As someone with kids, I’m really surprised to hear this. I viciously keep my kids off social media. There’s no political connection. It’s a safety and mental health concern.
I think he was more influential to the younger generation. I saw Gavin Newsom interview Kirk, and Newsom opened by saying his son followed Kirk to a certain extent.
How does that make sense? Wouldn’t high interest rates and tariffs cause more expensive engineers to have disproportionate opportunity? I remember during 2008 it was much easier for my employer to justify junior engineers than senior ones.
People need purpose. It’s not enough to work in an Amazon warehouse selling stuff from China to make ends meet or driving Ubers. These manufacturing jobs aren’t low skill industrial age jobs, they are highly skilled professions that improve our national security.
I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.
What about the guy that sits at a computer and works through an issue queue changing the color of buttons or adding an extra 2px of padding to a class or writing glue code so one API can talk to another API?
Oh no, those are highly skilled professionals as API Integration Architects and Gartner tells me we currently have shortage of 230,000 of those. Hence we need import these best and brightest from outside.
It depends on the job. T-shirts yes. I enjoy building microgrids. There are many unsolved challenges. When the robots start doing it maybe it’ll be boring. That’s a long way off.
I think the implication of question 2 is who, exactly, are we going to tax to get the money to pay for all the highly skilled professionals needed? Everyone can't be working for a military contractor. Someone has to pay the costs of moving the legions of workers needed into those jobs. And taxing the uber drivers, walmart stockboys, or the Amazon warehouse workers is just not going to get us there.
In my view, the way forward is, unfortunately, automation. We can't bring that manufacturing back using the same labor basis as is used in Asia. Just to put that labor basis in perspective, we'd be looking at millions of jobs that the military would be funding through sub-contracts. We have to get some of that work done through industrial automation without creating jobs. We need to do that not only to make this sustainable, but really even to make this feasible at all.
I've yet to be convinced that manufacturing jobs inherently give more "purpose" than white-collar work, and I think posts like yours are mostly ungrounded fantasy. Ironically, that kind of rose-tinted nostalgia is usually coming from people who have never actually worked a manufacturing job themselves and can only guess at what it's like from internet memes.
I recommend this quasi-review of Rivethead by Ben Hamper if you want a taste of what "manufacturing jobs" were actually like: a lot of people drinking themselves stupid to escape the monotony and utter lack of agency in their work. And this was at one of the Big Three automakers, supposedly the peak of what we're trying to return to! [0]
It's somewhat more complicated given that much of the significant work passed on by Klaus Fuchs to the Soviets that they acknowledge was responsible for the first Soviet fission bomb was Fuchs own work .. he shared with the British, the Americans, the Canadians, and the Soviets .. who were all ostensibly allies at the time.
The Soviets had the first flying object in space, the first animal in space, the first human in space, first spacewalk, first woman, first space station. I doubt those plans were all in the US, and if they were, the US didn’t use them.
This is complete moral bankruptcy. You're saying it would be better, rather than developing excellency, to instead become a parasite. I understand that in a world where winning is all that matters, this might be a viable strategy... For a while, until everyone adopts it or you otherwise kill your host. But this is not what being a human is about. I wouldn't want you near anything I care about
Moral bankruptcy is probably a bridge too far here: in weapons, especially with weapons of such power, espionage should be expected. Besides, upon first use you advertise the possibility and that alone will be an enabler, an existential proof that something is possible but you don't know how is a completely different story than groping in the dark while wondering if a thing is possible or not. Any kind of lead will surely be sooner or later be squashed. Note that nobody thought that using the patent system to get IP protection on the Atomic Bomb was a good idea: our friendly ways to establish who gets to make bank on an invention like that would simply fail and would actually pass valuable information to the perceived opponents.
When applied to medicine that same attitude becomes parasitic: you may be able to make much more money by restricting the distribution of the knowledge that could save people or prevent their suffering. This is where Martin Shkreli and other such characters come in to play.
reply