We cannot. We are richer because we don't do it. We export it to areas so poor they view the environmental impact as a fair trade-off for being able to eat.
We can afford to do it right. It will cost more and we'll have to make more prudent, effective, efficient, etc... decisions about producing and allocating goods and services and would need to give up many of the net negative/zero economic activities we like.
We've also likely enriched ourselves by externalizing the negative externalities of some of our goods and services to other countries. That's our choice, and I don't think it's a great one.
> We cannot.
Apple can afford to do test fabrication while abiding by the rules, but chooses not to. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-fine-over-bay-area...
There are also network effects. Your plant that is energy intensive is closing? Now other manufactures must increase their cost as transportation is increased and local contracts harder to get. Your chemical plant, which has operated within good bounds for a decade can't get a permit to expand, or is protested? Your intake products now either go up in price or become unable to attain them at all.
(China's predicament is not much better, with the added wrinkle that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever they can do about bad demographics due to their size, whereas Central/Eastern Europe can import people once we collectively get over ourselves and let go of uppity xenophobia).
There IS labour over abundance. Unemployment in most EU countries is at record highs. And it shows no sign of slowing down.
The problem is it's mostly white collar labor overabundance. And those college educated people aren't gonna want to make sneakers in sweatshops.
There's not going to be any point even having sweatshops or factories in this region soon. Why bother? If it's anything low or medium-skill and low or medium-capital intense, just open up shop in... Well, why not Uzbekistan? And if double-landlocked isn't your thing, there's dozens of other options.
Plus scaling industrial production is one thing, but if proletarians are unable to afford them because wealth distribution is exponentially concentrated, what is the point?
No but they are significantly cheaper than an employee, A robot can pick up something and move it from A to B for upwards of 10 years. The programming and setup are a fraction of the time a robot can operate reliably
I cannot stress to you how reliable and little maintenance is required for a $60,000 fanuc robot.
I have a friend who works as an environmental engineer at a chem plant. They work hard to keep things safe and clean, and rigorously monitor their output.
I'm sure we could do even more if we weren't competing in meany areas against legal jurisdictions which DON'T care about such things. We aren't "priced out". We are regulated out and out competed by jurisdiction which have many fewer labor laws and much more lax environmental monitoring. If we are out-competed on product, then we deserve to loose, which is where libertarians and free-trade have a point. But if we are out-competed on keeping people and the environment reasonably safe? That's when we enact trade barriers.
That is how you actually keep the environment and people safe.
Trade barriers however are bullshit and don't work. And they are a lie. You are not building IPhones in the US because building an IPhone in the US would cost three times as much as it would doing in Shenzhen. And people would not be willing to pay that. And that's why they get an exception from the trade barriers. And that list of exceptions basically goes on and on and on...
Anyway, what works, works. This is especially true if that industry had been in the area for long, and therefore has access to a lot of skilled and experienced workers.
But it does not make sense to cry and complain that building such a thing from scratch is "banned". No, it is not banned. It's just a stupid idea, and there are laws against stupid ideas using limited natural resources.
We do manufacture things. Just not in California.
So why does it even matter if California bans manufacturing dangerous things? Who cares? Just manufacture it in some other state. As a bonus, you don't have to pay those high California taxes.
In what world is this a problem?
Texas beats California in total value of manufacturing shipments only because because of its petroleum and coal products manufacturing. And California beats Texas in manufacturing employment.
Again, what is the reason New Mexico, or Utah, or Nebraska, or Tennessee cannot manufacture these things? And why is it a problem if they do so instead of California?
Manufacturing jobs are also some of the most unstable because big companies will shop around for tax breaks. Once they find a political sucker ... they build a new plant and close the old one which wrecks havoc on the local economy. PR teams are designed to mitigate negative feedback when this happens.
Smart politicians know this and will not concede to tax breaks for big companies, like Amazon.
I mean if these jobs are so bad, isn't it good that California is trying to not have them in its own municipalities? The way you laid it out, shouldn't everyone be trying not to have those jobs?
California has the highest manufacturing employment and most manufacturing companies of any state, the second highest (behind only Texas) dollar value of manufacturing output.
It is just below the national average in manufacturing as a share of GDP, but its also the fifth highest state in GDP/capita; leaving it still above average in manufacturing GDP/capita.
And the other limiting factor is knowledge/education. Your region has been known for 100 years to be highly skilled at building $THING? That knowledge is still there and has not fully retired? That's also a resource.
"High labor cost" is a smoke screen. We are not talking about acquiring from a pool of lazy dancing monkeys. The labor you need are for tasks that machines can not yet do. Those jobs are either really shitty, or need a lot of qualification.
Due to this: If you want to build a factory in an area where there aren't already similar factories, you first need to build a University and come back 25 years later.
The articles author should next try to build a business based on offering camel riding in Greenland. Camel riding? Banned in Greenland!!!1
Maybe those that own the wealth should pony up more in taxes or give away their factories to the workers so they can run it themselves (something tells me they'll do a better job than greedy owners that just care about money rather than building a community).
You may want to ask your LLM to do very detailed research.
The difference between the USA and, for example, China, in manufacturing is the difficulty of getting a new factory built.
If you have a product designed and ready for production, it will take you years to build a factory in the USA. All the while you'll be losing money managing the build, paying your employees and, most importantly, letting your competitors get a head start.
Likewise, if you build that factory in China, it'll be up and running in less than a year and you can start making your R&D money back, get to market before your competitors and not bleed money keeping your companies doors open.
The labor costs are easily offset by removing the logistics of moving the product.
Tesla Gigafactories are a pretty good example of this. The first two took ~3 years to build in Nevada and New York. The third, in Shanghai, took 10 months.
Gigafactory Berlin is a different beast and produces a different product mix.
Gigafactory New York produces photovoltaic cells and Tesla Supercharger assemblies but does not produce batteries or vehicles yet another product mix.
Giga Shanghai just does final vehicle assembly (basically the easiest kind of factory and most minimally regulated) and is a million square feet smaller than the other factories and with no joint partnership/co buildout.
If you’re worried about people evading the tax, you can make a border adjustment for imports across national borders. Note California is simply forcing things to be done elsewhere.
Right, and if the US congress[0] properly cared about the environment, the regulation would require both A) requirements to keep the manufacturing clean if done here, and B) tariffs for goods produced with polluting processes over there, scaled so the costs are somewhat higher if produced dirty.
They can produce cleanly here or there without extra tariffs and without losing market share because some other competitor externalizes the pollution costs.
[0] Tariffs are proper the domain of Congress, not any other branch. OFC, because of this, it isn't really an option for California, since states cannot levy tariffs externally or vs other states.
- I don't need a car, I'll use public transport. - I will only buy and eat the amount of calories I actually burn. - This 10 year old phone actually works pretty well. I don't need a new one.
etc
You need new factories because you want more stuff. If you stop wanting more stuff, you don't need more factories, and therefore nobody needs to cry about his industry being "banned".
I have visited the US a hell lot of times. I swear, I never ever in all these visits in any part of the US had the following thought in my head: "Boy, these people really need more car factories!".
The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.
California can't fix the whole world's problems.
America barely cares about the domestic poor[1] - do you think its captains of industry will care about the poor abroad? Charity begins at home.
1. See locations of Superfund sites. Or for a modern example, where they are choosing to build AI datacenters powered by on-site diesel generators or gas turbines.
Then in 1995, congress "chose not to renew" that provision.
Now you and I literally and directly pay for the cleanup of hazardous waste. Companies don't really. Yet somehow they "Can't make factories" here
No, California can't do that. States cannot impose tariffs per the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C2-1...
They could push for more regulations at the federal level (and indeed, Californians do this quite often!)
They probably do if it's near their backyard
Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing.
The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy:
>>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
>>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.
This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things, because they wouldn't be price-competitive.
If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes.
But what will be the result? The product now has equal cost to be produced, but the market is gone.
People consume cheap stuff because it is cheap. If it is no longer cheap, they will not consume.
US americans just need to make up their minds. Do they want keep getting more and more and more cheap stuff? Fine. Then go on exploiting other regions of the planet. Or do you have enough cheap stuff now? Ok, then nobody needs another factory.
Many on HN are living in a society where it is normal to use a TELEPHONE for only two years before throwing it away.
What would happen if you instead used it for 5 years? No more factories needed. Problem solved. You don't have to compete, as there is no competition.
The result of charging the true cost of T-Shirt to the consumer is not that everybody now has 100 Fair-Traded-Ecofriendly T-Shirts at home that they don't wear. They will notice that 10 T-Shirts are more than enough if you wash your clothes once per week.
What I am trying to say is: The demand is only there due to the option of exploitation. Take away the part of ruining other peoples lives to get cheap stuff, then it's no longer interesting and will just stop.
So of course you can take the detour, try to re-industrialize, and then find out that your people do not actually like this kind of work, and that they for sure also aren't willing to buy your stuff at the price you are asking.
There is a reason nobody would be so stupid to produce "Make America Great Again" merch in America. Your target audience would not buy it if it was made in America.
It is pragmatic to simply skip this step and end up with the same result: You'll just consume less.
No, why would you say that? When America and Europe built their wealth, they were mainly (though not exclusively) producing and selling manufactured goods for themselves. This whole idea of a poor country developing by building polluting factories to make items for rich countries is a more recent and different thing.
Europe and America insisting on certain labor and environmental standards as a condition of trade wouldn't mean poor countries can't build factories for themselves. At worst, you just split the current one big market into two smaller markets: an expensive and clean one, and a dirty and cheap one.
Do we let other countries wage war, pillage, etc. because others gathered wealth that way previously?
Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced.
Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now.
But maybe I’m just being a cynical bastard.
Yes exactly. And most of the complaints in this post is not stuff that's outright banned but stuff that's "hard to do".
These companies are complaining about how much more it costs to do this AND keep the environment clean. In an ideal world we would just have environmental protections all over the world so these companies don't simply find some small town with a local gov't they can buy off and do whatever they want
I'm not sure about that, maybe it is based on the definition of "safe". There are tortilla chips made in Chicago that explicitly say they cannot be sold in California on the packaging. This is due to chemicals banned in Prop 65.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1220zn9/...
CA can't say "the factory that made these chips emitted chemical X into the air during manufacturing, but none of it is in the final product", so you can't import it.
The Federal Government can, but not an individual state.
The other thing you're not understanding is how the state can enforce regulations and how the federal government has to. States cannot levy tariffs.
In your proposal you'd also cede the global market to China- because nobody in Angola cares about how those solar panels were made.
If you don't have regulation, for profit industry won't do it right “through process”, because that would be throwig away money. Regulation is how you do it right through process.
> So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely.
Standardization and final safety measurements are literally regulations (and permitting is just a means of enforcing standardization.) So, basically, you “cut regulations” plan is actually to pair regulations doing exactly what the regulations you claim to cut do, call them a different thing, and add tariffs on top.
Which, is a long winded way of just saying “add tariffs”, which of course, a US state can’t do.
If it was California wouldn’t be covered in superfund sites that originated from industrial activities that took place decades ago.