I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308

Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: ▶ this video . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling: 1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed. 2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make e

> We make plenty of stuff at scale Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is? ▶ this video

That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: ▶ this video I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company. The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.

I think we are definitely losing our blue collar skills. This video[0] about building a grill scrubber in America really highlighted the problem for me. [0] ▶ this video

SmarterEveryday is trying this right now too. He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch. The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one. ▶ this video

Agreed. Maybe you’ve seen this, but Destin Sandlin’s recent video on this topic does a good job of demonstrating the institutional knowledge gap [0]. He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video. I think there’s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated. [0] ▶ this video [1] link

But that's not exactly the Chinese fault. Actually try building something somewhere else - here's the process Smarter Every Day went through for a VERY simple item, nowhere the scope or complexity of the 3d printer: ▶ this video

This is so accurate wtf!? - "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS. - "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter everyday on how atrophied manufacturing has become in the US: [I Tried to Make Something in America]( ▶ this video ) - "Technological power in the hands of very few": AWS, Google Cloud, Azure. - "People have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [...] unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true": Fun house mirror of Twitter/X. Attention economy. Algorithm that maximizes engagement. AI Slop. Deepfakes. War in Iran. - "our critical faculties in decline": NYT Article [Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a Generation-Long Decline]( link ) - "the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less": TikTok, Instagram reels - "credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition": RFK Jr, Tate, Fuentes, conspiracies, Qanon, Vaccine hesitancy.

They are pretty happy with having superiority on high tech manufacturing and robotics. You basically cannot manufacture something without using China - even if you try. I don't think they consider the TSMC EUV monopoly a long term threat. Doing good on AI as well, you bet the OSS chinese models causing stock panic in the US makes them laugh. On the topic of manufacturing outside China, the YouTuber "Smarter Every day" (Destin Sandlin) has a series on manufacturing and feels strongly about manufacturing having moved out of the country. As an experiment he tried to manufacture something without China, but was unable to: ▶ this video

This reminded of the YouTube guy of "Smarter Every Day" who tried to manufacture a a grill brush completely in USA and still be competitive in the marketplace (i.e. China) [0]. It turned out that USA / "the west" lost the engineering knowledge to manufacture "stuff" (in this case injection molding and other procedures): Nowadays, we simply create the plans and schematics (e.g. CAD files) and let the Chinese do the building. [0] ▶ this video

I wonder sometimes if there's an earlier level of technology that society could basically "checkpoint" at and freeze, and then build off of. Capitalism today feels like it's hit the Red Queen Paradox - it goes around and around to keep the money flowing, but with very little actual progress. Indeed, most people seem to feel like the world is getting worse for all that work, and that many of the innovations of the last ~10-15 years are "fixing" things that weren't problems to begin with while creating new problems. And yet because all the substrate is shifting around, even if you don't break something someone else will. Could we go back to a world of redundant interchangeable parts where if somebody breaks something, you just cut them off and use a substitute that works just as well? Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America. ▶ this video

It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices, even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs. The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do. It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have ever done. T