How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

It’s like people excited about the new datacenter being built in their town, think of all the jobs that will bring they cry. Nobody realizes it takes 6 people to run a datacenter.

Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.

i don't understand the obsession with jobs anyway

people don't want a job, they want money and purpose

most jobs barely deliver either

Can you propose something better that provides money and purpose?

Keep in mind that most people are unwilling and unable to sustainably maintain self-employment.

Something like a grant from the government to work on your project of interest with no expectation that it be commercially successful. You want to be an artist the government gives you a grant to support yourself while contributing to the cultural lexicon. Scarecity is manufactured today for profit and not real; nobody needs to work at a 7/11 but they are essentially trapped into those sorts of jobs because they are profitable for those business owners vs a good use of creativity or labor for our species.

Now before you get all hung up how this isn’t possible. There is precedent. The government would do just this during the great depression, sponsoring artists knowing it is more valuable to have artists in the population than to lose that talent pool and benefits to culture over cold cruel economics.

Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

Scarcity is very real, I'm not sure why you would feel otherwise. Fortunately, we have largely eliminated scarcity of the necessities of life due to economic policies that are as far from your suggestions as possible, but that doesn't mean that they are produced at no cost or that scarcity in general does not exist.

And you don't need to go back 100 years for precedent. We basically paid people to sit at home during covid, and I didn't see some sort of renaissance as a result. Why would this be any different?

> Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

I think the implication here is that such a society is not built on markets or even money, but rather by individuals working together to foster a collective community that meets everyone’s needs.

Yes, communism. The more advanced we become technologically the more sense it makes. We’re largely at a point where most jobs are made up - created to give people something to do because if we don’t then they die.

We’ve pushed consumerism to the absolute max. Now, most goods are pretty much worthless. But we have to buy them, or we die. That’s how markets works. We work, and we consume, or else.

That made sense when the work we were doing was beneficial and the stuff we’re consuming was needed. We’re past that now. Most people are working to produce something dumb, or worse, evil. New addictions, new poisons, new bombs, and new problems to be solved by new software.