What it would take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing might

ppetethomas about 12 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on axios.com

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pull_my_finger•about 11 hours ago

I get why the government is keen to do this, but what sane citizen wants to live anywhere near those factories they want to bring back? Nothing like contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc, etc. Not to mention they'd surely be built with automation in mind to rug pull and wishful thinking about job creation. No thanks.

rayiner•about 7 hours ago

Better than your kids having to move to China for upward mobility, which is the way we're currently headed.

esbranson•about 9 hours ago

> contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc,

Ah yes, who can forget everyone's experience at the Denver, Colorado zoo, a 10 minute drive (or 30-40 minute bike ride) from a massive oil refinery operating since the 1930s. Same with the Rocky Mountains, totally polluted and gross by the likes of factories like Coors. Definitely stay away from those places. Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, CO? With so many factories up there and everywhere around, what's going to get them first, Colorado's water, air, or rain?

bediger4000•about 8 hours ago

Look up on the hillsides as you drive west on I70. See those yellowish piles of rock? Mine tailings leaching arsenic and all kinds of bad stuff. Take a tour of the Argo mill in Idaho Springs. They'll let you look at the rainbow colored water running out of that old mine. Rockies aren't totally polluted but it's not rosy either.

esbranson•about 6 hours ago

Pity the kids getting jobs in the ol' Argo Mill. Exactly what the article and OP are lamenting: trillions of dollars of investment in 1800s-era mining for gold, that rare earth metal vital to national security. No sane person would ever want to live in the Rockies.

orionblastar•about 11 hours ago

The factory work doesn't pay as much as Nursing careers or Building Houses for carpenters, plumbers, roofers, etc.

I have a feeling factories will use H1B Visas to bring in immigrants to do the work and fire them as soon as the H1B Visa expires, and hire all new H1B Visa workers.

aplummer•about 11 hours ago

I don’t think factory worker is quite a covered specialty profession…

necovek•about 10 hours ago

This seems to confirm one of the premises of Capital by Marx, as this only works while there is inequality in the global market.

As purchasing power in China grows, their labour costs grow because they start demanding similarly unpolluted environment, and dirty production will start moving to the next country.

Is it not the answer that you demand a clean production or stop using products which cannot guarantee it? The fact that consumers do not apply this logic means that NIMBY can only take you so far, because if we accept polluting production, some humans will have to deal with it somewhere.

exabrial•about 9 hours ago

Cheap electricity. Like a 10x-15x reduction.

We can't change material cost at the moment, but this is something we could have influence over. Recycling steel and aluminum would be dirt cheap. We'd leap even farther ahead in training AI models. We'd reduce carbon emissions from shipping. So many beautiful outcomes.

I can dream. If there's one upside to the AI boom, I hope we see a plethora and overbuild of power infrastructure and a second coming of nuclear energy. Alas, both blue and red hate nuclear when both should love it.

adjejmxbdjdn•about 8 hours ago

So cheap electricity will come by building out the most expensive source of electricity?

exabrial•about 6 hours ago

Sigh. You are the reason we can't move forward.

JSR_FDED•about 11 hours ago

The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to nurture multiple suppliers for critical items?

nothercastle•about 9 hours ago

How do you compete with China? You loose on regulatory costs before you even consider anything else.

Sabinus•about 8 hours ago

Don't compete with China. They're merchantilist for one, and if you want environmental standards in manufacturing, you can't negotiate free trade agreements with one party states.

TPP was an attempt at this.

rkagerer•about 6 hours ago

https://archive.ph/erHoE

jleyank•about 11 hours ago

To start with, they’d have to be willing to pay more in Walmart for us made goods…

mchusma•about 11 hours ago

I can’t read the full article, but the snippet (6%gdp/$2T) seems not that expensive? And you could read that either way ”cheap so we should do it” or “if we end up needing to do it, we can do it”.

m_mueller•about 7 hours ago

Cost is one thing, time is another. You’d need massive investment in trade education and then wait 20 years. See vocational education in German speaking countries as an example.