To your point 3, I don't think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry. Industry is a riskier and lower impact investment. It takes a ton of money to buy land, build a huge building on it, fill it with machines, fill it with people, train those people, fill it with inputs, and coordinate the shipping and distribution of the outputs. This is a huge huge huge cost for not a lot of payoff in the short term, at least to someone trying to fund it privately.

What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?

Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won't accomplish anything meaningful beyond "Americans can afford less shit." An economy built on financialization and that doesn't care about anything except short term profit has no incentive to build industry. At the kind of scale that would make a meaningful impact on the average American, only a government could accomplish it, and that definitely won't happen.

[–] BashfulBob@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry

We're doing it with battery manufacturing as we speak. A big reason the Atlantic Coast is trending blue stems from re-shoring of automotive manufacturing, particularly with regard to EVs. In theory, we'd be doing it with semiconductor manufacturing, too, if we weren't so far behind the curve.

What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?

Some private investors see value in real assets, even if they aren't producing the immediate sky-high returns available in the IP markets. Yes, GE's sort of blazed a trail of "don't own anything except the debt of other industries" as a corporate model. But you've also got big energy producers like Exxon and construction companies like Bechtel that have huge investments in income generating capital projects. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft are invested in data centers - which require material infrastructure, maintenance, energy, etc. For all the shit AI gets, its been an excuse to build out these enormous facilities for data processing that have value beyond whatever lies Sam Alton is telling people.

Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won't accomplish anything meaningful beyond "Americans can afford less shit."

I disagree, but I guess we'll see. I think onshoring means rebuilding the collapsed base of engineering, technical management, and logistics that we've let sag over the last 40 years. And I think it's going to boost the quality of work for a vital sector of the national economy.

[–] SadArtemis@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago

There's no reason the US can't onshore its industry again... But the process (and the products) will be prohibitively expensive, such that without astronomical subsidies (which the US certainly is pumping out, money printed go brrr) the only viable markets for such goods will be captive markets.

Rebuilding the industrial infrastructure, etc. will be hilariously overpriced. Rebuilding the ecosystem (base of engineering, R&D, etc) will be hilariously overpriced. The labor costs will be hilarious overpriced (because the workers' living expenses will be depressingly overpriced- Yankkkeestan and the collective west is expensive as all hell). The valuations, final cost of production, etc etc... will all be hilariously overpriced. And each and every capitalist will... "capitalize" appropriately on the situation to whittle out their cut.

What I'm saying is- China will be building a bridge in a few months to a year, and often doing it under budget and generally with great quality. Africa, Asia, Latin America will build their bridges, and it will take (varying amounts of time), and it will cost considerably less than it would in the US or anywhere in the west for comparable quality. Same with Russia, etc.

The US will use its money printer to magic up the funds to build a bridge (or even just repair it lol) and will wind up going massively over budget, will probably not have completed it within a decades time, will cut corners here and there (and won't even maintain it properly... Because everything in their system is so overpriced), and will have what may as well be infinite grift and corruption (probably legalized in one form or another). All the "capitalization" adds up lol...

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I thought the Atlantic coast automotive manufacturing was mostly a way to union bust the last dregs of Detroit manufacturing

[–] BashfulBob@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

That was more Right to Work legislation. The insourcing of Asian auto assembly was about Japan giving a bunch of Mid-Atlantic senators/congressmen a jobs program so they'd step off picking a trade war with the Pacific Rim nations.