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Trudeau Popularity - or not (various polling, etc.)

If Peter Zeihan is correct, we’ll have to expect higher prices anyway, since China isn’t going to be the “cheap labour” (it already isn’t) soon due to demographics, and SE Asia may not be willing or able to pick up the slack.
The world is running out of places with cheap labour. Africa is the next likely target but IMO the place is too fragmented to make the place friendly for business and the population not compliant enough to follow strict government directions.
 
The world is running out of places with cheap labour. Africa is the next likely target but IMO the place is too fragmented to make the place friendly for business and the population not compliant enough to follow strict government directions.
He says Mexico is the next place to watch (and possibly invest).
 
The world is running out of places with cheap labour. Africa is the next likely target but IMO the place is too fragmented to make the place friendly for business and the population not compliant enough to follow strict government directions.
Most of Africa does not have the infrastructure to support large scale industry, that which does is often legacy infrastructure that needs replacing.
 
He says Mexico is the next place to watch (and possibly invest).
I might be mistaken (I don't 100% know on this topic) but I thought Mexico lost a bunch of factory work to China and India many years ago?
 
He says Mexico is the next place to watch (and possibly invest).

Nope...

The South is fast becoming America’s industrial heartland​

Joe Biden’s manufacturing boom is accelerating the region’s rise​


In popular perception America’s industrial heartland is its Midwest. Just look at where President Joe Biden has travelled for many of his big made-in-America speeches: Ohio thrice, Michigan twice and Wisconsin. (These, helpfully, are also political battleground states.) But look at where the money is flowing, and a different picture emerges. It is the South—a region running from Texas to Virginia—that is fast becoming America’s new industrial heartland

 
I love the idea! But there is a but. Are North American companies going to pay people a living wage or better ? The whole reason a lot of these companies left or folded in North America is they didn't want to pay their workers, so went to third world countries and China instead.

North Americans will also have to get used to paying higher prices for the goods.

There is no use bringing manufacturing back if the workers in those plants cant afford the good they are making.
Now is the time to repatriate manufacturing. Technology has gotten rid of the factories of the 50s and replaced them with substantially less workers who can produce substantially more. Yeah you may pay workers more, but it doesn’t matter much anymore especially when you consider shipping costs as much as it does.

Some simple examples from places I have worked.

One produced oil piping. Factory was mostly built in the 80s and updated with all the PLCs and modern electronics. It employed about 450-550 people. That same company opened up a new factory in the states made using only modern tech. New factory employs 500 people but makes 3 times the amount of product that 80s one does. That 80s one replaced a 50s era one which again it produced substantially more than that with less workers.

Another example is a steel plant. Used to employ 12000 direct employees. Now with technology advancements it is down to 2800 employees and producing more steel than those 12000 ever could. In a few years that same plant is hoping to be down to 2000-2200 employees and making even more steel thanks to technology.

The cheap labour side of things only matters when we choose to use labour intensive methods to save money. Fortunately for all involved those types of factories are going extinct slowly but steadily.
 
Nope...

The South is fast becoming America’s industrial heartland​

Joe Biden’s manufacturing boom is accelerating the region’s rise​


In popular perception America’s industrial heartland is its Midwest. Just look at where President Joe Biden has travelled for many of his big made-in-America speeches: Ohio thrice, Michigan twice and Wisconsin. (These, helpfully, are also political battleground states.) But look at where the money is flowing, and a different picture emerges. It is the South—a region running from Texas to Virginia—that is fast becoming America’s new industrial heartland
I suppose the writer(s) missed all the statistics that have been showing a contraction in US manufacturing for the past couple of years. Or is "boom" one of the words for which the definition changed to be more "woke"?
 
Now is the time to repatriate manufacturing. Technology has gotten rid of the factories of the 50s and replaced them with substantially less workers who can produce substantially more. Yeah you may pay workers more, but it doesn’t matter much anymore especially when you consider shipping costs as much as it does.

Some simple examples from places I have worked.

One produced oil piping. Factory was mostly built in the 80s and updated with all the PLCs and modern electronics. It employed about 450-550 people. That same company opened up a new factory in the states made using only modern tech. New factory employs 500 people but makes 3 times the amount of product that 80s one does. That 80s one replaced a 50s era one which again it produced substantially more than that with less workers.

Another example is a steel plant. Used to employ 12000 direct employees. Now with technology advancements it is down to 2800 employees and producing more steel than those 12000 ever could. In a few years that same plant is hoping to be down to 2000-2200 employees and making even more steel thanks to technology.

The cheap labour side of things only matters when we choose to use labour intensive methods to save money. Fortunately for all involved those types of factories are going extinct slowly but steadily.

I saw an article the other day saying that 3-D printing is a marvelous tool but is not suitable for mass production. I begged to differ.

Every village used to have a village smithy. The world is currently populated with lots of printing and copying shops. Printers used to be more popular than they are now. But machine shops are found all over the place....


So...


Reinvent the village smithy. 3D printer, mult-axis lathes/mills and water cutters and every community has the means to meet any local bright ideas PLUS the local smithy can accept foreign contracts and download the patterns and drawings and ship globally via UPS and FedEx.

...

Watts, Arkwright and Ford destroyed the village and created the modern city. A modern village could be created reviving the concept of cottage industries.

....

Zeihan alluded to a modern clothing plant in the Appalachians bringing in raw fibre, cleaning it, spinning it into yarn, dying it, weaving it into cloth, cutting the cloth and sewing it, in other words replacing 7 factories with hundreds of workers with one factory with 2 workers.

Also lost are all those sales men selling fibre to the fullers, selling that product to the spinners, selling yarn to the dyers, then to the weavers, then to the sewiing factories. A lot less time lost in negotiation and physical transfer as well as money lost in markups.

...

Downside/Upside - a lot more people would have a lot more time on their hands to figure out how to put a roof over their head and food on the table.
 
Nope...

The South is fast becoming America’s industrial heartland​

Joe Biden’s manufacturing boom is accelerating the region’s rise​


In popular perception America’s industrial heartland is its Midwest. Just look at where President Joe Biden has travelled for many of his big made-in-America speeches: Ohio thrice, Michigan twice and Wisconsin. (These, helpfully, are also political battleground states.) But look at where the money is flowing, and a different picture emerges. It is the South—a region running from Texas to Virginia—that is fast becoming America’s new industrial heartland

This was captured in the video by Peter Zeihan, that @dimsum posted previously:

 
Another aspect to productivity, guns and foundries - material science



Polyethylene is a thermoplastic material that has very balanced properties and therefore established itself as standard material in piping construction both for the supply of water and also for the low and medium pressure range distribution of gas. However it has not been possible to use the plastic pipeline in the high-pressure range so far because its strength is low in comparison to that of metallic materials. An exception is the fibrereinforced polyethylene pipe RTP (Reinforced Thermoplastic Pipe). Highstrength fibres integrated in the pipe wall allow very high operating pressures. A new approach is to use self-reinforced high pressure pipes, which are known as monocomposites and consist to 100% of polyethylene. The secret of the monocomposite structure is an integrated layer of highly oriented polyethylene tapes. This allows operating pressures twice as high compared to common pre polyethylene pipes. KIWA/Gastec has proven the pressure strength of minimum 40 bars for the “raised pressure” pipe structure which is the doubled strength compared to a standard PE 100 pipe of the same wall thickness. If a higher pressure is required for some special application, the strength of the pipe structure can be reinforced by increasing the ratio of oriented polyethylene in the wall structure. Pressures up to 70 bars have been proven by single pressure tests.

Polyethylene and Carbon Fibre Reinforce pipes replacing steel pipes.

And the really neat thing is that instead of using oil and gas to make steel to carry oil to make plastics you can now use oil and gas to make plastics which can carry the oil and gas. Lower temperature processes, more efficient use of the oil and gas.

Unfortunately fewer foundries producing steel to make howitzers, guns and grenades.
 
I saw an article the other day saying that 3-D printing is a marvelous tool but is not suitable for mass production. I begged to differ.

Every village used to have a village smithy. The world is currently populated with lots of printing and copying shops. Printers used to be more popular than they are now. But machine shops are found all over the place....


So...


Reinvent the village smithy. 3D printer, mult-axis lathes/mills and water cutters and every community has the means to meet any local bright ideas PLUS the local smithy can accept foreign contracts and download the patterns and drawings and ship globally via UPS and FedEx.

...

Watts, Arkwright and Ford destroyed the village and created the modern city. A modern village could be created reviving the concept of cottage industries.

....

Zeihan alluded to a modern clothing plant in the Appalachians bringing in raw fibre, cleaning it, spinning it into yarn, dying it, weaving it into cloth, cutting the cloth and sewing it, in other words replacing 7 factories with hundreds of workers with one factory with 2 workers.

Also lost are all those sales men selling fibre to the fullers, selling that product to the spinners, selling yarn to the dyers, then to the weavers, then to the sewiing factories. A lot less time lost in negotiation and physical transfer as well as money lost in markups.

...

Downside/Upside - a lot more people would have a lot more time on their hands to figure out how to put a roof over their head and food on the table.
I think your a bit behind in how modern machine shops work. Generally there is two types.

1) Maintenance shops, they generally repair parts, make one offs to get things going etc. not nearly as much high production levels but it is critical work for the customer. A lot more manual work is done in these types of shops, usually not very many employees. Generally the machinery is more generic and basic (lathes, mills, maybe a boring mill, some other odds and ends). There may or may not be prints for this type of work (I have reverse engineered more than a few things from only the broken parts and knowing what it does).

2) Production shops. They generally do large runs of parts, usually with more specialized machines to make processes more efficient. For example they may have screw cutting machines and just make screws on them day in and out, or say 5 axis mills to cut complex parts. Most maintenance shops wouldn’t have much value in machines like those as they would only be using those features for the odd one offs.

They all already use drawings that are downloaded and sent to them. Most modern drawings are made to the same standards to make it easier for people around the world to work on them, generally trying to use symbols to communicate than words (as the person working on it might not speak english).

Its hard to explain how much of a difference CNC makes. For example if its a simple one off I can generally make it quicker on a manual than a CNC. However after that first part, it becomes substantially faster on a CNC. Just a basic brass bushing for example might take a hour or two on a manual. On a set up CNC it could take as little as 40 seconds.

3D printing is a neat toy, and I think the potential for casting stuff at home with it is great (using a wax filament, coating in ceramic and melting out the wax), it is just way to slow for industry.
 
I think your a bit behind in how modern machine shops work. Generally there is two types.

1) Maintenance shops, they generally repair parts, make one offs to get things going etc. not nearly as much high production levels but it is critical work for the customer. A lot more manual work is done in these types of shops, usually not very many employees. Generally the machinery is more generic and basic (lathes, mills, maybe a boring mill, some other odds and ends). There may or may not be prints for this type of work (I have reverse engineered more than a few things from only the broken parts and knowing what it does).

2) Production shops. They generally do large runs of parts, usually with more specialized machines to make processes more efficient. For example they may have screw cutting machines and just make screws on them day in and out, or say 5 axis mills to cut complex parts. Most maintenance shops wouldn’t have much value in machines like those as they would only be using those features for the odd one offs.

They all already use drawings that are downloaded and sent to them. Most modern drawings are made to the same standards to make it easier for people around the world to work on them, generally trying to use symbols to communicate than words (as the person working on it might not speak english).

Its hard to explain how much of a difference CNC makes. For example if its a simple one off I can generally make it quicker on a manual than a CNC. However after that first part, it becomes substantially faster on a CNC. Just a basic brass bushing for example might take a hour or two on a manual. On a set up CNC it could take as little as 40 seconds.

3D printing is a neat toy, and I think the potential for casting stuff at home with it is great (using a wax filament, coating in ceramic and melting out the wax), it is just way to slow for industry.

I'm fairly up to speed with modern machine shops. I use them.

I agree with you on the CNC stuff.

I am saying that that model can spread more widely. Relatively speaking it is less capital intensive than building a Two-Woman clothing factory in the Appalachians.

The village seamstress can become more productive just like the village smithy.

Anciently armies were outfitted with hundreds of thousands of arrows from cottage industries in villages.

On the 3D printing - I am going with horses for courses. It depends on the materials being used and the dimensions of the structure being created and the finish required.
 
Wonderful thoughts but energy costs and government red tape will ensure that production mills will remain offshore. Our government actively discourages dirty businesses.
 
We are so boned…Poilievre better have a real plan other than simplistic one-liners or he will be replaced in quick order by a movement that will make the Tories appear to be moderate elites.

How bad is it? Way worse than Poilievre is letting on.​

In the Post I mention in passing the Gallup organization’s World Happiness report, which ranks Canadians under the age of 30 in 58th place among the nations of the world, between Malta and Ecuador.

As recently as 2010, Canada’s under-30 set was as happy as the happiest cohort, the over-60 crowd. The happiness deficit among young people in Canada is particularly pronounced among young women, who report a third more negative emotions than young men.

This up and coming generation isn’t expected to get any happier, any time soon, and that RCMP analysis I mentioned, the “secret” report that details trends that are expected to shape the next decade or so, is chilling. Especially the observation that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.”

The RCMP’s “whole of government” forecast notes that the RCMP needs to be capable of responding to “new and unexpected crises,” and quite a few are on the horizon. Here’s just one: "Law enforcement should expect continuing social and political polarization fueled by misinformation campaigns and an increasing mistrust for all democratic institutions." You can read the report for yourself after you’re done here. Just click.

It’ll take radical, invasive intervention just to get to ‘normal’ again​

Poilieve’s enemies are quite right in this one respect: there are going to be big, scary changes if his Conservatives get elected. Let me put that another way. They’d be right if they were saying there should be big scary changes if Poilievre’s Conservatives get elected.

Housing is the “domestic” issue at the top of everyone’s minds in Canada, even though it’s not merely “domestic” and anyway it’s really a crisis in housing availability and affordability, and it’s not so much a political crisis as a full-blown generational catastrophe.

Until very recently, Poilievre’s remedy has been an articulation of variations on the theme of this snappy slogan: “Fire Gatekeepers. Build Homes. Fast.” This was always just pissing in the wind, as the facts show, which we’ll come to.

And the public has been catching on.

Our friends over at Blacklocks’ Reporter have got a hold of an $814,741 contract the Privy Council entered into with the Strategic Counsel firm in Toronto that shows that Poilievre’s idea of witholding federal funds from municipalities that fail to raise building-permit numbers by 15 percent a year has landed with a bit of a “mixed views” thud.

Canada’s construction industry is building as fast as it can - about 250,000 homes a year. Hiking municipal building permits by 15 percent a year wouldn’t put a dent in the target the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reckons would have to be met - 741,000 housing starts, every year, for the next six years, just to reach a dubious “affordability” target.

Quite sensibly most people in the Strategic Counsel survey said: Hey, Ottawa, you’ve really got to do something about immigration.

Lately, Poilievre has been pulled reluctantly into being more specific about his intentions: “We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians.” No kidding. He says a Conservative government with him in the wheelhouse would return Canada to a policy that “invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

But we need to stop kidding ourselves about the enormity of the changes that need to be put into effect to fix the mess, and the radical surgery required to do it Poilievre’s way.

But what about Canada’s “low-fertility” and “aging” population?​

Like the “labour shortage,” these things are mostly works of fiction.

Canada’s population isn’t aging faster than any other G7 country. And it’s not as if those distinctly unhappy Canadians under the age of 30 stubbornly refuse to have kids. It’s that they can’t afford to, and they can’t afford homes to raise the kids in, so actual houses - single-detached homes - are being built less and less, and because they cost so much they’re available to a shrinking and increasingly wealthy fraction of the population.

The most commonly occurring Canadian household, until 1976, was two parents and three kids. After 1976, two-person households - roomates, a couple, a single parent with a child -took top spot. By 1981, people living alone (one on five households) surpassed the two-parent, three-kids household (one on six). The gap keeps widening. By 2011, less than a tenth of Canadian households coinsisted of a couple with three or more kids.

Reverse-engineering the Liberals’ Great Leap Forward​

Everything the Trudeau government has done since 2015, whether by incompetence or on purpose, has ended up putting Canada at the mercy of what is probably the biggest housing bubble of all time.

The number of “temporary” work-permit holders in Canada has doubled over the past three years to at least 2.5 million, including foreign students, many if not most of whom have also been granted work permits, or are working without them. That’s six percent of the population of Canada.

Scotiabank reckons the real number would amount to eight percent of the Canadian population if you go by Ottawa’s own guesstimate of “undocumented’ residents. It’s actually more like 16 percent of Canada’s workforce, which was put at 16.5 million people as of last month.

And they all need a place to live.

Add to that about 1.2 million permanent residents admitted to Canada over the past three years, and another 866,000 who became citizens over the past three years and the final figure is. . . nobody knows.

It was only last month that Immigration Minister Mark Miller was pleading the case of the big box stores. They were getting spooked about Ottawa’s hints that it would have to do something about the public uproar over foreign students making up an increasingly huge component of the big retailers’ payrolls. “Labour shortages” and all that, old boy.

Now we’re expected to believe that Miller has seen the light, and by golly, by 2027 we’ll have brought those numbers down a bit. I’m not so sure.

There were 1,040,985 foreign students studying and working in Canada last year. Ottawa now says that this year we’ll be going into the first year of a “temporary” two-year “cap” on new foreign-student admissions. It will mean “only” 364,000 students will be admitted in 2024 (next year’s number is still up in the air) which, conveniently, is the same number of students whose study permits are set to expire this year.

Last year alone, the number of work-permit holders in Canada officially grew by 502,835 people. According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the Canadian economy grew only 417,500 jobs in 2023, as my old chum Rohana Razel points out.

Also last year, 203,300 Canadians ended up unemployed. And the tent cities across the country keep getting bigger and more numerous.

Here’s the thing.

Even if federal government was controlled by totally insane people who believed that the entire point of the Canadian economy was simply to provide jobs for people emigrating to Canada to work, we’d have 85,335 unemployed foreign work-permit holders to take care of, just from last year’s arrivals, on top of everyone else.

What the hell are we going to do?​

So, good, Pierre Poilievre says he’s going to match up the number of new arrivals every year (last year Canada brought in 1.2 million newcomers, officially) with the number of new people we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.

What do you reckon that new number would be? Say, 300,000 newcomers, give or take?

Poilievre’s formula wouldn’t require simply blocking 800,000 people on Canada’s immigration flightpath starting in 2024, and turning away all those prospective citizens, permanent residents and people arrriving via the dizzying array of temporary work-permit categories on the books.

It would mean telling perhaps two million people already here that their work-permits are being cancelled. It would mean telling more than a million foreign-students: Sorry, but once you’ve graduated or earned your diploma or whatever it is, you’re going to have to go, because we Canadians need to get ourselves sorted.

And even then, would we have managed to stabilize rents at some affordable level and bring house prices back down from the monthly-mortgage heights that only one in four Canadian households can afford to pay?
 
Nope...

The South is fast becoming America’s industrial heartland​

Joe Biden’s manufacturing boom is accelerating the region’s rise​


In popular perception America’s industrial heartland is its Midwest. Just look at where President Joe Biden has travelled for many of his big made-in-America speeches: Ohio thrice, Michigan twice and Wisconsin. (These, helpfully, are also political battleground states.) But look at where the money is flowing, and a different picture emerges. It is the South—a region running from Texas to Virginia—that is fast becoming America’s new industrial heartland

The south shall rise again under the original party of slavery and Jim Crow.🤣
 
The south shall rise again under the original party of slavery and Jim Crow.🤣
Yes, and the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, but I kind of doubt that Abe would be too “woke” to be welcomed in the current GOP.

But that’s neither here nor there, nor in the right thread.
 
We are so boned…Poilievre better have a real plan other than simplistic one-liners or he will be replaced in quick order by a movement that will make the Tories appear to be moderate elites.

Good article with a couple minor quibbles:

Canada’s low fertility rate isn’t a myth. Population replacement without immigration requires approximately 2.1 live births per woman. Canada was last there in 1971. By 2021 we’re down to 1.43. The labour force is also aging.

IMG_4478.jpeg

A big cohort is in their last 5-10 working years. My cohort, the millennials, is a fairly modest bulge, but there’s a hell of a taper after us. Inherited owned housing will pass from the boomers to the Gen Xers and millennials; there won’t be a significant trickle down to the under-30s. There might be a bit of a surplus of single family housing in comparison with the classic 2+3 nuclear family referred to in the article, but these homes still won’t be affordable for your growing families. It’ll just be us aging millennials without enough kids sitting in these large houses. Something still has to give to let the Gen Z cohort be able to afford to get into ownership and start building equity.

There’s a ton of fraud and bullshit in foreign worker and foreign student programs. Put a bunch of money into regulatory enforcement. Close down these ‘schools’ that don’t exist. Hammer employers who falsely claim no local labour to hire TFWs at a discount. Hit some people with heavy fines at a minimum to deter this kind of graft.

We absolutely do need to let our services ‘catch up’, but that will be expensive. We need to pay doctors more and we need to reduce the overhead the face when trying to operate a family medicine clinic. GPs are closing shop because it’s not economically viable. We need a major elder care strategy for both healthcare and supportive housing, because a lot of people are living very long lives post-retirement. COVID in the care homes ripped the curtain back on a lot of that. And we need a strategic approach to encouraging skilled trades to we can build and fix all the things we’ll need.

All of our trends right now are relatively gradual, but they’re compounding frighteningly. We’re absolutely not past some point of no return, BUT the strategies needed are general in length. No one or two term government is gonna fix this at any level.
 
Good article with a couple minor quibbles:

Canada’s low fertility rate isn’t a myth. Population replacement without immigration requires approximately 2.1 live births per woman. Canada was last there in 1971. By 2021 we’re down to 1.43. The labour force is also aging.



All of our trends right now are relatively gradual, but they’re compounding frighteningly. We’re absolutely not past some point of no return, BUT the strategies needed are general in length. No one or two term government is gonna fix this at any level.
Any government we elect could fix it. Not easily and not cheaply but it is repairable. What it involves though is them working together with the opposition to agree upon a viable solution and then introducing the legislation to implement it. Now that is a pipedream BUT the solution needs to bridge the parties so an electoral change won't effect the outcome. It means no promises re: increased benefits such as day care and dental, but it requires both parties to explain to their supporters that this is the way it has to be.
 
Any government we elect could fix it. Not easily and not cheaply but it is repairable. What it involves though is them working together with the opposition to agree upon a viable solution and then introducing the legislation to implement it. Now that is a pipedream BUT the solution needs to bridge the parties so an electoral change won't effect the outcome. It means no promises re: increased benefits such as day care and dental, but it requires both parties to explain to their supporters that this is the way it has to be.

If you think eliminating subsidized daycare is part of the solution to our pending demographic crunch, I’m not sure we’re part of the same conversation.

I used the terms “strategy” and “generational” deliberately. While any one government could start certain balls rolling, these are trends decades in the making that will take decades to remedy.
 
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