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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

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842 points putzdown | 6 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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mppm ◴[15 Apr 25 14:12 UTC] No.43692983[source]▶
Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk

2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

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imbusy111 ◴[15 Apr 25 14:14 UTC] No.43693026[source]▶
But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?
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pjc50 ◴[15 Apr 25 14:26 UTC] No.43693233[source]▶
People seem to want jobs with the macho kudos of manual labour, but with the physical comfort and salaries of email jobs, and I have some very bad news about that combination.
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1. cratermoon ◴[15 Apr 25 14:52 UTC] No.43693598[source]▶
Those people need to watch a few episodes of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs". Also people need to stop saying "unskilled labor". There is no such thing as labor without skills, outside a category in an archaic way of justifying low wages.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp

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2. DoneWithAllThat ◴[16 Apr 25 14:48 UTC] No.43706274[source]▶
This is a pet peeve of mine: yes there are unskilled jobs. Lots of them. The term is maybe slightly misleading, but there absolutely is a class of jobs that any able-bodied person could perform given at most a few hours or a few days of training, and they are qualitatively distinct from jobs that require education, specialized training, and/or months or years of experience to be considered proficient and productive in them.

That doesn’t mean people who work jobs in the former category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the distinction is important because finding workers to fill an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of system of education, training and/or apprenticeship (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and functioning to even have an industry that depends on those jobs.

Not everything is some silly game of political fighting through language. Some things we actually need terms distinguishing “this” from “that” so we can have real world conversations about them.

3. Vegenoid ◴[16 Apr 25 16:03 UTC] No.43707057[source]▶
I think it is pretty useful to be able to distinguish between jobs that don't require much education/training, and jobs that do. "Unskilled" and "skilled" are how we do that. Do you have alternative words you'd use?
4. LunaSea ◴[16 Apr 25 16:47 UTC] No.43707561[source]▶
Working at McDonald's takes 1 day of training.

Working as a doctor takes 10 years of higher education on top of secondary school.

Calling McDonald's "unskilled labor" seems quite fair to me.

5. e40 ◴[17 Apr 25 11:51 UTC] No.43715443[source]▶
Behind the Bastards podcast on Mike Rowe opened my eyes to him.
6. Der_Einzige ◴[19 Apr 25 14:56 UTC] No.43736848[source]▶
Mike Rowe is a shitty human being who delights and is gleeful about the idea of those folks in these same “dirty jobs” being paid less, forced to work more and harder with less safety equipment, and with less respect.

He hates the idea of people getting ahead in life with anything but the most extreme back breaking labor. That’s why he’s hardcore MAGA and makes such a big deal about trying to shit on folks who do desk jobs.

Fuck him, fuck his show, fuck the “good parts” where he tries to show you that being a garbage man is hard. If it’s really that skilled, the market will pay it as such.