Some of the arguments I have been reading/hearing regarding the immigration mess is along the lines that the US could not function without this unlimited supply of cheap labor pouring across our border. Ostensibly the US produces an overwhelming supply of jobs for people who are uneducated, low-skilled and don’t speak English? Let’s be clear this is NOT a discussion of past economic realities, but of the economic realities we face in the year 2021. Technology is not going away and will continue to phase out more and more low-skilled jobs, and COVID has accelerated that and has definitely changed the economic landscape. It’s also going to take years until we have a good picture of this new economic landscape. I just don’t see how anyone can argue that what we need right now is thousands of uneducated, low-skilled, non-English speaking labor pouring across the border?
Next point, which is really a question. Is it not the case that all other industrialized nations have very strict immigration laws and actually enforce them? How many of these countries have a functionally open border and provide free healthcare, education, etc., to anyone who gets there?
Last point/question. If our border situation is such a positive, how is it that other industrialized nations are able to function without thousands of people pouring across their borders every year?
Which is not happening at this time. The only people being admitted are children who have previously been made to stay in Mexican border towns that are very unsafe. For now the hold on immigration for adults is unchanged.
This is one of the main concepts behind a basic universal income, but backing up a bit, 90% of jobs won’t be eliminated, they will change.
I got out of oil and gas for the simple reason is that I just couldn’t take the boom and bust nature of it any longer. I brushed up on my skills and got back into manufacturing with tech startups utilizing AI driven on demand platforms.
In manufacturing, people think oh there’s this huge cratering of manufacturing jobs and if you’re talking about low skill type work, then that’s true. Meanwhile, manufacturing output has never been higher, something that’s true outside of the odd economic cratering since 1980.
But, the jobs aren’t low skill and automation continues to explode. There’s still a ton of work to be had for people with the right education, training and skills. Find me a guy who can run a CNC lathe or a mill (for some reason it’s impossible to find people who can do both well, it’s weird) and He can walk into any shop in the country and get at least $30 an hour. If that guy can program the CNC, he’s looking at $40-45/hr. Application engineers, AI, computational geometry scientists, those are manufacturing jobs today. Some guy making the headstock go back and forth on a manual all day isn’t going much use for anybody.
So yes, automation will eliminate a lot of jobs but it also creates a lot of better higher paying jobs, but you have to have the skills.
It also depends on what liberal arts majors you’re talking. The whole “liberal arts” denigration is just strange. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, those are all “liberal arts majors”.
The vast majority of college grads are business majors.
It will take machinist jobs. No, not every one of them, but many. Some of the resin compounds are hard enough. I know I saw one example of a small compressor that used to have to be machined, now they can pull it out of the vat.
I don’t really see that. Carbon is pretty similar to Stereolithography (SLA) with better materials. You have a UV reactive resin in both, in SLA a laser builds the part layer by layer, point to point. DLS uses an LED array that “shoots” the entire layer at once. It’s a QuickTime movie projecting the part by each build layer. The problem with SLA is the materials never stop being UV reactive; with exposure to heat and light it will keep “cooking off”, oxidize and turn yellow and brittle and fail. DLS materials are catalyzed and go through a heat curing process similar to cast urethane. They still have some UV reactivity though and will fail like SLA, just more slowly.
The only machinist jobs I’d see that going after is injection molding tools, and it will never supplant injection molding. Way too limited of a palate of materials and they’re mostly urethane based, which is 7-8X the price of engineering thermoplastics. It’s nice for short run parts or as a bridge to tooling up for injection molding and it performs well enough to be sold at retail, but it has inherent limitations.
One of the more interesting things I’ve seen lately is combining DMLS (metal printing) with CNC. DMLS is pretty cool but you can’t get the tolerances needed for even a ■■■■■■ CNC part, so to be usable you always have to have some kind of secondary machining. Clean up a flange so it will seal, printed threads aren’t functional and need to be chased with a tap, O ring grooves cleaned up. The machines I’ve seen running in demos rough out the part in DMLS and then CNC’d where it’s needed. THAT is cool, but again, you’re severely limited on what materials you can use. Aluminum, 17-4 and 316 stainless and after that it’s slim pickings. Binder jetting you can do superalloys like Inconel and titanium but it’s unreliable as hell and have a lot of failed builds, and when you’re scrapping those off on a regular basis you are losing your shirt.
So yeah, I don’t see DLS or any additive process threatening any machinist jobs.
I don’t know if the last part was added on or if I missed it the first time. Probably one of the most common geometries done with additive is small turbine blades for CNC that’s 5 axis work. That is the beauty of 3D printing, you can do complex to impossible geometries.
You’re still very limited on what materials can be printed, like for like the performance is inferior to a machined or molded part, sometimes pretty close but it’s always less than what can be achieved through traditional processes.
But perhaps most impressive about DeSimone’s resins was that they could undergo a second reaction in a post-print heat treatment to strengthen the finished product. “It opens up a much broader array of materials,” says Lewis.
Can also print metal
Aviation firms such as Boeing, Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney are using 3D printing to make metal parts, mainly for jet engines. It can be cheaper than milling metal blocks, and the intricate components often weigh less than their conventionally made counterparts.
Taking Germany as an example since I have some experience there. There is a program called Gasterbeiter, “guest worker”, mostly from Turkey where they import low skilled labor. Similar program in France. The Germans I met considered it a necessary evil but weren’t fans of it, and the way it’s run especially in France causes a lot of social problems. All those Muslims rioting in France? They’re 2nd and 3rd gen workers with no path to citizenship. That creates a lot of resentment, as they’re there working in this social democracy but aren’t allowed any way to take part in it.
The Gasterbeiter program was also leading to a rise in neo Nazism. I haven’t checked in with anybody over there for years so that might all be obsolete but that’s how they manage their low skilled labor, they import it.
