alt Hacker NewsYep. Sadly, this is how manufacturing "actually" works.
Everyone on HN loves to daydream about automated assembly and additive manufacturing, but almost all manufacturing is dependent on dirty industries like oil (fertilizers, textiles, plastics), rare earth elements, coal (steel), and others.
When I'd visit my SO's family back in VN or my extended family back in India, it's easy to see why manufacturing is so cost effective in those countries - the only lever low margins industries have is manpower, and that requires you to devalue life to a certain extent.
This is why my parents and my SO immigrated to America.
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It doesn’t have to be dirty, proper rules have to be made to incentivize solutions that leverage economies of scale.
Politicians gave up and assumed manufacturing can’t be clean so they let good jobs leave while those left behind tended to die of fentanyl shipped in from China.
Tell it to the guy above[0] who is avoiding work travel to the US because “safety, health and freedom”
It depends. China has impressive automation and vertical integration.
This was the USA and Britian in their early industrial periods.
Now, oil and gas field work, mining, iron and steel processing, and other raw materials extraction is either automated or high-paying unionized manual labor. The same will happen in other developing economies.