Octavian Augustus

Some things can’t be rushed Appreciate @LukeGromen sending this to me. This dude is saying the quiet part out loud and it matches with my experience in industrial process and my father’s experience in electrical transmission and plant pre-commissioning. Before doing overseas security, I built industrial plants overseas. I was one of three Americans on a plant I worked on in 2007-2012. Was an eye opening experience out of college competing head on against dudes hungrier than me. I tried to hire other Americans. Ended up firing all 15. They couldn’t adapt to the fact they weren’t in the US. My team ended up being Irish, Indian, Romanian, Filipino, Nepalese, Syrian, and South Korean and their quality of work was solid. At the same time my father was killing it doing commissioning on big power generation plants and electrical transmission systems. Mostly because he was one of a handful of people on the planet with experience on all three turbine designs and the US wasn’t building enough plants to keep young guys employed so only his generation had the knowledge. He finally retired at 70, turning down $2k/day. He has all of these out of print technical manuals on all kinds of plants with handwritten notes from guys who commissioned plants back in the 1960s. He said the old timers gave them to him when he learned commissioning in the 80s. I asked him why he didn’t pass them on and he said to who? All the guys commissioning are either old like me or guys from overseas. Even you don’t do industrial process anymore, you make a living with gun because the money was better. He was right. The US is missing a generation, maybe two now in technical expertise. A generation to relearn all of this and get good at it again, and a generation to be taught the lessons and take it forward. That second generation is where China is now. Tariffs might help restart the industrialization process but it won’t be easy or fast. We’re talking about a process that can’t be rushed. Will take decades of support across different administrations as we’re more polarized. As this reality sets in, many complicating factors will have to be addressed. 1) I doubt the people replaced with automaton will retrain. Read my previous thread on my buddy’s potato chip plant. You replace dudes putting potato chips in cardboard boxes during a tight unemployment business cycle those dudes aren’t going to reskill. They’re going to sit at home, vote for whoever promises to give them more entitlements and steal amazon packages off your front porch. 2) From the other end are the white collar people who are going to be replaced with AI in the next decade. I use it a lot for work overseas as it is, and sure, sometimes it’s like I’m talking to a retard I have to remind it of things, but it doesn’t have to be amazing to replace six people in the travel voucher approval process. just needs to read a spreadsheet and consult the guidelines of what’s allowed. Those white collar people aren’t going to want to reskill either. You think some dude in cubicleland wants to go from being in project controls to putting a leather welding cape on and laying in the desert when it’s 105 and keeping scorpions from running up his pants leg because there’s shade? They’ll just be the other end of the extreme voting for whoever tells them it’s ok and they don’t have to reskill. 3) Are people in financial markets really willing to take the pain necessary to make this happen? We can have whatever we want if we’re willing to take enough pain but so far I don’t see much honesty about the cost, all I see is people hoping decades can be undone in a few months. Hopefully I’m totally wrong about this, and we get beautiful abundance from tech and deflation because otherwise there’s going to be a lot of disillusioned people who still get a vote.