Comment by TaylorAlexander

Comment by TaylorAlexander 10 months ago

I actually think the extreme density and breadth of manufacturing in China is going to continue to outpace US manufacturing. They have multiple enormous manufacturing hubs connected by high speed rail lines over a wide geographic area. The US has no equivalent to the likes of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, where you can finish a PCB design in the morning and have the prototype in hand that evening. You can go to the Huaqiangbei Electronics Market and find exactly the right motor and controller for your specs, pick up specialized sensors, and build your next rev overnight.

I have lived in the Bay Area my entire adult life. We used to have Halted/HSC, we used to have Weird Stuff. We used to have Triangle Machinery Co in Santa Clara. Now everything is gone.

I think it’s great that we built a semiconductor manufacturing plant. That’s important for strategic manufacturing. But we’ve so thoroughly destroyed our manufacturing base, let the factories rot, and financialized property value that the “weird place with random electronics” can no longer even afford to do business. Starbucks makes more money, so in it goes.

US politicians love to shout about manufacturing. “Manufacturing jobs jobs economy growth.” But these people DO NOT understand how things get made. They have no serious industrial policy. They do not know the value of a high speed train connecting manufacturing centers. And even if they did, the entire apparatus of our government is set up to stop it.

Manufacturing workers need education. They need housing, transit, health care, maternity and sick leave. They need secure jobs and extra income that allows them time off to take classes to learn new skills.

I’m glad we passed the inflation reduction act, and the CHIPS act. We need that investment. But it’s going to take much more than that to “bring manufacturing back” and I’ve have seen time and time again that we do not have the vision or capability to move in the ways that would be required.

I hope manufacturing comes back. We desperately need it. But I’m quite frustrated that despite some marginal progress, the serious changes we need are not on the horizon nor seemingly beyond it.

aksss 10 months ago

> They have no serious industrial policy.

Ignoring how we define "serious", they do have an industrial policy. You just may not agree with the wisdom of the outcomes wrought by the regulatory regime. I don't know how you ever compete with the developing world that has a surplus of people and comparatively lax regulatory framework for everything from labor to the environment.

The policy is to move all the dirty work to someone else's back yard. It seems to work as long as the shipping lanes stay open and the other economies have something to gain (room to grow and raise standards of living).

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TaylorAlexander 10 months ago

> The policy is to move all the dirty work to someone else's back yard.
Whose policy? Like, which politicians and what exactly is their policy?
Because that sounds more like the kind of thing people say they are trying to do, while hiding the fact that they are doing something different.

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- themaninthedark 10 months ago
  
  Those who tout Free Trade and Globalism as well as those who look at Wall Street numbers and claim that is success.
  >Production offshoring, also known as physical restructuring, of established products involves relocation of physical manufacturing processes overseas,[22] usually to a lower-cost destination or one with fewer regulatory restrictions. >Physical restructuring arrived when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made it easier for manufacturers to shift production facilities from the US to Mexico. >This trend later shifted to China, which offered cheap prices through very low wage rates, few workers' rights laws, a fixed currency pegged to the US dollar, (currently fixed to a basket of economies) cheap loans, cheap land, and factories for new companies, few environmental regulations, and huge economies of scale based on cities with populations over a million workers dedicated to producing a single kind of product. However, many companies are reluctant to move high value-added production of leading-edge products to China because of lax enforcement of intellectual property laws.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshoring#Production_offshori...
  https://theweek.com/articles/486362/where-americas-jobs-went
  https://www.economist.com/media/globalexecutive/outsourcing_...
  
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- aksss 10 months ago
  
  I’m not sure what your last sentence is saying. To the question, an example would be resource extraction and refinement. The United States has no less appetite for the materials but denies permits locally in favor of other countries doing the work. Regardless of what you think about reasoning and justification, this is an example of pushing dirty work to another country. Similarly, policies on labor, safety, environmental protection make a lot of manufacturing and textile work relatively untenable in the United States relative to the developing world. These are policies of the nation. Individual politicians are not really relevant to the point.
  
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mptest 10 months ago

Perfect comment, it's important to celebrate but more important to keep in mind it's a tiny piece of the public infrastructure and government inertia we need to do this correctly. We need exactly what you describe, and I want to bolster the mention of education. China produces 2x the stem phds we do every year. Sure, bigger population, but they also have a growing share of citations. (source for both is suleyman's book "the coming wave")

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s1mon 10 months ago

I came here to say something like this. I've worked in product development in the Bay Area for 30+ years and brought numerous products to market, mostly manufactured in China. There's nothing like the density and ability of manufacturing that's in China (and more broadly in other parts of Asia). In the US I've worked with great molders and toolers, PCB fab, machine shops, CMs, etc. but the ability to turn on a dime and get stuff done quickly in southern China is insane. In the Bay Area you see billboards for esoteric SaaS products and credit cards for startups, in parts of China, they are for molding machines and CNC tools. You drive by rows of roll up doors in the base of apartment blocks and each stall/shop is filled with bar stock, plastic pellets, CNC machines, injection molding machines, etc.

You'll also see people doing complex repairs of mobile phones sitting on a stool on the sidewalk. The level of skill and access to tools/spare parts that is endemic there is completely different than the US.

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roughly 10 months ago

As they say, the perfect time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

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onlyrealcuzzo 10 months ago

> and financialized property value

Do you think China has not?

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TaylorAlexander 10 months ago

I suspect that the extent to which they have done so, and its impacts, vary significantly from how things have gone in the US.

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