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

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] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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. [VIDEO]

This seems to be startlingly contrast to all the talks about "US manufacturers are absolutely doomed w/o Chinese vendors' great products and quality control" when Trump increased the tariffs. I can only find [VIDEO] but earlier this year it was all over YouTube.

The problem is that these jobs are hard and the pay is crap. SmarterEveryDay attempted to make a grill scrubber in the US. [VIDEO] tl;dr He did it, but it went very poorly.

>As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge. Trying to make a thing and not sourcing stuff internationally is almost impossible: [VIDEO]

Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: [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

SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the "Smarter Scrubber" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

It's not just Trump, it's also US public who thinks that domestic manufacturing brings jobs. Even Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every day guy) hinted it in a recent video [VIDEO] Manufacturing as share of jobs declines even in those countries that are big at manufacturing. China, Germany, Japan, South Korea. China buys half of worlds robots. Manufacturing can create only very low paying jobs that people do in third countries. You can bring more manufacturing but not much more jobs. Most likely the lost comparative advantage means net welfare loss if you force it.

Good imperial bolts. Does the US make the machines that make the bolts any more? And what if you needed metric bolts? "I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment)" [VIDEO] talks about the trouble he had finding US made bolts and I seem to remember he found out he'd been scammed and was sold Chinese bolts anyway? (Edit: Skip to around 17m35s)

Manufacturing: > The United States is the world's second-largest manufacturer after the People's Republic of China with a record high real output in 2024 of $2.913 trillion [0] I believe the US' manufacturing capability is the core of your comment and I also believe it's incorrect. Sure we don't manufacture fast-fashion or junk products and we may have lost quite a bit of tribal knowledge[1] with respect to that. But it's nothing that can't be re-gained. And the benefits China and the Russia get from their spying programs? Americans by-and-large simply do not care about them. Denmark can do whatever they want with their tech as long as their citizens approve. Like you said, they're in a different position given their geographic location - thus, they have different priorities. But Americans do not feel like they have such an existential threat so they are (generally) not willing to give up their privacy. Whether "reality" catches up to your predictions remains to be seen. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]

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] [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

> 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. > Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. As an engineer running a factory in New Jersey doing, among other things, injection molding, this is way off base. There are plenty of tool and die shops. While they do exist, injection molding job shops are a miniscule fraction of the injection molding market. The machines are so cheap and so easy to use that everyone in-houses their molding operations. I don't personally see a shortage of young people in manufacturing; I'm in my mid 30s and I'm the old man in my department, and my past employers and the various companies I interact with seem to have similar demographic structures. Our job postings are flooded with kids fresh out of school applying for jobs. My job requires a degree; and it is quite rare to find someone who does not hold a degree compared to say software development. A lot of manufacturing companies will pay to send mid-career employees to school. Post secondary degrees are not uncommon. > Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It

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. [VIDEO]

That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: [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.

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] [VIDEO]

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: [VIDEO]

> 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? [VIDEO]

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: [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]( [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.