Our politicians chased our manufacturers to China by over-regulation and nit-picking idiocy of labor laws.
A good example. We built the Empire State Building in 1931 from design, engineering, construction, to opening, in a little over 14 months and one week. The Golden Gate Bridge was built from selling the bonds in 1932 to completion in 1937, five years. . . including approaches. In Stockton, where I used to live, it took them 20 years to get approval to build a divided grade crossing at two important intersections under the railroad tracks. . . and FIVE years to build each of them! When Obambi entered office he said there were shovel ready jobs. . . several of them were to widen Interstate 5 in Stockton and Hwy 99. . . they moved in K-Bars and started the work, in 2008. It is now almost 2015 and the K-Bars are still there, as are the orange cones, and the freeways are STILL not widened. . . and no one seems to be working on these shovel ready jobs but a lot of digging was done but nothing has been completed. It takes forever to do anything because Judges get to second guess everything. . . sometimes multiple judges. And there are multiple agencies who get to stick their sticky idiotic fingers into the decision making process and any one of them can veto the process, send it back to square one, require changes to the entire design to protect the spotted deer tick, or state that you didn't hire enough tutu wearing poofie thinking engineers from Zaire on your design team, so START OVER! (Well, that's only in San Francisco).
Speaking of SF, Bagdad by the bay. The new SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, California hired a Chinese Company, a dockside crane company, who had NEVER BUILT A BRIDGE BEFORE, to build a new, never before built concept bridge. Do you see this coming from a mile away?
This is a company who faked EVERY CRITICAL WELD X-RAY and arranged for CalTrans to fire or transfer the supervising engineers who screamed to high heaven about the X-Rays and welds not being right, and kicked the supervising bridge architects out of the plants building the parts. . . and CalTrans management ignored the money flowing over and out of the treasury until it was BILLIONS over budget. The company delivered a supposedly waterproof BoxBeam bridge that LEAKS when it rains, has substandard concrete (supplied by a DAMNOCRAT donor) down in Caissons in the bay that has not SET properly ("Oh, it'll be OK, someday, eventually it will set, we promise, maybe! But we can't take it out because it's holding up the suspension tower, and if we take out the tower we'll miss our deadline and not get our bonuses!"), and huge stainless steel BOLTS that are rusting in their first year(!) and coming loose, and supposedly sealed cables that are already CORRODING internally(!!!!) and the improprieties and graft are being investigated by the California HIGHWAY Patrol investigators (!), but not by the DAMNOCRAT Attorney General, or CalTrans, who gave themselves bonuses for what a good job they did, instead!!!!!
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Most of my career I've been an electronics designer for small companies, 50-150 employees, typically tech-oriented (usually 2/3 engineers). So when we have a design and we're ready to manufacture, we try like hell to give it to a manufacturing outfit in the States. The times we've gone overseas (Taiwan or China) it's been either non-profitable in the long run, or an unmitigated disaster. Overseas manufacturing only works for the really big guys.
I have no idea how it's all gonna shake out eventually, but I sure hope that the idiots who try to whittle away at, or take down, the American companies like Apple, lose their shirts litigating and bitching and p!ssing and moaning... for God's sake let the companies do their jobs!
There's SO much real EVIL in the world, Boko Haram and ISIS and Taliban and North Korea and Iran, just for starters... geez, WTF are these people doing, tearing away at the folks that are on our own side????