We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.
> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.
The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.
Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.
Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.
Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.
> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.
I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.
I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.
Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.
> I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.
From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on more.
When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the change.
One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up.
I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the ones putting the upfront capital so early). Google also has the X moonshot lab that is trying to do similar things to Bell Labs. I think there’s just a lot of romanticism of the golden age when developments were relatively easier because we hadn’t exhausted the low hanging fruit of applied quantum and material sciences.
There is also the negative effect of over-expensive ip blocking product development as no new product with unclear potential can take on prohibitive license costs.
But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..
Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.
Literally patents.
But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.
And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.
What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.
1) The alternative is for millions of local-currency patents in Lesotho to automatically be valid for two decades in USA, EU, and Japan.
2) An of course it doesn't prevent IP violations - Eurocopter (now Airbus helicopters) had to spend millions to enforce their patents against the thieves* at Bell helicopter.
https://www.bananaip.com/intellepedia/bell-helicopter-v-euro...
* not my preferred choice of words, but its the tone on this forum.
I'm confused by the ending of this article. It seems like two mutually exclusive outcomes happened.
> The court held that the landing gear certified and sold by Bell Helicopter on its Model 429 helicopter, namely the Production Gear, does not infringe the Eurocopter patent. The court invalidated all but one claim of Eurocopter’s patent. Bell Helicopter is, therefore, free to continue all use and sales of its Model 429 helicopter with its existing landing gear.
So it doesn't infringe and they can continue to use the landing gear. But then
> In addition to awarding to Eurocopter damages and punitive damages, the judge also issued an injunction enjoining Bell from manufacturing, using, or selling the infringing landing gear, and also ordered Bell to destroy all infringing landing gears in its possession.
What? I'm clearly missing something here.
> What you’re describing is monstrously expensive
I would actually consider this to be an desirable side effect: if you want governments to enforce your monopoly using their state authority, you better pay for this really well. :-)
So you'd prefer there be no protection for inventors who aren't already wealthy?
I prefer for inventors not having to deal with the minefield of loads of existing patents.
I wonder if we could reproduce the magic of Bell Labs by basically re-creating some Ma Bell style businesses: grant a profitable, but regulated monopoly that had the financial security to think long-term and be willing to fund out-of-the-box research to service internal needs or hypotheticals.
I mean, wasn't this ZIRP Google? Chrome, Android, Project Zero, etc.
It's deep hubris in our leaders that assumes existing capital/values/structures/motivations are sufficient to allow newcomers ( & new generations) to contribute..
Tangentially, I have not personally tried, but it seems possible:However. Bell Labs did it, so what sort of humility existed then that (mostly) does not exist now?!?("Unintentionally moderate"[1-2] business thinkers like PG/YC partners do it all the time)
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.htmlWonder if hubris is necessary for continued survival of the economy.>Have to be an asshole or something
[2] https://archive.today/latest/coralcap.co/2022/02/why-japanes...
It's also fundamental tech and a research pipeline supporting new ones.
There are numerous examples of whole competencies were transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/10/22/america...
And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc ... Which corp has the gumption to fund any of that again? They'd rather pad the current quarter than invest in the next.
Corporate research spending is nearly $1T/yr. Yes, corporations have a lower risk tolerance than the government, but that's not always a bad thing.
Not just risk tolerance - they also have different (generally much more short-sighted) incentives.
To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.
A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.
> you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.
Because it would be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - in the company's estimate - and then force them to stick around for years.
"But nobody made them agree to that!"
Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.
> "But nobody made them agree to that!"
And to amplify your point just a bit, if the alternative is losing your healthcare and possibly going homeless, what does "agreeing" even mean anymore?
What you’re describing already exists and are aptly named TRAPs (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions). Companies already abuse these and in fact are illegal in California. Here’s an article covering it from a few years ago: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-us-companies-charging-...
> Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.
And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.
Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service.
50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.
> Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront.
Why not?
> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.
"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?
> is more expensive than
Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.
Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.
> Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.
How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee?
The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will take whichever job pays more, so the employer who paid the $50k has to offer the same salary as the one who didn't. And then who is going to pay the $50k when they could get the employee that someone else paid the money to train, for the same salary?
> The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years.
No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.
Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.
As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.
It's almost like maybe there was a point to unions and guilds and what not...
Isn’t that simply the inherent risk associated with business ventures? Not every investment will yield a profit. I recall reading about Ward Parkinson, one of the founders of Micron Technology. During his tenure at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company paid for his Master’s degree at Stanford. However, upon graduating, he promptly left to work for Reticon.
If more employers gave raises such that an existing employee in a given role was paid the same or more as what they would pay a new hire to fill the same role, I don't think we'd see the level of job hopping that we currently do.
This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.
If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU, Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either. Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews, one hour each? If that's not enough to judge a potential hire then I don't know what is. Once the hiring is fixed you should have lots of great candidates available.
You don't even need to go out of the US. Plenty of good US people are down to live in non-FAANG COL areas and thus can have more take-home for less upfront pay.
In networking the situation is just ridiculous. Companies just expect people to know Cisco Nexus, ASA, XE, Palo Alto, Linux, AWS VPC, and do a bit of database and backup admin all for less than $100,000 a year.
That’s sounds like a functioning free market. Either they find the quality of labor they require at that rate, or they don’t. Either you take such a job at that rate because you have the required skills and knowledge and that’s your best offer, or you don’t.
Exsept usually adding extraneous requirements and low pay offer is cover for wanting h1b1 wage slaves that have a visa bound to the employer so they can't demand market rate or risk being sent home so a new artificially low market rate is created. So much for it being a free market.
> Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work.
Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx
If you don't upskill for free with no additional comp, how will they continue to cram down labor costs to make their quarterly numbers? You are, broadly speaking, treated as an asset to be sweat until you can be replaced.
Well, tbf, it's not like there's no carrot in this case. (I'm at a FAANG)
But I'm sure what you're describing is common in the general case.
Certainly, at FAANG outlier comp, it is likely worth your while vs the median.
> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work.
Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.
What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.
The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.
It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.
Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise? It would be foolish for an employee to let someone else handle career growth for them as their interests aren't aligned (or even known). If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager.
Managers should facilitate training to improve employee productivity and help prepare them for a promotion. But that isn't really the same as career growth.
> Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise?
On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly recent.
Edit - added source (1993): https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-no-...
Outside of government, this shift also coincides with the decline of pensions and the rise of the 401k.
Career growth has always been a shared responsibility between employees and employers. In white-collar fields--especially medicine and engineering--education has long been frontloaded, with formal schooling as the main on-ramp.
Blue-collar jobs, by contrast, have relied more on trade schools, mentorship, and hands-on training. These pathways have steadily eroded since the 1980s.
Much of this traces back to the Open Door Policy with China and the broader Free Trade Agreements that followed. These moved massive segments of industry offshore--along with the structures that once incentivized long-term employee development through education and skill-building.
Revitalizing domestic industry could reintroduce competition among employers, which in turn could restore the pre-1990s incentives for long-term investment in the workforce.
I would point to the emergence of Milton Friedman’s school of thought that the only thing a company should care for is delivering “shareholder value.”
It's the same problem in the trades. Apprentices tend to cost the company more than their output so no one wants to hire and train them.
It didn't stop in the 70s. In many countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it's still common for businesses to retain employees over the arc of their career.
Certainly true, my comments are specific to the North American workplace.
Even the creepy business terminology "human capital" implies something that a business actively wants to grow. That is in stark contrast to how most businesses manage their people today.
I find "human capital" better than "human resources", as it has connotations of something valuable to be invested carefully as opposed to something simply to be consumed and discarded.
Of course, in the end it doesn't really matter, it is all Orwellian anyway.
Not entirely. Businesses don't try to grow things like buildings and inventory, they try to manage them at levels that make sense for their present and projected sales.
(So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees get)
Inventory is part of working capital. Companies generally understand that they want to expand working capital.
Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital at all.
Companies who pay attention to free cash flow will typically try to manage inventory and non-cash/equivalent working capital down, not up.
How do you improve your "return on capital"?
That's right - by keeping output constant (e.g. through automation) while reducing capital!
My bestie works in sales and marketing. Events, promotions, audience engagement. Long time experience with national brands, loves helping local businesses (side hustle).
A huge part of her job is recruiting and hiring. Part of her pitch is proactive career development.
Paraphrasing: I want you to join our team. I also understand that this job is just one stop on your journey. While you're here, what can I do to help you get the skills and experience you want for your next job?
Consequently, she has a HUGE network, built over decades. Something comes up and she knows just the right person. She has her pick of new opportunities.
Wouldn't you love to have her as your boss?
I've had precisely 2 bosses in my career that had any impulse for nurturing, mentoring, career development. Whereas I've tried to be that kind of boss, given the limits of our current system.
> If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager.
Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.
No, that's not how it usually works (at least not for professional and managerial employees in the US). Mentors are typically more senior, not peers and not someone in the employee's direct chain of command. They may be in an entirely different organization.
I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.
As a manager, I disagree. It is entirely within my interest to have a direct do better; this provides me a path in the future to switch orgs when they switch orgs. If I level up or leave, I bring them with. If they level up or leave, they potentially bring me with. Team, self, org in descending order of priority. Companies are temporary, network is what carries you until the end of your career.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your network is your net worth but only if you give more than you take.")
> How can it be otherwise?
It was otherwise. And is IS otherwise in many other rich countries, as well as not-so-rich ones.
In these places, the employer-employee relationship is more of a relationship and less of a transaction to be reassessed every morning.
If you don't believe it, because you've never seen it, then you are probably American, probably young. And seeing other possibilities is a good reason to study (modern!) history, and to travel.
You fix it the way every other industry has fixed it: broke/agent model.
Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.
In a broker/agent model agents are people doing most of the client-facing work, but they defer an offset of both liabilities and earnings to a broker. This is how real estate agents, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and many others enter their professions, at least in the US. Because the broker carries civil, and possibly criminal, liable for the violations of their represented agents they have a vested interest in the quality of product/service those agents deliver. In the medical industry the agent phase is described as residency and internship. Its a matter of who actually holds the license that allows a person to perform professionally.
In criminal enterprise drug mules and prostitutes often subscribe to this business model. Drug mules will transport drugs as part of an illegal enterprise and are paid by criminal organizations that have vested interest in the successful completion of the logistical services provided by the drug mules. Likewise, in some geographies prostitutes will voluntarily pay pimps a percentage of their earnings in exchange for physical security and those pimps stake the value of their services on the success and reputation of the services they provide to their prostitute agents.
You also have to understand most of the software industry loves to bitch and cry about all these problems they see in hiring and practicing and yet don't really want any of these problems to be solved.
>We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.
This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."
Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.
I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.
> Business culture is eating its own young
it's not eating its own young. It's externalizing the costs.
And it's understandable, because the cost of employees are perhaps the largest line item in the budget.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say capitalist culture is eating its own young, due to its fixation on business culture. And I'm saying that as basically a capitalist. Not sure where we go from here.
Shareholder supremacy is the problem.
We can go back to stakeholder capitalism.
What's the difference?
Unless a stakeholder can become a stakeholder without putting in risk capital of course.
Do you have a stake in whether your water supply is full of arsenic?
Yup!
Do you have a stake in whether the people in your community work unsafe jobs for poverty wages?
Yup!
From Claude:
"Stakeholder capitalism is a model where businesses focus on serving the interests of all parties affected by the company's operations - including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. The core belief is that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just investors.
Shareholder supremacy, on the other hand, is a model where a company's primary or sole purpose is to maximize returns for its shareholders. This view, popularized by economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s, holds that businesses have no social responsibility beyond making profits for their owners while following the law."
Shareholder supremacy is a recent meme and it's wildly, obviously antisocial.
Away from unfettered capitalism, clearly.
Ford Vs. Dodge Brothers
I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for industrial/mining/agricultural customers.
'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years,
The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly jump through hoops to live in an area well removed from the industry I work in but not everyone has this luxury.
The second is psychological. How many kids do you know who are ready to commit to a future of 35+ years of factory work in their early twenties, even with reasonable pay. This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when there is a high probability they will make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable.
This is HN, so I don't know if this resonates but as a thought experiment, would you take a welding/machine operation/technician position for 25 - 45 USD/hr (based on experience)? Overtime gets you 1.5 base rate and health insurance + dental + 401k is part of the deal. All you need is a GED, proof of eligibility to work in the United States and the ability to pass a physical + drug screen on hiring. After that, no one cares what you do on your own time if you show up, do your job and don't get in an industrial accident. Caveat, you have move away from anything remotely like a 'cultural center' but you do have racial diversity. Also, you will probably be able to afford a house, but it won't be anything grand or anywhere terribly interesting.
There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?
> There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?
It's pay. It's always pay.
You gave a range so I'm guessing the lower end is starting out, why take that when nearly every entry level job, with far less demand, pays about the same?
Start your pay at $45/hr and people will flood in. If they aren't, it's because the factory is too remote for population to get to. Put that factory in any mid to large midwestern city and it'll be flooded with applicants.
How do I know? About an hour south of Louisville, Amazon keeps building giant warehouses and hiring workers, and people fight over those jobs. They don't pay half of that.
> It's pay. It's always pay.
Indeed.
I attended an injection molding conference and one of the panel discussions was about the poor state of hiring and retention. I stayed expecting to hear the standard complaints about the fact that injection molding was considered "obsolete" (really?), the pipeline was too weak so wages were out of hand and there was too much churn. I was interested in which companies were hiring off the people so much that it warranted a panel session.
Then I heard the complaints of what their primary competitor was: Amazon warehouses. They were losing injection molding workers to freakin' Amazon floor jobs!
I lost it and lit off on an absolute rant about how if a company couldn't keep their employees from joining one of the objectively worst employers in the country then they absolutely deserved to go bankrupt.
I, very suddenly, made both a bunch of friends and a bunch of enemies that day.
Preach. How long does it take train someone to get them to $45hr level of experience? The truth is that it doesn't. Companies love using yoe as an excuse to pay newer workers less. Manufacturing is not like software engineering where you have to constantly be re-educating yourself.
Staff who’ve been around a while, understand how a company operates and can seed that understanding into new staff are more valuable to companies. For example: if every worker were replaced with an equally skilled worker tomorrow a company regardless would not be able to function. It therefore makes sense that a senior employee can demand a higher wage [than a new starter] even if their direct productivity is no different and so a gradient in wage for seniority is exactly what one would expect to see in a free market.
If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.
Making employees replaceable cogs is what industrialization was completely about. It's what happened during globalization. Think about all those seniors who lost their jobs when the factory went overseas. That was successful in large part because the distinction between a junior and a senior is not that great.
There would be some exceptions here for management and execs, but we are not talking about them here.
> If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate.
No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here <points>". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.
It turns out, that isn't worth much. Because they upended the factories and sent them to Mexico and China overnight without a person to point and say where the jig was. Seemingly, they figured it out.
To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.
At least in the instances I've been aware of, they usually weren't really "overnight". Usually a good bit of knowledge transfer or actually moving institutional people, sometimes having the other factory coming online in parallel so they can tweak processes, etc. Usually a years-long process. I think few truly overnight shut down one factory and opened the other with those other people having zero knowledge or training on specific processes without experiencing big issues.
- [deleted]
In Norway skilled trades generally require a 2-year education and an apprenticeship. After education you start the apprenticeship for which pay starts at like $5-7.5 an hour but every 6 months it increases until you finish the 2 year apprenticeship.
This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice program so it's very cheap to train young workers.
The people who choose this path generally end up pretty well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like mid to late twenties and make even more later.
> This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when there is a high probability they will make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable.
We've had decades of large companies laying people off (effectively) without warning, and the lessons of "don't trust an employer" are... fairly well understood by a lot of folks. If I had the promise of working some place for, say, 20 years, with a statistically 0% chance of being let go because someone wanted to goose the quarterly numbers to get their bonus... yeah, I'd have gone for it years ago. Even 25 years ago, that wasn't much of an option with most companies. Lean/Kaizen/JIT were all big movements by the 90s and ability to ramp down headcount was a requirement for most companies.
Where does 'skilled' labor for specific types of manufacturing processes come from? High school? With slashed budgets and worsening teacher/student ratios?
Businesses could step up and create environments that people competed to work at - pay decently, invest in their workers and community - but that requires a commitment to stick with the people and community even in the lean times. And most companies don't want to, or more likely simply can't, operate that way.
30 years ago I considered positions like that. Some of my family and friends did, and were there for years - decades in some cases. I don't think there's many of those left any more.
You make a good point about the Lean/Kaizen/JIT philosophies + headcount.
I've always been associated with mid-size (< 500 million/yr) where much of that 'wisdom' sounded good but didn't work out so well in practice. Sadly for the consulting folks, it isn't actually possible to lean out an entire supply chain and still maintain the ability to respond to market fluctuations. Being lower on that food chain, if you lay off reliable operators/maintenance during something like the COVID slump then you are screwed when business comes back because you can't rehire/train fast enough to fill orders that are needed 'next month'.
Lol, $25hr. McDonald's entry-level wage is $20hr in CA. The $5 premium is not enough of an incentive to move to the middle of nowhere for a job.
Adjusted for cost of living, this could be double the wage.
$5 plus lower cost of living might be depending on the employee and on what you mean by “middle of nowhere”
Will your pay gradually increase to $45 or more at McDonald's?
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Yeah I think I would say you're right to doubt if this resonates on HN. You're posing it to an audience which has very little GED-level representation. HN more often has people who did well in school and are at a much better disposition for higher-salary jobs.
I'm not part of the target population but my guess is that a large factor has to do with people's tendency to go down the path of life that is most similar to the path they've already tread. If you grew up in a 'cultural center' it's less of a paradigm shift to take the crappy job around the corner rather than move somewhere slightly more remote to start a new career even if in the long run it could actually lead to a more decent life.
Oddly, literally everything you just described is true about my pure remote software engineering position, except I had to get bachelors in computer science first.
I think it's worth specifying even further: wealthy business owners don't want to pay what a US employee costs.
Most jobs are wholly unsustainable. You have to job hop every couple of years to keep up with inflation because God knows you're not getting a raise that keeps you comfortable.
This has led to churn and brain drain and the slow collapse of US domestic business.
It's not that people don't want to work, it's that wages have fallen so far behind the cost of living that it's financial suicide to stay in any one job. Even with all the traps like employer sponsored healthcare, most people just can't afford to be paid the pittance most businesses are willing to pay.
This is a deep societal illness in the US. We've glorified and deified the concept of greed to the point where even talking about income inequality and the unimaginable concentration of wealth is just anathema. It's seeped into the everyday consciousness in the form of "I'm the only one that matters, fuck absolutely everyone else"
I genuinely believe that America will never, ever recover until we address this. We will always be this sick and broken country until the state entirely collapses or we get our shit together and address income inequality.
I have some real serious doubts that we'll ever get there, but it's easy to be pessimistic.
The USA is number 1 in median disposable income at purchasing price parity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
This makes me think that it at least as much to do with high (unrealistic?) employee expectations as business stinginess.
There's always someone to quote some dry statistic that refutes the lived experience of... pretty much anyone. I wonder, what's the deal with people like this? Is the point to convince yourselves it's not that bad?
Yes, indeed, in the US even a poor person is relatively wealthier than someone in a war-torn African country. But humans are social creatures. We compare ourselves not with "the poor kids in Africa", but with the business owner in the adjacent zip code.
As for "unrealistic" expectations: why do business owners expect to take an unrealistic percentage off the top of everyone's labor? What made them worthy of such a huge amount?
You’re coping hard. The USA is (well, was before tariffs and related) so far ahead and richer than the rest of the “first world” that “europoor” is a correct term for those unfortunate souls who weren’t born there.
OK, let's all celebrate King Bezos shutting down Venice to celebrate his union with his plastic appliance. The suffering of his serfs is necessary to enable this show of excess.
The problem is that we're talking about "manufacturing" as one big homogeneous thing. The US obviously makes a bunch of stuff, but it has very limited ability to make lots of kinds of stuff, especially in a hostile trade environment.
The US manufacturing sector is about half the size of China's in terms of value-add, but it's much smaller by any other measure. The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property provides a deep moat and secure profit margins. That kind of manufacturing doesn't produce mass employment for semi-skilled or unskilled workers, but it does create lots of skilled jobs that are very well paid by global standards.
That's entirely rational from an economic perspective, but it means that US manufacturing is wholly reliant on imports of lower-value materials and commodity parts.
A Chinese manufacturer of machine tools can buy pretty much all of their inputs domestically, because China has a really deep supply chain. They're really only dependent on imports of a handful of raw materials and leading-edge semiconductors. Their US counterparts - we're really just talking about Haas and Hurco - are assembling a bunch of Chinese-made components onto an American casting. To my knowledge, there are no US manufacturers of linear rails, ballscrews or servo motors.
If the US wants to start making that stuff, it's faced with two very hard problems. Firstly, that it'd have to essentially re-run the industrial revolution to build up the capacity to do it; secondly, that either a lot of Americans would have to be willing to work for very low wages, or lots of Americans would have to pay an awful lot more in tax to subsidise those jobs.
It's worth bearing in mind that China is busy moving in the opposite direction - they're investing massively in automation and moving up the value chain as quickly as possible. They're facing the threat of political unrest on a scale they haven't seen since 1989, because of the enormous number of highly-educated young people who are underemployed in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Lots of Americans want to bring back mass manufacturing employment, but very few of them actually want to work in a factory. You can't resolve that contradiction through sheer political will.
I did a tour of a huge beer plant in the US. The 4-5 floors where they made the beer had maybe a dozen people total. I was told back in the day it would have been thousands of workers.
It's not even aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Any manufacturing that comes back onshore will not employ massive amounts of people.
They will automate it. Which, to be fair, will help employ some Americans. But it won't be employing them to work 9-5 in a factory. It will be used to employ Americans to build and maintain the machines building the product.
> The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace
Which is about to take a huge nosedive, as both Europe and China pull back on buying critical systems from the US. And can you blame them?
There's an excellent youtube series (by a Finnish ex-military officer) on the likely impact of recent events on US arms sales to Europe. They do have choices!
Trump and Musk's threats to invade and blackmail (e.g. by cutting off Starlink) will be felt long after they're both gone.
100% agree with you!
I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials, aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want to be.
One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to increase shareholder value.
So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that increases the cost of their cost centers:
- employee training & development? hell with that.
- Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing? Why? isn't everything mostly automated?
- manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and, then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched internal manufacturing development investments where we conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the projects still didn't get funded.
There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs. outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.
Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate between difficulty and speed.
You could simply make taxes scale inversely with the number of employees. Make the tax scale with a lack of career path. Even more tax if you don't have a system to measure and reward performance. More tax for lack of R&D. They don't have to be huge amounts, just enough for the MBA to stfu.
> The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.
I think you're exactly right there.
>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.
I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.
My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.
No, we're a very close second in terms of output, almost on par. [0]
The difference is China has something like 10x the number of workers in manufacturing and can efficiently take on smaller or custom work.
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[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-manufacturing-scor...
We produce weapons. We are an arms dealer empire.
Our biggest exporter is Boeing and sure Boeing produces commercial aircraft but their position has a lot to do with inertia as the accountant leadership of Boeing is doing their best to destroy Boeing by nickel-and-diming every aspect with a complex web of outsourcing that will fall apart the second there is any disruption in international trade.
What China has now is the infrastructure and ecosystem to manufacture. You need some tiny screws made of titanium? Well, there's a factory that produces that down the street.
The last time we got employers to care about employees it was because the unions dragged the bosses into the streets and beat the daylights out of them.
Unions are all conservative trump voters now. Labor isn’t left wing anymore. Arguably never really was (sorry coping anarchists and marxists, but usually the greedy monical wearing boss still leads to better outcomes than most “back against the wall” types we end up with when we let leftists have one iota of power.
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This is even showing up a bit in tech now. The number of places that expect some articulation Venn diagram of skill sets is too high.
There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.
> Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.
The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.
>That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.
Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.
This attitude that manufacturing is moving down the tech tree ladder completely misunderstands manufacturing. IME the entire notion was invented by elitist economists and embraced by CEOs looking to justify sending manufacturing overseas for short term profiteering. Regular people bought in because of the promise of cheaper gizmos.
It’s the sort of attitude that infected Boeing and resulted in taking them from the peak of aviation to an embarrassment. Because they don’t know how to lubricate doors or tighten screws.
Building things is hard, and requires significant technology and skills among a lot of people. A service based economy inherently looses that technology and skill.
Tim Cook interviewed and said China isn’t the low cost labor anymore it once was. China has become the place that knows how to manufacture things, especially electronics.
And is that quoted fact in absolute terms or per capita / as percent of GDP? That makes a big difference as to how we should interpret it.
The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society.
I agree with the unhealthy society and your statement got me thinking. In regards to health what happens when global trade is shut down and a country can not make it's own pharmaceuticals for example? About 64% of people in the US over age 18 are on prescription drugs. Some of those drugs have really dangerous rebound effects if one suddenly stops taking them. Some of those effects can be deadly, especially blood pressure drugs. Most of those drugs come from China, some from India. How quickly can each country start manufacturing and distributing it's own prescription drugs? Would that cause a quick adjustment to the culture or is that not enough?
According to Brookings, 80% of drugs are imported.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/pharmaceutical-tariffs-ho...
To clarify, I just Googled for: what percent of american adults are on prescription drugs?
I got back from "AI Overview": Approximately 64.8% of adults in the United States report taking prescription medication at some point in the past 12 months. This figure is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The key phrase here is "at some point". I guess a huge amount of it is a very short 1-3 week dose of antibiotics.
I can invoke the powers of Google as well. Let's ask it how many Americans are on blood pressure drugs.
"Approximately 51.2% of Americans with hypertension (high blood pressure) are currently taking medication to lower their blood pressure."
That is not a temporary thing. Most of those people will be on drugs the rest of their unnatural lives. So when the availability of said drugs is gone, 51.2% of Americans will go into full rebound and their BP will spike for several days to weeks. Their risk of stroke and heart attack will go off the charts as any ER doctor can attest to. What should we do for those poor souls?
that's 51.2% of Americans with Hypertension, not 51.2% of Americans at large.
CDC says:
Source: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Published by: Health, United States. Table RxUse and NCHS Data Query System, Prescription Medication Use Tables One or more, Three or more, Five or more.Percent of people using at least one prescription drug in the past 30 days: 49.9% (2017-March 2020) Percent of people using three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 24.7% (2017-March 2020) Percent of persons using five or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 13.5% (2017-March 2020)https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm
It is coincidentally close to 51.2%, but not the same statement.
> We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.
I don't think it's just that. We manufacture, but we aren't great at the entire chain. China is much better are specialized tooling, etc. We have definitely lost a lot of knowledge in critical parts of the chain.
Which means policies that reverse that are immensely important. The process of offshore our jobs and much I.P. took decades. Getting them back and rebuilding manufacturing support will take a long time, too.
Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.
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> We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.
That’s a misleading oversimplification. While it’s true we haven’t stopped manufacturing, we did offshore a massive portion of it--especially after the Open Door Policy with China and subsequent free trade agreements. That shift didn’t just change where things are made; it fundamentally altered corporate incentives. Once production moved overseas, the need to invest in domestic labor--training, benefits, long-term employment--shrank accordingly.
Yes, I should have said "we just stopped employing americans".
I suppose so, since your use of “we” includes both America and China et al.
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Most companies that do manufacturing in USA are oriented to making business-to-business products, where high margins can be achieved.
As an European, there have been many decades since the last time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product that is intended to be sold to individuals.
There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA, e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in USA.
When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.
Chip subsidies seemed to work with little to no consequence. I'm not sure why you're so pessimistic about this obvious mechanism you even mentioned
It's shareholder capitalism. Capitalism can be a great thing, but shareholder capitalism defines profits as the only reason for a corporation to exist. Humans are simply resources to extract work or profit from, and destroying the future of the country is an unfortunate externality. CEOs are obligated to behave like sociopaths. Lying, cheating, stealing, and subverting democracy are all good business if it returns value to shareholders. We see this over and over again, and wonder why our society is so fucked up.
And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat than them and eat their lunch.
> Humans are simply resources
I thought that the human resources department made that obvious.
The notion of shareholder primacy capitalism is one of those ideas that seems great on paper, much like communism, but its end effects are disastrous.
It seems great cause it’s simple and gives a nice simple answer to “what’s capitalism” and “how to make effective companies”. That intellectual (existential?) laziness is costly long term however.
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This is the root issue
The idea that “labor is cheaper elsewhere” is simply a neutral statement of economics is wrong — “lower living standards” is not just a economic measure, it’s a political statement about the value of labor and labor conditions. The US and by extension the “western capitalist world” has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then later globally slavery.
The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer exporting to the US post war, is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to be explicitly capitalist. Read “Understanding Defeat” for detailed proof of the 7 year occupation of Japan, explicity to destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture, and replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices, like unionization, but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into cooperatives and syndicates.
China moved into that position post 70s, because Japanese labor began getting “more expensive.” Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to exploit “cheap” labor because there were no protections for workers or environmental protections - so “opening up china,” plus the Nixon shock and floating of interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost slave-like conditions. This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971, there was a “global south” that now could be exploited.
NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural slave countries etc…starting in the 90s, and on and on just moving the slave-wage ball until there’s nowhere else to exploit.
It’s not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move wherever it needs to in order to exploit “arbitrage opportunities.” Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.
Just like #2 in Austin powers said:
> Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.
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> We just don't want to employ people
I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.
There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).
That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.
But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.
I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.
Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.
> I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.
I don't see a difference. If we want local industry, we must address the global geo economics.
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Nobody really wants a "local" industry as much as consumers want cheap prices and companies want global reach.
US manufacturing accomplishes higher prices and US only reach.
That's a narrow perspective. The "benefits" that are granted to a country have a cost and these costs need to be reconciled with on the international stage. This is achieved through tariffs otherwise the playing field isn't fair.
Cost of labor is the issue: china is enslaving people to work.
The other side of this coin is cost of living. If housing costs more in the US, so does everything else. If everything costs more, people have to be paid more in order to make a living, and that makes the US less competitive in the global labor market.
Doesn't that feel like a massive overstatement? They have worse working conditions for sure. "Enslavement" is absurd if we are speaking about the macro level.
Overstatement? China is going fully facist on the Uyghurs for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
Those nets tho...
There's nothing unusual about suicide nets in a place with a lot of people. They're on the Golden Gate Bridge but that doesn't mean SF is a sweatshop.
(The suicide rate at Foxconn is lower than average for China.)
The US specifically outlawed slavery except among prisoners. The US also operates prison labor at very low rates.
I'm not sure this is a meaningful point of differentiation.
US corporations benefit today from slave labor by people housed in for-profit prisons where there are incentives to over-prosecute brown and poor people. These include, but aren't limited to:
- Aramark
- Avis
- IBM
- JCPenney
- Kmart
- McDonald's
- Nintendo
- Sprint
- Starbucks
- Verizon
- Walmart
- Wendy's
- Whole Foods/Amazon
Seems pretty much like gig economy works in US.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.
The US has forced prison labor. We can talk about how bad the Chinese government is, but their economy is not built on forced labor anymore than the US is built on prison labor.
I also think any form of forced work in the US prison system is pretty awful, but don’t try to equivocate Chinese “reeducation” camps with regular prison. Not anywhere close to the same thing.
Have you asked any of the inmates at the Angola "working farm" in Louisiana?
Apparently 63% are serving life terms, 27% more than 20 years.
Doesn't seem worse than China's attempt to iron out a seditious, violent sub-culture that was actually detonating bombs amongst civilians? Most seem to have closed, so the maximum term < 10 years.
Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
> Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
Inmates in any prison in the US ostensibly have gone through due process and were convicted of their crimes. You can argue about whether the US justice system is truly fair, but it's (at least in historic years) certainly more fair than rounding up large portions of a specific ethnic minority for 'reeducation'.
I would argue that in the 21st century being convicted of a crime does not make your labour essentially free to the state for the rest of your life.
Exactly, a notion of free prison labor incentivizes discrimination and as we see it that is often how it plays out in reality.
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Simple google search, first result:
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
This doesn’t entirely prove that China is much worse off than the US here, since we appear to be comparing. It’s pretty clear that US has a lot of room for improvement at 3.3/thousand people compared to China’s 4.
How many Americans are dying to and will do tedious labor (not many), as well robots, automation and AI can do a lot of it and or will end up doing a lot of it.
If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.
Importing immigrants directly into the military sounds like a bad idea. I’m guessing many would be less likely to want to lay their lives down for the new country, so drafting them seems like a great way to end up with a bunch of disloyal troops.
Both the Romans and the US had success with immigrants in the military, provided that they were thoroughly mixed. A unit with 35 ethnicities in it usually does not rebel "like one man".
The Roman way started to fail when they moved to the foederati model, where there would be units of, say, only Goths under a Gothic commander. That proved dangerous.
Did either work for Kakania/Austria-Hungary?
The Hapsburg empire, in its various incarnations, existed for almost four hundred years (1526-1918), and most of the time, their troops were loyal, so the answer is yes?
But one has to be careful: while their military was diverse, it wasn't really made of immigrants. It was simply built out of very diverse local ethnicities that were settled in the same place for centuries. Which means, for example, that when the Kaiser fought against the Turks, everyone involved regardless of language had an incentive to fight, because their own homes and freedom were at stake.
The traditional incentive that the military gives in these situations is that your spouse and children will be well taken care of if you serve, and even better taken care of if you die in service. Not endorsing that approach, just explaining.
Indeed, come here and expedite citizenship by serving America for an X number of years! In return along with expedited citizenship your partner and any kin can join you with your partner required to work/contribute some to the economy. Heck work in one of these new factories part or full time (if full time the new factories offer free day care).
Personally this concept is a more humane one then rounding/exiling want to be Americans in which the majority are not criminals! No they are hard workers coming here for a better life, why not give that to them and in return they "Make America Even Stronger!" ;-). That's what the current admin wants beef up defense, yet to me with immigration they are taking the wrong approach!
The French Foreign Legion is a famous counterexample to your argument here. They might actually have the best Esprit du Corps in the world. In particular because they have to since they are indeed comprised of random foreigners and historically at least low-level criminals.
How many wars has American been in within the past 40 to 50 years?
You say it's a bad idea, so it's a bad idea for an American citizen to join the armed forces too?
The best army/weapon are those never needed to be utilized. Enemies won't pick up fights because your weapon/army are way stronger than theirs. Therefore we cannot regard army/weapon as "not used" or just wasted.
These two to four family member who immigrate would not also be required to serve in the military? If not, what are the criteria used to select the one-out-of-five?
I think it be better if they had to work and contribute to our economy and society. They could work in one these new manufacturing plants, as no doubt if you ask farmers and other businesses that offer grunt work they will say they can not find Americans to do the work but they can find hard working and reliable immigrants to do it! How many immigrants nowadays do you see at a construction site? It's the majority for me here in York, PA.