They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
This feels like a justification for slavery and slave-like conditions. I assure you the conditions and salary in most manufacturing countries would cause riots in the US; but as long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, who cares what happens to their children.
Imagine if I used this argument for 1850s plantations (the conditions in many factories not being much better). “Do you really want your children working on the plantations? Is this what you dream of for your children?”
The answer is, of course not; but that sure as hell doesn’t justify enslaving other people (whether literally in chattel; or implicitly with meager wages, long working hours, no other opportunities, and no time to learn alternative skills).
- you shouldn't want that for your children
- you shouldn't want that for their children
In a geopolitical context, those are separate discussions. It's not really fair to accuse someone of promoting slavery when they did no such thing.
Pundits are going on fox news and saying that having a job where you primarily use a computer turns you into a woman. These people are not coherant.
At the end of the day if you want quality products and innovation you need to pay for it.
Outsourcing this ability to other countries saves you money up front but it costs you the institutional knowledge to do it at home and all the costs that losing this entails.
But let's be charitable and assume that you're saying that the price of Apple products will double if the cases are machines in America -- I don't think that would be the outcome.
What percent of the cost of an apple product goes to towards the aluminum case? What percent of that cost is the material, what percent of that cost is the milling machine, and what percent is the labour?
It's not foolish to want to maximize manufacturing capacity in America and minimize it in China. If you want to be able to beat China in an armed conflict then manufacturing is what will do it -- not software development.
Computers used to be made like this. The hardware cost the modern equivalent of tens of thousands to tens of millions, partly because the assembly workers were well-managed, well-trained, and well-paid. This was DEC's business model, and it worked well for a couple of decades.
Offshoring from the early 80s on allowed US corporates to double dip and explode their margins. Local workers were laid off and replaced with cheaper offshore workers, wages for most jobs were cut in real terms (with a few critical exceptions, like software dev), but the people who did have jobs had access to much cheaper imports.
Property became catastrophically expensive, but other sectors, including consumer goods, electronics, non-premium clothes, and domestic essentials like furniture became much cheaper in real terms - which took the sting out of the loss of the better-paying jobs.
You can't reverse that overnight without catastrophic damage, because prices will explode but wages will still be depressed.
You will be making domestic commodity products that have no market.
Reindustrialisation is a fantasy. You can't bring the factories back without reinventing the economy from the ground up and making all of the parts fit together in new ways.
That would take decades, and a level of strategic insight the US is completely unable to imagine for political reasons.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/08/24Apple-Offers-Aggres...
more than $5000 in 2025 dollars!
Plenty of people still work in the data entry mines, even though that’s a desk job. In a lot of ways being an Uber driver about as cushy as a desk job in terms of physical demand on the body, but it certainly isn’t a status position.
Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry.
The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA.
And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning.
No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure.
Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.
I would argue they know..