Re: (ReacTor) Five Unconventional SFF Road Trips

Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>
Apple just announced that they are going to move all of their computer
plants to the USA and spend $500 billion here over the next four years.
I call that a win.  There are many more companies moving their
manufacturing back to the USA.  I call that a win.  Those will be lots
of high paying jobs.

No, that's the thing about manufacturing.  In 2018, Trump was talking about
"bringing back manufacturing to the US" but that year there was more
manufacturing being done in the US (by dollars of product) than ever before.
And yet, all of my relatives in Pennsylvania are lamenting that "we don't
make anything in America any longer."

There is plenty of manufacturing here, it's just that there aren't a lot of
manufacturing jobs.  When I was a kid, I toured a TV plant which had lines
and lines of young women smoking cigarettes and soldering one part in at
a time, then passing the chassis to the right.  Hundreds and hundreds of
employees, without very high skill levels, making good money.

But today, I go to a similar plant and there are machines picking up boards
and dropping parts on boards and running them through a wave tank and putting
them in boxes and stamping shipping labels on.  There are a couple of human
beings on the production line making sure all the machines are doing well,
and they are extremely well-paid experts.  But those lines of hundreds of
woman are gone.

My wife for a while was working at a fuel injector plant where they would
turn the lights out on the production line most of the day, because it saved
electricity when nobody was there.

So... I am glad to see Apple bringing their plants back to the US, and I am
sure they will hire some people who will make good money, but I am under no
illusion that the kind of manufacturing jobs that we had in the seventies
will ever come back because they don't exist any longer in any country.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."