America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

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.

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.

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.

I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.

Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.

But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..

Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.

Literally patents.

But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.

And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.

What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.