Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production.
The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.
However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months
What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that.
Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts.
A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm working without working with external vendors).
I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.
Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
Or you could have trade borders.
Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications?
Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong zip code.
Seen but never hired: Fully qualified people who are awful at job interviews.
> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.
I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.
> the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.
I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may not have more-granular info than this.
But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs.
Also they’ll do local job fairs on site, at local community colleges. You’d be surprised how many people still listen to FM in their car so ads go up there too locally.
Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies when they need X number of low level employees or temps
> Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies
Son #1 got employed there early but it turned out that a small group had a deal with management and got 100% of the work. New hires went out on one job immediately and then never again.
I don't understand why Craigslist is being framed as a some step down here (while probation clearly is). Craiglist is exactly where you instantly have many eyes on your ad and people will send in resumes without the bullshit filtering of the various portals.
Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job realistically, you'll get people realistically interested in your job.
Uh... The newspaper.
Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
Marysville
I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?
I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.
I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.
I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.
From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.
Do you hire deaf people?
I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like pretty funny.
US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job.
US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for emergency vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBDPno
> Do you hire deaf people?
I think you may start to understand the requirement once you realize the issue is where attention is and is not placed, instead of what sense is being exercised.
I mean, think about it. The recommendation was to consume forms of entertainment. In the factory I worked, there was a mandatory safety rule where you were required to establish eye contact with forklift drivers. Why is that a requirement?
Funny - eye contact is my "secret" to crossing the road in places like south east asia
Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.
YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.
Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching YouTube though?
Yeah I guess it’s probably not realistic for most factory jobs. I am just thinking that “get paid $20 an hour to do a simple task and watch YouTube/listen to music” is actually kind of appealing to many people.
This is a lot of security guard and front desk jobs. if a boss doesn't like smartphones on the job, I know people who read books or knit between tasks.
Having worked at a very simple factory job that involved hot-pressing plastic-aluminium film into shapes, yeah, that would end badly. It's unskilled job, that doesn't mean it's mindless.
If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,.. or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
> Watching YouTube though?
Yeah, I can't make that work. Only my most routine work can be done with the TV on (and providing it's my 5th rewatch).
It's a matter of habit and personal traits.
I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some anime or tv show.
You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just don't care.
I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare. Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.
Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.
I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.
In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
That just tells me that the pay was bad for the job.
If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more but not better.
They wrote per hour rates though, it is just more difficult per hour
I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.
I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).
Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or social media?
UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.
For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.
UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.
And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.
A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.
Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.
So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.
In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.
Then long hours of repetitive labor are a skill which needs to be attracted for.
finally a positive framing on social media addiction
If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.
Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
We need actual data to decide how significant is "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses complaining no one wants to work for "significantly" higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
I’m sorry but this is a ridiculous take. $0.05/hr is $104 a year for a full-time job. Zero people are going to have that be the tipping point for them to take on a monotonous, often physically draining job that they’d otherwise turn down.
You underestimate the low end of the labor market. People may not jump for a nickel, but they absolutely will for $0.25-0.30.
Yes that is my point. What business owners consider "significant" and what sane people consider significant are often quite different.
A lot of folks like repeatable, monotonous jobs. They can loose themselves in a trance doing the same thing for hours.
The problem is that American bosses will never hire these kind of people. They can never pass the interview game.
Except you can't just zone away in a factory job. Workers need to pay attention if they don't like injuries. It the job doesn't need much skill, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy or safe.
there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay
I do not believe this common claim.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job. But for practical purposes the pay needs to be in line with still being able to price your products competitively in a global marketplace.
Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due to your location.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job
Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing.
The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics have.
As for your last paragraph, the oil fields have been able to meet their need for employees for the most part, and that ticks every one of your undesirable factors. So what gets workers there? Pay.
You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole family, all on the salary of a high school educated factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You’d have to pay factory workers well into six figures for a lifestyle like that.
What happened? Cost disease [1]. All of the big ticket things in that lifestyle (except for the car) skyrocketed in price relative to inflation.
That was never the reality for most factory workers. Usually the car was cramped with a single bathroom, the wife picked up some part-time work, most vacations were road trips to go camping, and not all the kids went to college. Inflation and growing income inequality are legitimate problems but let's not paint an unrealistic picture of "the good old days".
Pay, plus a willingness to hire workers who might not be tolerated in other jobs due to background check issues or HR policy violations. (I am not claiming this is necessarily a bad thing.)
Theoretically, an utterly horrible job with great pay would attract a lot of workers who do it for some time to get a financial boost before moving on.
I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?
The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.
For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.
Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
“MBA shrinkflated garbage”
I’m definitely going to find a way to slip this into a conversation.
The problem is opportunity cost
Of what?
Of getting on disability (back pain)
And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up conspiracy theories on the Internet
Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.
> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest possible pay + benefits is really pathetic.
And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no health insurance.
On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a nightmare to work for.
It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering 100% of health insurance premiums.
There's somethhing you're not telling us or not being honest about.
It's common. People would rather work in a Wal-Mart as it is more social and less demanding. The physical space is nicer.
Decent chance given that it's a plastics plant probably not unionized and probably in a red state that the air is not healthy to breathe.
I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2 months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly functioning alcoholics.
This was a family owned biz? Somehow, I imagine, I'd feel better slogging for an SME than in an "externally-funded" place.
I'm guessing that US needs a similar nation-wide service to connect gig-workers of all sorts to factories specifically.
Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view:
1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it
3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially
1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.
1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be serious for this to work.
As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways. That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some national protection via tariffs on some types of manufacturing, while investing in automating some other types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a much of a strategy.
The USA and the west in general is 40 years deep into this crisis and recent developments have not actually made a shift in that trajectory.
It seems like the US in particular isn't able to pick one path and stick with it. The shift towards services has already happened. But investment in silicon, renewables etc is on again off again. There now seems to be a desire to bring all manufacturing jobs back to the US, although it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't seem to have an overarching goal.
# 3 is not a solution because it will only make American production more expensive and impoverish the population. It's a full disaster.
Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
What's the point of GenAI in a manufacturing pipeline? Good ol' ML based AI automation is heavily used in larger manufacturing plants to identify defects
Rubbish. Ai has been used for many years in factories and modern AI will be even more useful. The issue is that most people aren't going to be the target of this sort of AI advertising and also that this takes longer than making a chat bot
Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost
The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.
Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment.
Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive work. This work sucks! And we should be happy that as a country we managed to transition our economy away from depending on this kind of work! Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2 baby booming economy.
Manufacturing jobs are mostly unionized and service jobs aren't.
Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into thinking they want manufacturing jobs back
Conservatives don’t want unionized labor - they want 1890’s style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory of any sort - dark factories end to end. There’s little room in the conservative morality for people not working, or for people who are working.
Can we not call those people "Conservatives". There is very little conservative about them.
You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is something else carrying the mantle of conservative, cowing the conservatives to silence.
>Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.
Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.
> Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes?
And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?
What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?
Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.
> So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet?
Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even though Ukraine is.
I hear people (media, politicians) talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, but I haven't heard too much well articulated reasons for why.
There are issues with national security, reliance on less than friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs.
Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
Global supply chains seem to be gradually breaking down due to a mix of politics, demographics, and armed conflicts. Everyone has become accustomed to the post-WWII system of global free trade but historically it is an aberration and everything will eventually revert to the mean. I wouldn't be surprised if China disintegrates into another civil war within the next few decades. We can't necessarily rely on foreign countries to make stuff for us anymore so if we want to have stuff we might have to make it ourselves.
A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said, maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't force the world to do things forever because there is a dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy can work.
>Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money
sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent.
If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
> operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website
Airlines and high speed rail systems are also services. Heck, even Tesla's real value isn't in manufacturing, it's in the (delusional, but nonetheless) belief that they're going to make an absolute killing on services at some point in the future. They could probably sell off their manufacturing arm and their stock price would increase.
And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.
I am perturbed by the power consumption of these behemoths causing high market prices for everyone.
We've been through this before; "history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes":
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
But for 20 sweet minutes just before the entire thing collapses, someone will get crowned the winner
Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.
I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did.
"We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"
We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do see output increases.
Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m):
"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."
In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
They orchestrate partners!
Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years.
Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war.
It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.
It all drives ads
All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly line.
I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence you could get around those constraints.
The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.
> existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints
Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product. Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless.
One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing that with things like 3D printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is always going to be have significantly lower per-unit costs than ordering 1, and if you're ordering 1000 you can probably afford a human spending some time on setting up robots or optimizing the design for existing setups.
There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead to a manufacturing revolution.
I think you could make an analogy to the difference between ASICs and general-purpose CPUs. ASICs are great, but CPUs have flexibility and massive economies of scale. Similarly, a specialized machine might be more efficient than a humanoid robot at a particular task, but advanced humanoid robots could theoretically do all the tasks and as a result would likely end up being manufactured in very high volume.
Imagine a future where any hardware startup could design and provision an assembly line as easily and cheaply as software startups today use cloud computing. Maybe after a certain scale it becomes economical to consider replacing steps of the manufacturing process with "ASIC" solutions, but maybe there'd be a long tail of things which would continue to remain best served by general-purpose robots indefinitely.
I've heard that the general transformer architecture (not specifically LLMs, which imply a language model, but applied to sensory perceptions and outputting motor commands) has actually been fairly successful when applied to robotics. You want your overall assembly line to have a tiny, repeatable instruction set, but inside each of those individual instructions is oftentimes a complex motion that's very dependent upon chaotic physical realities. Think of being able to orient a part or deal with a stuck bolt, for example. AI Transformers potentially would allow us to replace several steps in the assembly that currently require human workers with robots, and that in turn makes the rest of the assembly much more reproducible (and cheaper).
Training these models takes a bunch more time, because you first need to build special hardware that allows a human to do these motions while having a computer record all the sensor inputs and outputs, and then you need to have the human do them a few thousand times, while LLMs just scrape all the content on the Internet. But it's potentially a lot more impactful, because it allows robots to impact the physical world and not just the printed word.
And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "pass", generate another one until it does. Then grade according to "efficiency" metrics and feed it back in.
As long as you do that, the penalty for a a slop-based fuckup is just a less efficient toolpath.
Manufacturing robotics is all about movement. All movement exists on a spectrum of difficulty and context needed to perform. For instance, welding the steel plates together in an empty and repeatable consistent 3d space is now on the lower end of difficulty. Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly difficult for a robot to do.
The more we can bring down all the difficulty of all these processes, the more we can accelerate manufacturing locally.
That's at odds with everything I know about manufacturing robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of specific features. That is by design, not because (or at least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning its own motion. The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
> The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great and easy when you will do the same thing millions of times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".
Costs have been going down. In high school I took the class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly recommend even though it was only for fun). These days almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable programming language. (it probably isn't)
> Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly difficult for a robot to do.
Not really. The robots are programmed by having a human manually guide it, so the robot itself doesn't really have to do any navigation - it just has to follow a predefined path.
Want to install different variants of dash components? Split it up into methods and have the robot return to a neutral position after each method. You're literally programming it.
And yet China already has 100% automated vehicle production lines.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-...
That's not how the LLMs should be used in manufacturing. It is still the current assembly lines robots that will do that. LLMs can be used by the humans who design the automation workflow, as coding assistants. That can lower the breakeven number of items that can be automated. Maybe if today it only makes sense to automate the manufacturing of a widget only if you can sell more than 100000 of those widgets, then with LLM assistance that number can be reduced to 1000. Whenever you have a 10x improvement of something, there's scope for a mini-revolution to happen.
I'm not even clear on what people mean when they say 'AI' anymore
This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."
This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field of robotics.
To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.
FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.
I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced cruise control as "full self-driving".
Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
> factories with no humans on the assembly line.
Not an American myself, but why should that be good for ordinary American citizens?
Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?
This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who are incapable of doing something else)
There is the constant argument that what when machines do everything. We are not there yet, and so far there is no reason to think we will be anytime soon.
> The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative.
Yes! I'm pretty sure the guy working his ass of at the factory does so because brain surgeon doesn't pay enough...
Is this the next version of "trickle down economics"?
> Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs.
If only. In reality they'll be as expensive as they can make them without completely killing sales, just like they are right now.
> The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative.
Aren’t the creative jobs also being taken by LLMs and image generators?
> This is great for ordinary Americans.
If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services.
The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2] do the boring immigrant jobs.
AI can't just handwave all this shit away because 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns or not, there's a massive backlash from various flavors of nativists about jobs. Why isn't it directed at all of these pie in the sky AI promises?
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[1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What difference does it make to me where a factory is located, when that factory doesn't employ me or my neighbours? The people collecting profits from it aren't going to share them with us.
[2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job? Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
Unrestricted immigration is good - they just want a 'boogyman' to blame unrelated problems on.
we're talking about what really matters here, the investors
China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things.
Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025
Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf] - https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China... - May 5th, 2025
ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... - August 28th, 2024
> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back.
It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.
Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop.
AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.
EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
That's 0.3%.
You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything.
Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
Feels like Milton from Office Space: I was told there would be a manufacturing boom.
There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people in manufacturing now takes less than 200.
down is down
Hardly a boom.
