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For return to happen you need to have a creative economy, not an extractive economy.

Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable.

For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.

What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.

It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.

Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.

There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.

I think if the wealth class wants to avoid communism and heads on pikes in the longer run, they should absolutely start to be more concerned with community and move beyond the tunnel blinders of the next quarter over long term stability.

This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.

Unfortunately that's a wall street problem. I don't think wall street can be fixed, at least I don't have any clue on how it's possible to fix it outside of destroying it.

As long as the ownership class can continue tricking half the population into directing their lust for violence towards scapegoats like illegal immigrants, there's very little reason for them to change course. The remaining half of the population then gets most of their energy used up defending against "culture war" bullshit, with many even going on the aggressive there because it's one of the few types of allowable wins in the very narrow Overton window.

Illegal immigration isn't just a scapegoat... it's a large impact on social welfare spending, infrastructure costs and housing availability. Especially when considering an increase of over 5% of the population in under 5 years without an accompanying growth in production and wealth generation in general relative to inflation.

There are limits on migration for a reason... that doesn't even consider the impacts on the larger society by weakening social cohesion.

Even then, there's plenty of indication of movement from those who want a Communist society... you only need to look at the NYC election, and the Venezuela protests to see that. Without a longer term consideration for society as part of where business/corporations operate, you will only see more drift in that direction.

Sure, it's not just a scapegoat. I'm actually pretty ambivalent about the immigration issue itself [0]. But it is still a scapegoat - the people who were violently angry about economic disenfranchisement (due to overfinancialization and massively monetary inflation) are currently all-in on cheering for the New York financial con artist for performatively going after those scapegoats while making the real problems worse, right? That right there is the pressure valve popping off, and even if the tribal buntings change and those people go back to seeing the system as their enemy in ten years, history shows they will just get hoodwinked again.

If this tiny movement towards "communism" amounts to anything of note in 20 years, I will be surprised. The pattern I've seen is that even if the current push is headed by idealistic leaders who don't give in to self-interested expedience (ie corruption), the next crop won't be. And the corporatist structure has been very good at neutralizing any real reforms, especially in the US.

[0] given equity with things like people who have been here for quite some time - those are undocumented Americans. For comparison, adverse possession, by which you can gain exclusive title to a piece of real estate by breaking the law usually only requires a few decades

Offshoring happened because people dont want to buy goods that cost 3x as much just because they were made in the US. If a clothing company tries manufacturing domestically no one will buy their clothes unless theyre already an expensive brand.

Partially true, but it also happened because companies wanted to reduce cost and logistics are cheap. Sometimes this was a necessity to stay competitive. You either prohibit some trade with taxes or it is a race to the bottom to concentrate all production into countries with the lowest possible wages.

Ecological factors from logistics are missed technological development opportunity from not having local production are not factored in here as well.

You’re cherry-picking examples. Manufacturers can and do relocate the entire chain (or a super majority of it). I live outside of Greenville, SC also (previously Charleston) and when Boeing or BMW or Mercedes or Volvo bring a product out here they also bring hundreds of small time suppliers with them. Maybe the cotton for the cloth seats still come from Egypt but this is immaterial to the overall operation and the jobs it brings to a community.

They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet people wore shirts. Those steps can come back.

For cars I found it interesting that my water pump on my Dodge Ram is stamped with Made in Italy. Yet the part is fairly small that even if Italy continues to make it, they can ship 50k water pumps in one shipping container to Detroit, and the truck can still be assembled here. That's not an issue. The issue is when the truck is made in Mexico entirely (which I think they still are). I know that's not "the entire supply chain" but it certainly becomes a center of gravity.

Last year many people were talking about dev shops changing their "center of gravity" from the US to other places like Poland. In other words, CEO here, EVERYTHING else is in Poland. Wherever that center of gravity is, that's the country that will benefit the most. They may even hire a remote worker in the US that is up all night - but it will be the exception, not the rule to hire US people.

Clothes are much cheaper than they were in 1960. You could bring the garment industry back to the US but you wouldnt be able to sell your products because they wouldnt be price competitive with sweatshop products.

You can just ban imports of the sweatshop products.

The problem is that people like sweatshop products. If you ban them you get voted out because of massive inflation.

like all Apple products?

Protectionism has been proven time and again to fail. Over time inflation rises, trade gets worse, prices get higher, fewer choices, then the economy fails; it's a shitshow.

Even if we wanted to buy domestic-only, wealth inequality is so fucked that our people couldn't afford it. The way to solve that is higher wages, smaller corporate profits, cheaper healthcare and cost of living. But you know that ain't happening. Our economy is built around corporate profits. We're basically one large hedge fund with a lot of uber drivers.

So while you can get away with protectionism during the reign of an insane person for 4 years, you eventually need to move stuff back overseas, because nobody here can afford the stuff you make here. (You could export all your goods, but then what's the point of the protectionism?)

Most clothing worn in the U.S. was made in the U.S. even in the 1990s. In the 1980s it was over 70%.

> They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet people wore shirts. Those steps can come back.

That was an entirely different economic world. We also paid 25 cents for gasoline; that's not coming back, and neither are cheap t-shirts.

Then why is Germany bemoaning and suffering from their Mittelstand jobs going to Eastern Europe and Asia?

>> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. > Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world.

You're both right but you appear to differ on particularities, like if it's good to bring all manufacturing onshore.

I'd rather address Jensen's could-be-apology which pretty much mimics Grok's "Oops, I made some pedo images, sorry... but move on, nothing to see here."

Yes, Nvidia, Apple and AMD are the companies that drove the US chip manufacturing overseas. The problem is, thanks to that, they are now forcing us to pay for their enormous margins and for bringing chip production back here, all the while they swim in money.

On top of that, we are now supposed to appreciate their newly acquired wisdom and be thankful when they lecture us about what's good for America.

I'm not sure what you're arguing against, isn't that the point of the GP? That we can bring all that stuff back? Tesla makes things predominantly in-house and didn't use a supply chain all over the world. There are still garments grown and made entirely in the US, eg Duckworth. They're just expensive because there's not a lot of it left.