucratic deadweight class (that makes the rules for themselves, and forgets the neediest).
The good news is that they’re building one here
When you look at solar panels and lithium batteries their biggest advantage is that they invest in large scale heavily automated factories. For really labor intensive and low value things like those dog beds Chinese labor is already too expensive and production is going to places like Bangladesh.
The problem is the capital cannot be put to good use here. Either because (1) there's too much uncertainty around project progress (think oil pipelines stuck for decades in permitting limbo), or (2) the ROI doesn't work when you pay insanely high bloated compliance costs of hiring US staff.
Even our sky high productivity cannot overcome the large lard deadweight each of us has to carry, on behalf of the elite class
I remember a time when every product sold around the world carried the "MADE IN USA" brand. It included random trinkets.
That would come back quickly, if we all decided we had enough of antiwork laws, enough with all the deadweight, and focused on building instead of regulating.
In China it is naturally cheap, they have humongous super advanced vertical and horizontal supply chains at their doorstep.
Need plentiful, cheap three phase electricity? - check. Need some obscure part at scale and immediately?- check. Need advanced engineering? - check. etc. etc.
It's at the point where for many industries the risk/reward just do not make any sense at all (it'll just be loss making no matter how you spin it, government supports etc).
Who pays for all that stuff in China?
You won't get made in the USA as unless you're determined to have subclasses of citizens.
All the economic dimwits (both on the left and right) who constantly harp that real wages have been falling, don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.
Ofc. this does mean that US becomes the world's "bitch" eventually following the economics of things, but the alternative is essentially becoming Soviet Union or Argentina.
Real wages haven’t fallen at all. We’re far wealthier in real terms now than ever before.
A typical persons load out went from personal possessions that could fit in a microwave sized box to personal possessions that overflow the bedroom and living room of their apartment.
The definition of "real wages" takes this into account - because they are indexed by the consumer price index, which tracks the prices of consumer goods.
Some goods have dramatically fallen in price (especially if one takes the so-called "hedonic adjustments" into consideration, i.e. attempts to price increasingly more powerful computers and visually impressive TV displays on a continuous spectrum over time). Others have dramatically risen. "Consumer goods" include things like food (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer-goods.asp), and certainly cars have also been more expensive of late.
The cost of, say, housing is also clearly not experiencing a "steep fall due to offshoring".
Everyone already knows this but the mattress industry is absurdly opaque and most reviews are fake
I personally believe that the Japanese futon mat is the healthiest way to sleep, and after you get used to it even extra-firm mattresses are soupy and uncomfortable. Downside though is that it is very difficult to be comfortable on if you are significantly overweight, and it’s a pretty hard sell for couples unless they are both bought into the idea beforehand.
From my personal experience of sleeping on one for the last decade, not having a bed with a mattress on it is beyond the pale. I have a nice townhome that is well decorated. But when people see my bed, they assume I have a health issue, some kind of homelessness trauma, I’m a weeb (definitely not), or that I’m too poor to own a bed. They assume that they could never be comfortable on it, as a pillowy mattress on a high frame is associated in people’s minds with high luxury, angels with harps, royalty, and sexual intrigue. Sleeping on a mat on the floor is associated with camping, homelessness, destitution, and failure.
To each their own I guess
It all boils down to awful pseudoscience pushed by Reaganomics/trickle down economic theory. This pseudoscience has been used to write policy in this country which has only benefited the ultra wealthy.
Population matters. There's not enough Americans, not even going into how many want to work a blue-collar job and how much you'd have to pay them.
1) OSHA - if you have more than 10 employees, you're subject to OSHA regulations. Do other countries have comparable regulations for keeping their workers safe and healthy?
2) Decline of shop classes - shop/industrial classes used to be widespread in high schools. Not as much these days. Why?
3) Litigious society - our society is quick to sue and the legal standard used in civil trials is "more likely than not".
4) Drug addictions - look at any job posting for manufacturing, labor, construction, etc. and you'll see mention about drug screening.
5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - we care more about Super Bowl Sunday, Hollywood, reality shows, etc. On average, we're lazy and care more about being entertained.Respectfully, people care about supporting their families, having health care coverage, paying off their student loans, having a safe job that they can get to easily and cheaply and have general good work conditions. The first 4 points may be true, but the 5th point is an unfair characterisation.
I notice that these "additional factors" happen to align with right wing politics, which implies to me that you may be smuggeling something in along with these "additional factors" I should also consider.
"Consider that working people may just be lazy drug addicts, and why do you care about their workplace safety?" Is not really something I want to consider.
1) OSHA - I'm delighted and proud that we have OSHA! OSHA regulations have saved lives and prevented serious accidents/sicknesses and continue to do so. Does Vietnam, China, India, etc. have comparable regulations? I don't know the answer to this question, but my guess is largely 'no'. There is a cost associated with OSHA compliance and it's worth it. Is it ok that a factory worker is killed or maimed in some other country for your low prices?
2) Decline of shop classes - I don't know why they're not as prevalent as they used to be. To be honest, a shop class of 2025 should not look the same as a shop class of 1970. In my opinion, a modern shop/industrial class would include robotics, 3D printing, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), etc. I honestly don't see how anyone would consider this to be a bad thing.
3) Litigious society - I'm not passing judgement, just calling it like I see it. Many lawsuits are deserved and many likely result in better processes and procedures. I don't have an axe to grind, just stating that the US probably has more lawsuits and judgements than most other countries.
4) Drug addictions - I don't think that drug addictions are good for anyone. I know that this is a very complicated topic. I'm just pointing out that it may be more difficult to hire manufacturing workers in the US who don't use illegal drugs than in other countries.
5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - I'm just calling it as I see it. A huge part is because as a country we don't eat healthy enough and get enough exercise. Look at the skyrocketing cases of diabetes. It's a huge problem. Dumb because it seems we continue watering down our schools to make it easier for kids to get through.
Where am I so off-base? Where did I make value judgements (aside from fat, dumb, lazy one) about Americans? Am I promoting some right-wing agenda with my comments? I believe that these are honest points that should be discussed and debated.
Rather the framing shouldn't be whether its too expensive or cheap but why so many people are willing to arbitrage industrial scale abuse of human labor only possible under an authoritarian regime and then virtue signal about anything else.
Even more puzzling to me is why nobody is making the connection between the dilution of US dollar value via exporting inflation that props up totalitarian regimes and its growing reliance on it to make things its people want to feel they are above others.
They tried Made in the US but customers found it too morally expensive to care as to why making it outside the US is cheaper especially in China.
Taylorism definitely originated in the US, and the modern Amazon's worker-related practices (in the US) are direct descendants of it. So while democratic regime makes industrial-scale abuse of human labour harder, it absolutely doesn't preclude it.
The only reason it still exists is because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor as they are pretty large and heavy. And it's quite a niche product/vertical.
The biggest problem that the business faces on a day-to-day basis is employees. It's a very low skill manufacturing job. You pull parts out of the mold. The pay is good for a large midwestern MCOL city, plus full health benefits (employees don't pay a cent). It is downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees. The job sucks. I worked there when I was younger helping out and you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory. It's not a career - just a job. I'm not sure how you fix that. The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.
Even the high skill stuff has already been taken over by China, their process is far more efficient. When the business needs design/tool & die for a new plastic injection mold costs and speed associated with getting that mold designed and made in America are astronomical compared to the Chinese. The Chinese will get back to you with a design proof in 24 hours at a 1/4 of the cost.
It probably isn't a bad thing, as long as we continue to invest in automation and high-skill manufacturing. The Economist wrote about this recently: the fantasy of "low-skill factory jobs for all" is just that, a fantasy: https://archive.is/YoMs1
They have toyed around with automation but the capital required to retrofit for such a small business would be intensive but is coming down.
Interestingly the automation pieces that they have been testing (multi-axis robot arms) have only became cost effective since the Chinese robots entered the market. The Chinese have completely dropped the floor on automation tooling.
There are plenty of poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs.
There is nothing to fix. It is a job. It pays money. Not everyone has the ability to excel in a "career." They simply need a job.
And, no one can compete with China. All companies operating in China, regardless of ownership (state-owned, private, or foreign-owned), are subject to the same political influence. If the government tells a company to do something, the company does it. China also manipulates its currency as a means to drive its predominantly export-oriented economy.
The business's biggest success with finding employees was getting in the good graces of the local probation officers who refer ex-cons to us, and that comes with its own set of problems.
Other than paying a premium for temps at a temp agency that's been the only way as of the last 5-10 years to get employees in the door. Normal applications are crickets.
Line work in the conditions you describe should be paying $16 to $26 per hour, with an average of about $18 per hour.
If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?
If the working conditions (e.g. heat and noise) are unpleasant, they could be improved. A ramp into other positions could be built to make the "job" an entry point to a "career" (e.g. Costco moves people between many different low skill jobs and then recruits from that pool for management).
Exactly my point, and that's what they are doing.
There is no prospect of advancement possible. It's a small operation with 15 or so total employees. Under normal circumstances I would agree on a much larger scale.
But the cost of everything has got out of hand. Why bother going to work if you're going to be basically homeless anyway? Housing+food+health care has detached significantly from wages and the costs of other goods.
This particular issue could be solved by producing in Mexico and trucking your product into the US.
I really think it comes down to the fact that people have no interest in working in low skill manufacturing. The business loses people to Walmart etc. where they get lower pay and no benefits all the time. There is more variety of work and potential for advancement at a company like Walmart. Even at a larger scale low skill manufacturing plant advancement is sparse.
One of the guys I worked with at my first job was a few years older than me, and he had given up a much better paying job in one of the flyover states for a lower paying one in a higher COL area; His reasoning was that no amount of money could buy him the things he wanted out there, but he did admit that had the pay been significantly higher, he probably would have stuck it out for longer than he did, though again only to save up a bigger nest egg before he moved away from the area.
And they say they can get employees, as pay is decent for low skilled job.
Could be something they try out of hours.
I used to work a similar job[1] at a plastics factory. We had about 12 machines in the area I worked. Some machines automated remove stuff from the mold, some removing the excess, some putting though the leak tester. Each stage of automation was an additional thing that had to be configured and adjusted.
Often we'd only make an item for a shift or two. At one point the company bought a new machine (the size of a 2 car garage) that automated some more bits. The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably.
[1] Blowmold, ranging from 750ml bottles, 5-20 litre jerry cans, sections of culvert pipe.
That doesn’t tell the story of the overall ROI. After 18 months of shakiness were those folks able to go do other work? Did the work pay for itself on a 5 year timeline? 10 years? Achieving reliability is huge - did the company spin that for PR?
Did they (the companies profiled in the article) actually try it
Or did they investigate the possibility of trying it
Did customers have an oportunity to determine it was too expensive
Or did these businesses make that determination themselves
NB. I am not suggesting their determination was incorrect. I am only highlighting how the title refers to something that did not actually happen. A more accurate title might be something like
They considered Made in the USA - they determined it would be too expensive for their customers
If you could sell it for more using a different avenue, you probably should have done that before.
Tariffs this way will kill a lot of small businesses.
As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.
I had though all such simple things had been completely outsourced to China or Vietnam or somewhere. That does imply if that if manufacturing economies of scale can be returned to the US, the price could become competitive, even for low value-added products like this.
franktankbank•14h ago
helpfulContrib•13h ago
>making bullshit
Make things that empower people and give them the ability to be class-fluid. That's what the world really needs, after all.
aleph_minus_one•13h ago
The problem is: by the way you were raised, you have become deeply brainwashed into the social norms of your class for decades. Becoming class-fluid means getting free of this whole brainwashing, and then get a brainwashing for your destination social class. This also implies that you have to give up all your friends (if you keep them, they will back-brainwash you into your old habits; additionally, by the reprogramming these old friends will be unable to get on with you anymore because you have become a "different person" for them).
Thus, I believe only very few people want that.
RonSkufca•9h ago
Workaccount2•9h ago
We just need to accept that everyone with a dog will need to purchase an $800 bed for their dog. Or since that is obviously untenable, charge billionaires $8 million to buy a bed for their dog.
At this point you might be unsure if this is sarcasm or not. Which is pretty telling about the state of things.