[goatinaboat]

Say you have a century-old widget factory that closes (a common story here in Wales). The widget making machinery gets sold off, even if for scrap. The factory site gets demolished and redeveloped. The widget makers retire or retrain and they tell their kids “don’t go into the widget business, it’s a dead end”. All the colleges cancel their widget courses, no demand.

A decade or two passes and rebooting your widget industry will be an order of magnitude harder than it was to start in the first place.

[lsc]

>A decade or two passes and rebooting your widget industry will be an order of magnitude harder than it was to start in the first place.

Eh, you don't want any of the old equipment anyhow, you want new computer controlled stuff. I mean, sure, the people making that equipment need to have some experienced machinists, but... not so many of them; you mostly want Engineers for this job.

I think the problem America has is not with losing existing factories, but in how little value we place, culturally, on education.

[JoeAltmaier]

Maybe not any more? You can hire internationally now, its never been easier to research widgets. New technologies and manufacturing techniques make it a whole different widget ballgame anyway - you probably wouldn't do it the same anyway.

In fact, many industries reinvent themselves periodically just to stay current. Restarting a factory can't be much different.

[goatinaboat]

Here I’m using widgets as a synonym for the kinds of heavy industries we used to have. Reopening a steel mill or a tin mine is not something you can do overnight.

People forget that a factory itself is a sophisticated machine and operating it is an advanced skill that relies heavily on experience. A car factory is considerably more complex than any of the cars it produces, for example. Or, we never had a fab in Wales, but it’s a similar analogy. And then there’s the logistics, the supply chain, again a massively complex thing that is often overlooked. Maybe the factory had hundreds of suppliers and subcontractors, they would all need to be rebooted too. It’s a fractal problem.

[lsc]

sure, but... I mean, the tech has changed so much and gotten so much better.

If we threw the sort of effort (and by effort, I mean money) into reindustrialization that we throw into, say, selling ads, the problem would fall pretty quickly. Heck, the net effect would be that the same people would work on it, if the money shifted.

(I actually think the bit about using most of the same people is... pretty true? half the programmers I support are actually trained as some other sort of engineer; but writing code is massively more remunerative, say, than actually working as a chemical engineer or mechanical engineer, and programming is something that can be done by nearly everyone who can handle the education, as far as I can tell, required to become a real engineer)