[robomartin]

It has been my experience that most folks commenting on this matter on HN have no clue whatsoever what they are talking about. None. They comment based on pure ideology or, possibly worse, a delusion driven into their heads by our lovely universities.

Those of us, like you, who actually have or had skin in the game --real experience actually trying to make real things in the context of the real world-- know better. We know and understand exactly what's going on and where this is likely headed. Nobody here wants to hear about it. The reaction ranges from the most uninformed comments to flagging and effectively cancelling what they don't want to hear.

The worse of it is that reality doesn't care about flagging comments and down-votes, reality keeps moving forward. The path we are on is 180 degrees from what we should be doing if we actually want to have a shot a maintaining a reasonable standard of living for generations to come.

To be fair, at this point, it is almost impossible. The kind of leadership and cultural shift we need in order to do the things we have to do might be impossible to achieve given what we have done to our society. This is the most disconcerting part for me. We have devoted years destroying this nation from the inside. Europe hasn't done much better than this.

[triactual]

It’s genuinely terrifying. There seems to be no recognition that you cannot have labor unions and environmental protections with out tariffs to even the playing field with less scrupulous countries. We are rapidly approaching a time where only the military industrial complex retains any manufacturing expertise.

[robomartin]

I have designed and manufactured systems for aerospace applications. I spent months dealing with ITAR issues due to the reality that you simply cannot build almost anything out of US/European components. The metal and a few high-tech items, mostly in the materials domain. Almost everything else is not made in the US or Europe.

I thought that people were going to wake up to some of these realities when they finally saw reality in the form of not even being able to manufacture face masks in the US. We don't make the cloth and other materials, we don't even make the machines you need to manufacture them.

This and related realities should have been covered in great detail by our media. For people outside of manufacturing this was news. Most people go through life having no understanding whatsoever of how and where the stuff they use every day comes from, how it's made, etc.

The pandemic should have shocked everyone into pushing for massive changes that would, over time, increase self reliance. Yet, none of that happened. It was starting to, at the highest levels, but then political forces changed and now we are more concerned about giving people free money than actually securing their futures and that of the next generation. Brilliant.