this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
77 points (97.5% liked)

News

29165 readers
3360 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] expatriado@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago

there multiple reasons for Trump's tariffs behavior, forcing business people to kiss his butt is probably top

[–] tal@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

The group further warned that the tariffs will not result in bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., as Trump has promised, because they erase the certainty that businesses require in order to invest in sourcing changes.

To expand on that, Trump hasn't built any kind of a durable consensus even with the broader Congressional GOP, much less the Democrats, which you'd expect if you wanted the trade environment to be predictable and lasting. He's operating under (questionable) emergency authority from the Executive Branch alone. That might work if his goal is to extract a bunch of taxes out of poorer Americans via tariffs for four years. But it's probably not a very effective way to restructure global supply chains, to convince countries to make major investments in domestic production.

Nobody wants to dump a ton of money into a factory in the US which is going to be globally uncompetitive, only makes sense to serve a protected domestic market, and would take take many years to make back the investment, and then have the protection go away and be left in the hole.

Howard Lutnick, Trump's Secretary of Commerce, had some quote from the other day where it sounded like he was promoting the idea that companies could just heavily automate production, so workers are just programming and maintaining industrial robots, basically.

https://www.businessinsider.com/howard-lutnick-future-jobs-factories-robots-manufacturing-tariffs-trump-2025-5

Howard Lutnick says the 'great jobs of the future' will be fixing robots in factories

So, what would these near-future human workers be doing in factories? Lutnick said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that the United States should train people to be technicians for these automated machines.

"It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future," Lutnick said. "You know, this is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here."

In a separate CNBC interview on April 3, Lutnick said US factories are "going to see the greatest surge in training for what we call tradecraft — teaching people how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers, and electricians for high-tech factories."

If he's actually serious about that and it's not just political-speak, there are a couple of problems.

First, the people who voted for Trump over manufacturing probably aren't going to be interested in that. If they had the skillset to do industrial automation, they probably would be a lot less concerned about finding a job.

Here's an NPR Planet Money podcast from a decade back.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-transformation-of-american-factory-jobs-in-one-company

Young is the perfect model of the new factory worker. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of metals and microscopes, gauges and plugs. He works on the team that makes fuel injectors, which require precision engineering. At the heart of the assembly process is an automated machine run by a computer process known as CNC.

"When I came here 20 years ago, we didn't have CNC equipment," he says. "It was more of the hammer and screwdriver fix, to where now it's all finesse."

"Now it's all finesse" could be the motto of American manufacturing today. In factories around the country, manufacturing is becoming a high-tech, high-precision business. And not everyone has the finesse to run a CNC machine.

I can read, I've had some computer classes, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree. But when I asked Ralph's boss, Tony Scalzitti, if he would hire me and train me on the job, his answer surprised me.

"No," he said. "The risk of having you being able to come up to speed with training would be a risk I wouldn't be willing to take."

To become like Ralph, I'd have to learn the machine's computer language. I'd have to learn the strengths of various metals and their resistance to various blades. And then there's something I don't believe I'd ever be able to achieve: the ability to picture dozens of moving parts in my head. Half the people Tony has trained over the years just never were able to get that skill.

And if you don't get that skill, a mistake on this machine can be catastrophic. All the work that's done here happens on a scale of microns. One micron is four-hundred-thousandths of an inch. A human hair, for example, is 70 microns thick. Here, you cannot be off by one-tenth the thickness of a hair.

"A 7- or 8-micron wrong adjustment in this machine cost us a $25,000 workhead spindle," Young says. "Two seconds, we could lose $25,000."

Madelyn "Maddie" Parlier is more like the old style of worker. She does have a high school diploma, but no further education. She works on a simple machine that seals the the cap of a fuel injector onto the body. All she does is insert two parts and push a button. It requires no discretion, no judgment. There's only one way to run it: the right way.

"It does it for you," Maddie says. "All you do is put the piece in, push the clamps down, and push your finger."

There are a lot of things Ralph knows that Maddie wishes she knew. She wants to know how many microns thick the different parts are. She wants to know the computer language used on the machine she runs. She wants to know all the things that make Ralph's job prospects so much brighter than her own. And until she knows those things, her future is far less certain.

Maddie has a job, I learned, because of some simple math. A machine could easily replace her — a robotic arm could put the parts in and take them out — but it would cost around $100,000. Maddie makes a lot less than that, and, for now, the math is in her favor.

But if the price of a robotic arm goes down, or a factory in China learns how to make that part for a lot less, Maddie's job is at risk. Simple calculations like that have cost around 5 million factory workers their jobs over the past decade.

If you voted for Trump because you were thinking that you'd get a lot of low-skill assembly line jobs that don't require a ton of education and training, and you wanted them to be high-pay, you're probably not getting what you want out of this arrangement.

Second, there are some other issues, like environmental regulations, that don't help the US be competitive even if a process is automated.

Third, my understanding is that with tariffs, at least some, if not all goods, it's the final stage in processing that matters for determining origin. So all one really needs to do is move legally-minimum transformative final stage out of China to some other country that has lower US tariffs, leave the inputs in China, and do the last step in that other country. Do no more than is necessary to keep this from being a re-export.

Fourth, even if you (could) change the international system of trade and tracked all the inputs, then there's still little reason to do labor-intensive manufacturing in the US. You might take it out of China, but you'd do it in Vietnam or Indonesia or whatever, somewhere where you aren't going to be left with an un-economically-viable factory if the tariffs on China go away or are relaxed. Avoiding that would require taking the US to autarky, which would really dick up its economy a la North Korea.

[–] TheMightyCat@lemm.ee 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We are gonna SAVE AMERICA by TARRIFFING EVERYTHING but also exempting everything from these tariffs.

[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

That's absolutely not true, be responsible and stop spreading those lies. Only the companies that write a cheque to him get an exemption.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 14 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Why should anyone get an exemption?

If Nike can't move their production to the US then why would anyone else be able to?

Either everyone suffers or no one should, either everyone gets fucked or fuck off with the tarriffs.

[–] Johnnykorn@lemmy.world 4 points 22 hours ago

There are made in US tennis shoes that are not much more expensive, if they wanted to make them in the US we know they could but that would cut into the CEO $32 million salary.

[–] Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 points 22 hours ago

All sorts of businesses should get an exemption.

It's a demonstrably fact that the materials needed for Nikes aren't available in the United States.

Source: forced child labour is, at the time of this comment, still illegal domestically.

[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

Lol. Fools. It needs to come with a checque for the orange doofus.

[–] BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

Trump wants tariffs to generate money to the federal income tax can be removed. He truly does not care about any other people or businesses. The will not be any sympathy. The only possible bargaining chip is to propose another funding source for the federal government.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 17 hours ago

so they can continue thier sweatshops.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

How much did they bribe the Turd with?