Jason KoeblerHere I explain why the idea that we are going to suddenly make iPhones in the U.S. is pure fantasy and if Apple WERE to do that it would come after several years of deep pain. The iPhone is perhaps the most global product that has ever existed: https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/
The idea of reshoring high-tech manufacturing isn't bad but it has to be done in a coherent and strategic way. Here is where Apple components are currently made. This is not coming back to the US overnight and probably not ever
It's not clear that Americans can even build the types of factories needed to make something like the iPhone. TSMC had to import workers from Taiwan on special visas to build its factory in Arizona. Half of the workers there are Taiwanese. Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin never opened
Flexport's CEO, who handles international logistics, says some clients it works with have already *stopped plans to build factories in the US* because tariffs have made buying equipment to expensive
Meanwhile, Apple's automation efforts are not going that well and there are still millions of human beings who work on it. Reshoring think tank suggests American workers in the same job make ~10x what a similar worker in Vietnam makes
Suzanne Aldrich (she/her)@jasonkoebler It’s just not meaningful to talk about restoring America as a manufacturing powerhouse as if it’s a realistic notion. Skilled jobs in America already run unfilled even with great wages. Meanwhile what are you going to make all these devices out of? Corn? 🌽 How are you going to upskill people when you just cut the social safety net? These are all just insane ramblings folks and the markets are proving it because at the end of the day, no matter what people say or how they vote, they always put their money where they think it’s safe, and that isn’t the American economy anymore.
RootWyrm 🇺🇦
@jasonkoebler Jason, it's even simpler than that. For a lot of these products, no amount of insisting we can build factories matters at all.
We simply don't have the raw materials domestically. Not 'we don't have a mine.' There simply aren't meaningful deposits.
Extinction Studies@rootwyrm @jasonkoebler We will have to mine our wastes. What wastes we haven't shipped overseas as pollution, that is. And accept that capital is finite, that it depends on nature's abundance, and that once debilitated, a species or an economy will never be what it was.