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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 1 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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NoTeslaThrow ◴[16 Apr 25 15:02 UTC] No.43706451[source]▶
We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

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glitchc ◴[16 Apr 25 15:09 UTC] No.43706516[source]▶
Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

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austin-cheney ◴[16 Apr 25 16:06 UTC] No.43707096[source]▶
You fix it the way every other industry has fixed it: broke/agent model.
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Keegs ◴[16 Apr 25 16:13 UTC] No.43707160[source]▶
Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.
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1. austin-cheney ◴[16 Apr 25 18:22 UTC] No.43708699[source]▶
In a broker/agent model agents are people doing most of the client-facing work, but they defer an offset of both liabilities and earnings to a broker. This is how real estate agents, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and many others enter their professions, at least in the US. Because the broker carries civil, and possibly criminal, liable for the violations of their represented agents they have a vested interest in the quality of product/service those agents deliver. In the medical industry the agent phase is described as residency and internship. Its a matter of who actually holds the license that allows a person to perform professionally.

In criminal enterprise drug mules and prostitutes often subscribe to this business model. Drug mules will transport drugs as part of an illegal enterprise and are paid by criminal organizations that have vested interest in the successful completion of the logistical services provided by the drug mules. Likewise, in some geographies prostitutes will voluntarily pay pimps a percentage of their earnings in exchange for physical security and those pimps stake the value of their services on the success and reputation of the services they provide to their prostitute agents.

You also have to understand most of the software industry loves to bitch and cry about all these problems they see in hiring and practicing and yet don't really want any of these problems to be solved.