Americans focused on other things: software, product development, high tech higher value stuff and so on. Our success there might not have been possible without the rise in manufacturing in China to actually make the things designed in the USA, we definitely didn’t have the population to do both, even if we did have the money.

But now we are in a hard spot because China has been focusing on STEM while we’ve been importing a lot of our STEM needs (from places like India and China). China is now in a position to do both, and they have the population, skills, and resources to do both.

I liken this to hanging off a cliff by multiple ropes/leads. Certainly, you can cut a few of them and still not fall, but eventually you'll cut enough rope that you'll plummet to your death. Americans need to feel the pain of poor policy, otherwise nothing will change, and there's almost no rope left to cut.

It's gone. It's the downside of the American vision of capitalism. We collectively flex in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are awesome, put light the room by setting the furniture on fire.

Reality is, as people have been pointing out for as long as I've been on this earth, the relentless focus on quarterly and current year fiscal has made the United States less competitive strategically.

I remember years ago a supplier came in to address an issue we had with defective parts in their intermediate supply chain. The VP dude was casually throwing out how all of their new parts get copied in days by their manufacturing partners, who share them with competitors, etc. In our case, a supplier was running a fraudulent third shift to make parts and threw in under-spec units as well. They seemed fine with it.

> Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.

I mean it's less nobody learned and more the demand was gone. American companies sent manufacturing overseas because back then, it was cheaper, and America is unique among nations in that we can just print money^1 to buy things. The only manufacturing that's still solidly American is products that are too fragile/large for sea shipping at scale (we make a lot of cars in North America, but a lot of that's gone to Canada and Mexico) and anything related to the defense industry. And even then, those companies (like Boeing) are now being eaten from the inside by the same business parasites that ate everything else.

These problems all have solutions but we have to stop giving private businesses a free pass to do anything and everything to starve the government of tax revenue while stripmining the citizenry for every penny they can.

1: Not without risks and problems, but still, no other country on Earth can do this.

That narrative is BS. Kids stopped going into CS in America because of the Dotcom bust. The number didn't recover until 2014. Driven in large part by the Great Recession encouraging more kids to go into STEM -- certainly my Land Grant school in the Deep South could barely keep up with the surge. Kids that did STEM recently? Worst entry-level job market we've maybe ever seen. But the kids who did a different major and likely have better short term prospects are the problem?

But that narrative certainly shifts any blame away from the winners in recent years and onto "flyover state" Americans. And now the same folks who told kids to learn to code want them learning woodshop? Come on.

Nah, the following generation will have all of that, and more, done by “AI”. No need to learn anything anymore, except giving voice commands to a computer. /s

I have! It's a great book. I don't work in that field at all but I find industrial infrastructure and manufacturing business endlessly fascinating. I wish I worked in it tbh because then I'd have an excuse to visit Shenzhen. It's on my bucket list.

996 was more a white collar phenomenon than a blue collar one.

As someone who regularly participates in local politics I assure you, this is incredibly still a thing. Every last measure receives vehement criticism from the older cohort of our city because they're certain it will mean a tax increase. We have to explain over, and over, and over again that the projects we're voting on were budgeted in over a year ago, and that money is already allocated.

Most accept this. Some stay mad but just quietly vote no (and are usually outvoted). A minority say if we have money for this then we should be cutting taxes.

Like it's stereotypical I grant you but stereotypes aren't made up in an office somewhere, Severance style. An unfortunate number of the old among us want nothing going to anyone who isn't them, and I fully accept, an amount of that is coming from people who are living on a fixed income, and I have empathy for that. A lot of it is also just coming from people who have sour grapes about only having a 17 foot boat instead of the 19 foot one they wanted, and see our parks and beautification projects as the reason they couldn't have it. Not only is it often BS, it's just anti-social. Like I'm sorry you're apparently too out of shape to enjoy a bike trail, but we have a whole ton of other people who aren't, and putting every measure of improving our city on a menu for you to select which ones you're comfortable paying for is simply not practical.

My entire life my taxes have gone to pay for things that don't benefit me. It's just part of living in a society.

Maybe in another 20 years. We were putting in an elevated light rail system above the highway, but no, it got blocked everywhere outside of the downtown core because “it looked ugly”. Nevermind that it was over a highway.