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by ahartmetz 61 days ago
>after dismantling their own manufacturing

Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.
1 comments
joe_mamba 61 days ago
>We still have a lot of manufacturing.

Then why are we afraid of China and the US and cave in to their demands?

Why is german manufacturing output back to where it was in 2006?[1]

[1] https://x.com/ThorstenPolleit/status/2047436171903394294/pho...

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ahartmetz 61 days ago
We still have a lot != it's doing fantastic and is expanding.
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joe_mamba 60 days ago
So your >"We still have a lot", is just hiding the decline.
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ahartmetz 60 days ago
I think the "still" implies that it's at least not increasing and probably slowly decreasing. And except in some of the largest companies like Siemens (where it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore neither), the idea that manufacturing (or anything) may be profitable but not profitable enough has not taken hold as much as in the US.
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joe_mamba 59 days ago
You're wrong if you're trying to use the US as a negative example and think the EU is better. Yes, the US offshored more than the EU in relative terms, but it has more domestic manufacturing left more than the EU in absolute terms, making the US is the second manufacturer in the world right now, by quite a margin.

Meanwhile Germany's and the EU's short sighted energy policies have caused a lot of manufacturing to move outside the EU to places like the US or China.

The EU is in a very bad position right now manufacturing wise compared to how it was and how it could be. It basically never failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the last ~20 years.

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