Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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The way I read it, the article identifies two problems: the first being the lack of a strong manufacturing culture, and I think that was an issue that the U.S. had been developing by the 80s for sure. The other problem is simply that neither the Macintosh nor the NeXT machines really had the volume needed to make it make sense. Who knows; had they managed higher volumes, maybe the landscape of manufacturing would look different today... Maybe not.

I mean, look. I think we all get it, to some degree. Everything from the land to the labor to the materials is pricier in the U.S., for reasons. It will also continue to get pricier in China. We also know that people don't want to do menial factory work for minimum wage, and that automation isn't quite solving that problem as quickly as everyone hoped. So even if we wanted to bootstrap everything in the U.S., from raw materials to advanced electronics, it's all going to cost more and we're not going to have the labor necessary to do it at the scales needed.

I think we should absolutely work on this problem, but it's a tough one, and it seems like it only gets harder over time.

there's also a very tight labor market. it's hard to square "we need to bring more jobs back" with "it is so hard to find workers right now"

This definitely seems to suggest that tightening down on (legal) immigration is a very bad idea. I'm really not understanding U.S. policy these days.

There's not much to understand. These policies aren't thoughtfully considered or intended to be helpful. They're chaotic exertions of power by an imbecile & his cronies.

> there's also a very tight labor market. it's hard to square "we need to bring more jobs back" with "it is so hard to find workers right now"

This is insanity. When was the last time your looked for a job? People literally send hundreds of applications to companies and don't hear a peep or are automatically rejected.

Maybe those two issues are connected, though. For some jobs, it seems like people cheating job applications and interviews with LLMs are making it hard for companies to actually fill jobs even when there are tons of applicants. In other cases, it may just be that the wages the employers are willing to pay doesn't overlap with the wages the prospective employees are willing to work for. I suspect it's partially both.

Right now, the unemployment rate seems to be relatively low, despite people reporting widespread difficulty applying to jobs. Not 100% sure what this suggests. I think we can reasonably conclude the application process for software developers in particular is hopelessly broken. (Or at least, moreso than it was before.)

Tech also swung particularly super hard from "everybody is hiring" to "nobody is hiring", but tech workers aren't that big a share of the general economy, and also let's be honest, would the tech workers here accept menial factory work?

My understanding is that it's a tech thing and not the general economy. The unemployment rate is still lower than at any time during the pre-2007 boom.

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