“Why would I hire X when I can get it for $20 a month on ChatGPT?”

Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.

Not overrepresented enough given that middle America has disproportionate per capita voting power

What government policies are you referring to? Businesses moved manufacturing to China because their goal is to make as much money as possible. The only potential barrier is if US citizens would care that it wasn't made in America. Products are labeled and most people don't care.

This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.

Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.

People could have supported American manufacturing by buying American. You're saying the government should intervene in the economy in a significant because the majority of people are just selfish

That's true, but we also collectively decided to buy cheap stuff from Walmart instead of buying from the local town store, creating a race to the bottom.

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I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well.

If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.

Was Kamala campaigning on bringing manufacturing to Texas?

You mean, like FoxConn took $B from orange guy, promised 10K+ jobs, then sat on the land for a few years and did nothing? Sure, let's replicate that at scale..

Managed to do what?

to be clear, the US has been rapidly losing manufacturing jobs since the orange coronation.

His predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments.

Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.

Establishing regulatory harmony is not only not possible but the current regime is working in exactly the opposite direction.

If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.

The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.

That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.

If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.

You willing to work 996? I would prefer some form of work-life balance.

The US had it when the rest of the world was severely bombed during WWII, and a lot of the world was very undeveloped. Things changed.

We never had manufacturing within an order of magnitude of China's scale in the US. Probably not within two orders of magnitude. When the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, we had far cheaper labor, far fewer environmental regulations, far fewer labor regulations, and far simpler supply chains.

> Apple here is the first step.

Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.