If you don't have the factories, you lose the expertise

I've learned to mistrust or even ignore the advice of these analysts. In the past they said "we need to make everything in China because it's cheaper." Now that we've discovered the drawbacks (as stated in the article) they're claiming "we can't make it here anymore because we've lost the skills to do so and we therefore must keep importing from China despite the drawbacks."

These analysts are the reason the West is losing the economic war being waged upon us. They're always cozying up to China and it's making me suspicious of them.

How can we wage war when 80% of the stuff in our weaponry is made in a foreign country which could turn hostile at a moment's notice?

This is a very confusing read - hard to understand what the main point the author is trying to make.

Is it that you can't effectively offshore just the factory production (and keep designing from California), and the flattening in manufacturing productivity + job losses is caused by offshoring chip development to China?

> If you don't have the factories, you lose the expertise

If you use AI, you lose expertise too! Retaining expertise isn't a one pony show, it can be done even when externalities work against it, shallow thinking can only do harm here.

> Jensen Huang’s account, as Joseph Steinberg reported it, is that American manufacturing jobs declined because the work was outsourced.

I don't know how much I trust the opinion of someone who doesn't know his own address: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

> There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. ... One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.