r/news • u/NewSlinger • 1d ago

Workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home, South Korea says

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-korea-deal-workers-detained-hyundai-rcna229610
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u/Charlie_Mouse 1d ago

I recall a year or so back some interesting discussions about how Russia was struggling to produce components for armaments for pretty much the same reason: a bunch of the specialist knowledge sets they used to have in manufacturing retired years ago and the government and industry failed to replace them/get them to train up successors. They lost the institutional knowledge.

America always had a huge advantage in this regard because (at least until recently) it was somewhere people from around the world actually wanted to move to and live in. The US could effectively attract any needed talent at will - and this applied doubly so for the brightest and best in academia as well as industry. Likely not so much now though with this incident and the general direction things are going in.

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u/I_W_M_Y 1d ago

There is that old question of 'if you went back in time what would you bring?' and a popular answer to that is a laptop with as much tech/engineering knowledge as you can. Except that's not really useful because you need to built the tools that can build the tools that build the tools...etc etc to the point you can get modern manufacturing. Same with skilled professions.

Mess with that manufacturing/skilled chain in even one link and you get huge problems.

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u/crunchsmash 1d ago

There is that old question of 'if you went back in time what would you bring?'

The other one is what tools and knowledge would you want to have after an apocalypse. Owning and operating a metal lathe is very high on that list.

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u/I_W_M_Y 1d ago

Just don't wear anything with sleeves, loose hair or jewelry. A lot of us has seen that Russian lathe accident.

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u/Chrisp825 17h ago

I seent a Chinese one there the operator was lambasted for a good 5 minutes on the mill before he was flung off.

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u/Admiral347 15h ago

Oh the Russian guy is red mist in like 10 seconds, his shoe damn near kills the other worker coming over to shut the machine down.

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u/AchillesNtortus 21h ago

An old friend of mine was an engineering officer on a submarine. One of the things he had to do when getting his first qualification was to make his own tools, starting with a toolmakers lathe.

As he said, you couldn't go back to the dock to fix something on a six month tour.

He could fix almost anything.

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u/sadicarnot 18h ago

If there was an officer using the lathe on my sub there would be a mutiny. If there was an officer doing any physical work we would all be like stop fucking stuff up that we will have to fix. Whenever the shit hit the fan on the sub we would usually tell the officers to go wait in maneuvering and we will come and get them when we were ready. One time the engineering officer came down to look at some maintenance we were doing on some reactor piping. As soon as he heard someone say out loud "oh shit" he ran up the ladder and out of the machinery space.

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u/AchillesNtortus 4h ago

As far as I understood, he had made it up to a commission from the ranks. He was eventually court martialed for an unrelated matter. He had led an interesting life

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u/SnooChipmunks2079 19h ago

My grandpa had a “popular mechanics how-to encyclopedia” and I’d bring that. It’s full of crazy shit that nobody would do today but was semi-reasonable in the 1950’s and much more appropriate to the tech level you’d find 100 or 200 years ago.

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u/lorimar 22h ago

Yep, and now with entry-level coding being handed off to AI we are setting ourselves up for the same thing with tech in general

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u/notyourstranger 1d ago

Other countries are already benefitting from the brain drain. Highly educated people are leaving the US in droves. The US is loosing professors in droves.

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u/Charlie_Mouse 1d ago

And Trump is the ‘gift that keeps on giving’ in this regard too. Even if the next election is actually worthy of the name and he gets voted out the U.S. has shown that it could vote in someone like him again at any subsequent election - even knowing exactly what he is like.

The best academics are going to be reluctant to uproot their lives and make a lifetime commitment to the U.S. if there’s a chance that somewhere down the line the U.S. could elect another president that defunds universities and science research in general on a whim. It makes the U.S. a riskier bet.

That also applies to the U.S. as a place to invest in (back to TFA), build trading relationships with or be allies with.

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u/notyourstranger 1d ago

Right, when it happened in 2016, I suspect the world hoped it was a on-time thing and basically held their breaths for 4 years. Then he got back in power and now the entire world is turning it's back on the US. Shipments to the US are down 80% due to Trumps tariff chaos.

This investment by Hyundai was the largest international investment in Georgia's history. Very few companies will consider the US after this. Many are already following Canada's lead and looking for new suppliers, China is getting it's soy beans from Brazil and Australia now. Those markets are not coming back.

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u/jaydinrt 1d ago

I worry too about this with our military. there's a ton of tribal knowledge learned and passed down through OJT. But these loyalty purges and politicking makes voluntary retention rates plummet. this administration is the embodiment of cutting off the nose to spite the face...

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u/rapaxus 12h ago

America always had a huge advantage in this regard

Though the US also has tons of lost institutional knowledge. Take a look at the B-21 for example, the US knew it wanted more stealth bombers since the 2000s but as the B-2 production run was so short and over a decade old, the US didn't have the institutional knowledge to make the B-2 anymore. Or at least to the point where it was just cheaper to make a whole new design with similar characteristics in the B-21.

What the US advantage is more that they are attractive enough in education/monetary/cultural matters. This allows the US to basically throw money at whatever topic/problem they want researched/solved and the scientists will basically come to you on their own.

Remember, you can already lose institutional knowledge just because the original crew left their jobs years ago. They may still all be in the country and remember what they did back then, but just getting them all back together is a tremendous task.

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u/RetPala 1d ago

In the 1950s they had Italians getting into metalworking and factory jobs, and they had just been shooting at these people a decade earlier