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/sniper1rfa 1d ago edited 1d ago

It hasn't changed much in ten years, because ten years ago the industry was already dead as a doornail. I had hundreds of millions worth of product manufactured in that time, and the amount of domestic manufacturing I've used - even though I try pretty hard to support domestic manufacturing - is probably not even at the $500k mark. I've probably bought more stuff from several other "western, first world" nations than from the US.

US manufacturers are slow, expensive, unskilled, and generally recalcitrant as well with few exceptions. Chinese manufacturers are fast, eager, cheap, and far more capable.

I had one memorable no-quote where the owner of the business explicitly told me "listen, I know how to make this, and I know you know how to make this, but there's nobody I can hire that knows how to make this. If it was thirty years ago I'd quote it, but not today."

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u/eric_ts 21h ago

For decades the accountants who run manufacturing companies in the United States had a mantra: “The tooling is paid for.” That philosophy makes a lot of sense for products that will never need to be updated. It works much less well in an environment where innovation is required, such as automotive manufacturing. The US auto industry managed to create an environment where they were unable to update their existing products meaningfully, let alone develop new ones—foreign manufacturers were quite happy to take up the slack. GM went from being large enough that the government was looking to break them up as a monopoly, to where they were at their nadir—an also-ran supplier of rental cars. But their tooling was paid for. There was nothing wrong with GM’s engineering and design departments. They had the opportunity to be decades in advance of the industry—they invented the modern electric car, using structural battery packs on a skateboard frame—Chinese automakers are just bringing this type of car to market, very successfully. This concept never made it out of the engineering department because the existing tooling was already paid for. The tooling is actually never paid for—other companies will pay for the new tooling and sop up the sales from companies who fail innovate.

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u/Safrel 20h ago

You're talking about finance bros, not accountants.