Capitol Hill Blue Forums Thread Like Summary - Chinese take out

The over ripe queen of the gerontocracy has set forth from the forbidden city to make the trip to Taiwan after all. Refuting the ‘one China’ policy of the last several decades, it’s been odd to see the role reversal for the right wing woke party.The Dems had confined themselves to the Russian scapegoating election losses and their proxy war in the Ukraine. It was the other right wing political party that made its antagonism towards the ‘yellow peril’ of south east Asia and China in particular known by calls for ‘getting tuff’ with China on the campaign trails, the appointment of Larry Kudlow to the SEC with Trumps election victory (sorry Dems, she should have gone to Michigan…) and the immediate tariffs his administration imposed on Chinese imports.

But politics make strange bedfellows and now that the neoliberals are in bed with the neocons that run state it’s the geriatric queen whos now poking the Panda and stoking the flames against China. Right wing Messianic fanatics of world domination in bed with radical adherents to market social ordering. What could go wrong? (Hint: see Ukraine)

Anyways, it was obvious the two camps were going to do China next and here we are now. Having started a fight with a commodities exporting superpower and having our ass handed to us (or our nato trained proxy army anyway) and deciding maybe it was time we picked another fight with a major manufacturing superpower that we literally helped create in the neoliberal pursuit of higher returns via deindustrialization of our economy and industrializing China’s.

Adults are clearly in the room. This could get fun..

Going to the beach

See the US in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, et al...

The age of imperialism is over. The age of war is over. There is only mutually assured destruction from here on in.

Chunks, a lot of supply chains are snafued right now for a lot of reasons. I don't see why the US has to kowtow to China's every wish. They don't walk on eggshells as far as our feelings are concerned and I think geopolitically it's a bad idea to bow down before the Bear or the Dragon.

Power is shifting subtly during this uncertain time and it's probably best to present a strong front against our economic competitors.

My rural town's high school, with an average graduating class of about a hundred, has an after school robotics class that kicks a$$ and takes names at local, regional and state level competitions. Combining programming, problem solving, mechanical engineering, CAD/CAM, milling, machining and human resource allocation skills in a state of the art wood and metal shop. Admittedly, their 4x8 flat bed wood router cnc is a bit clunky and antiquated but the HAAS metal machining center is up to the job and they go hard for that state wide brass ring every year.

More and more robotics are in small local job shops in every community. I know, I'm one. Robotics allows me to maintain my current existence. Robotics and a global supply chain that looks to be going away from hubris and incompetence. I doubt Jake Sullivan knows how to turn a screw much less know where they come from.

There's a lot of capability in the streets. The ruling classes above?... not so much.

That's a hopeful sign for a hopeful future. But only if we can manage to scale stuff like up to enterprise level penetration.
Prospective factory workers will need to apply themselves to .... Oh I dunno, maybe a six to eight week course to learn robotics basics.

Am I off by weeks, or even months in either direction? Maybe but the idea is to make training widely available and accessible.
Perhaps companies can offer subsidized training after an initial HR screening where candidates who pass get asked to make a commitment to training and an eventual job if they're deemed good enough to be hired.

Robotics as I am sure you know, doesn't always translate to utterly empty factories because it's about consistent speed and quality but we carbon based life forms have to babysit the machines to keep them happy and filled up with parts.

The very first official "W-2" taxpaying J-O-B I got hired for was in 1973, stuffing American made "op-amps" and semiconductor microprocessor IC chips into circuit boards for the very first digital modems, made by Penril Data in Rockville, Maryland. Later they moved me to running the wave solder machine and then later into Q-C and burn-in testing. I was still a morning high school student and would have graduated in 11th Grade except I decided that partying was more fun and wound up having to stick with two classes every morning AGAIN, in order to finish out my senior year.

Oh well, good paying US manufacturing job!



But with this new semiconductor act, some or maybe even a lot of these jobs might just return here...but having visited a facility like that in Plano, Texas in 2009 to shoot a corporate video, I can say this:

It is not going to be anything like the job I had in 1973.

At Penril Data, it was a long line of tiny Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino women and a couple of guys who sat at an assembly line, stuffing those tiny parts onto the boards by hand. And most of them didn't really have any grasp of electronics because they didn't need to.
The line supervisors trained them in their native languages to do the equivalent of "bead work".
A disc capacitor was called a "galleta" (pronounced "guy-YET-a") because it was shaped like a tiny little cookie.

"Poner la galleta en el agujero acqui" --- loosely translated "Put this little cookie into this hole here.

Every miniature electronic component part had a nickname related to what they looked like and the ladies would grab them from little cubbyholes and they'd follow the illustration on the chart in front of them. Each one had to stuff a certain number of parts into a section, then pass the board down the line where the next lady would stuff more, lather, rinse, repeat, until the board was finished and ready for wave soldering.
Each board took about 20-30 minutes to finish before solder.

Today, at least as of 2009 anyway, gone are the adorable little ladies who stuff the parts by hand and a robot can stuff even a large board, like a computer motherboard, in about a minute or two. The component parts are loaded into the bot the way a belt fed machine gun gets loaded with a belt of ammunition and the bot literally "sews" the parts onto the board with lightning speed.

So the point I'm getting at is, any American semiconductor job is likely more of a robotics job than anything else, care and feeding of all those happy bots that sew components onto board, shuffling them into the wave solder machine, moving them down the line to washing and drying (a chemical process with no water) and then into semi-automated quality control and burn-in testing.

I wager that the most human operations still done by hand will be mechanical assembly of cases and cabinets, and packaging for shipment, and dealing with the units that get culled and sending them back for disassembly and remanufacturing or recycling.

We are going to need low cost or even subsidized robotics training outfits on every other corner in every city if we expect to make this happen.

So....we need to be more like China to survive, We aren't going to become more like China so we can't survive as a society, Woe is us we might as well eat worms and die.

China uses sweatshops and slave labor has no respect for the rights of any individuals, and has turned its population into widget makers for the world.

Don't mistake China for a successful socialist endeavor. Xi Jinping is just another Stalin.

Crazy thought!

Wait...this is China! The Russian thread is over there,<<<<<

China got pissy when Pelosi visited Taiwan. The visit was probably unnecessary and probably designed to rile up China for one reason or another.

China needs to be reminded now and then just who it is buying all their stupid widgets! Without exceptional American consumerism China would be up to their asses in excess widgets in the blink of an eye.

We've sent envoys over to Taiwan every other year.
True they usually weren't SoH but the point is, this is by far not the first time a US envoy has visited Taiwan.
China is looking for an excuse to divert attention from the impending collapse of their ghost city realty investment buckets.

Wait ... you don't vote but you hang out on political forums.
That's going to take a moment to digest.