This goes far beyond skilled labor. But I'll start with that point. The US already has a huge shortage of skilled labor, and it's not like we would ever take people from the HVAC industry and put them in a factory. People in the US are gonna still want air conditioning. Culturally, the US absolutely pushes young people to aim for white collar service industry jobs.

Second, it takes a huge amount of engineering talent to do what China is doing as well. In the US, a lot of engineering talent has been attracted to software (or other service industry jobs), where there's a lot of money to be made, and you can sit on your ass and argue on an orange-colored website all day. I prefer that to wearing a hardhat and waking up at 6 AM to go to a factory.

Third, China concentrates a lot of this talent into dense cities, and people make a lot of sacrifices to live there. You're definitely not gonna convince an HVAC guy to leave his suburban home and sell his pickup truck to go live in a dormitory in a dense city and ride a scooter. In China, there's plenty of people that are itching to leave the countryside for the city, leave their families, and search for a better life. In the US, people that live outside of cities, generally want to live there, and aren't interested in relocating. Most developed nations feed this need for skilled labor by importing labor from countries where people have a strong desire to better themselves but don't have a cultural expectation of a backyard and a white picket fence. But the US has had a fucked up immigration system for a long time now.

Fourth, China pulls out all of the roadblocks in order to facilitate the growth of their industrial base. They don't need to go through 10 years of planning to build something, they don't need to argue with a local zoning board, and if they want to build something they don't wait for the free market to decide to do it. If they want to support an industry, they just do it. Single-party unitary governments are efficient as fuck. Of course, this comes with many drawbacks, which politically are just not viable in the US.

Edit: I grant I could be old and outdated. But having seen cycles. Having seen Japan go up and down. Having seen offshoring first go to Mexico then easily transition to China, I just don't see any black and white here.

1. The HVAC guys would definitely fill the the quick turnaround, small shops that surround the manufacturing industry in China if that was an option.

Culturally doesn't matter. The majority of young men I know are underemployed and hate the service industry, but would be a fit for having their own adjacent business like that ones in China that get so hyped as enabling their dynamics. I think you are very focused on the crowd you know. The young people I know are so itching to create they have 3d printers, or make fishing flies, or make their own clothes.

2. Sounds great, if you live in the bay area or other tech scenes. I no longer do. I left tech to work (albeit tech) in a factory. For the majority of people I know, what you lay out it isn't an option or on the table. They are under-employed in brain dead service jobs they hate, and that do not provide them a future. They would jump on building up the adjacent small businesses that China's manufacturing depends on and that people here hype as 'wow, you can find a shop that does XYZ'. The stuff people say 'we just don't have in the USA'.

3. Small town America was factories since forever. I don't think China's way is the only way. We have a very good transportation system whereas when China established it's manufacturing it didn't. I think your view is myopic here and clouded with 'the China way'.

4. Again, the 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.

Nothing you say is a limiter IF the jobs are there. American companies pulling the jobs killed American dynancism, not any of the things you list. If it's TRULY no longer about cost, we could EASILY do it again. The people I met in China weren't better than the average American. They were great, and I think very highly of China. But the advantage I saw were wages, and people from the countryside willing to put up with a lot, but I don't think they will put up with as much long term (and I hope they don't have to, again the people I met are all great people and I hope the best for all of us). And a side of environmental pollution (I know 2 guys that moved their factories to China purely because of savings by not having to be environmentally friendly. So many that falls under your regulation, but that isn't a long term solution/state for China and that was a decade ago, maybe things are changed for the better already).

I don't think you realize the difference to which cultural expectations of the workers are different. Yeah, people "hate" their service industry jobs here, but you can get a job in Iowa wrangling spreadsheets making $50,000 a year, grab coffee from the office coffee pot, sit in air-conditioning all day, then you clock out at 5 PM and drive your truck home to your house in the suburbs with a yard and a white picket fence. Nobody wants to make that same money or less working on a hot factory floor with a clipboard on a 996 shift and live next to a factory belching smoke. But in China, you can find people who will do that, and they'll wake up at 3 AM to work on an urgent customer request. And collaborate with all the factories down the road, and have a prototype out by 8 AM. In the US you're not gonna get somebody to respond to your email before 10:30.

> 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.

It's easy to get politicians to give out some tax breaks for a reelection campaign. It seems to be damn near impossible to actually get anything done that actually matters. We frequently spend billions of dollars to support manufacturing investment and have nothing to show for it.

Just look at Foxconn in Wisconsin, as an example. Over $1 billion and half a decade and still nothing. China could've had a whole city built. We were just trying to get 13,000 factory jobs, but we couldn't even manage that.

I worked in a plastics factory in a 10,000-person Wisconsin town through the 2010s. Hot plastic extruders, no air conditioning, 12-hour days 3-4 times a week with some mandatory overtime. You're always shorthanded but I might be the only person I know who ever left for a spreadsheet job. So the cultural expectations might not be as different in the heartland as they are in the cities.

I think we live in two different Americas. My mom who was a controller and CFO in Cali couldn't land a $50k spreadsheet job when she semi-retired here to be near grandkids. Old boy with a pickup definitely isn't doing that. We have plenty of actual non-grift factories going up here from owners relocating. The Apple 3am example isn't making or breaking an industry product, it's just shitty management, probably needed because the product was scheduled to go onto a boat, something that isn't needed if made here, or some artificial bs. Imagine operating that way as a public company, I think that's working with unacceptable risk and a failure of management.

But we'll probably just talk past each other past this point. It will be interesting to see what happens. Like I said, I remember the Japan scare. Then all manufacturing going to Mexico (and my dad making sure he didn't buy the heche en mexico lable) before it finally landed in China.