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I just post, I don't check. Oh, and I never leave out data if it's available.
Edit, Grok said:
The chart aggregates unweighted violent crime rates (per 100,000 population) from about 150 U.S. cities in 2023, categorized by the mayor's political party, likely sourced from FBI Uniform Crime Reports or local agency data—though Tim Pool provides no explicit citation. It sums these rates directly, treating each city equally regardless of size, which amplifies the effect of smaller Republican-led towns versus larger Democratic metros. Total incidents remain far higher in populous Democrat-controlled areas due to scale, but the graphic highlights per-city averages without population adjustment.
BTW, Virginia supposedly unalived herself April of this year, so there's no reason to not use her name.
The Hill, which is a part of the Nexstar / News Nation family, just published an opinion piece in which we make Fox News seem like a liberal mouthpiece by comparison.
In it, Robby Soave is heaping praise upon President Trump for saying that in order to Make America Great, we need to flood it with immigrants.
I logged into our HR portal just to verify that we have not been purchased by The Babylon Bee (we have not), as this is normally the sort of thing which I'd assume to be satire.
I watch a bit of Smarter Every Day on YT. I even bought the Smarter Scrubber after watching the episode for it. And I believe him when he says that the tools needed to make things here, sadly, aren't being made here. And worse yet, maybe a handful of people here have the knowledge to do so. He gives examples of it throughout the video.
So yeah, we make things in America. But we don't make the things that make the things. Those are made in PRC. And then you wonder why cheap copies of great products are out almost instantly after that product releases. It's not reverse engineering since they are the ones that made the original.
The Hill, which is a part of the Nexstar / News Nation family, just published an opinion piece in which we make Fox News seem like a liberal mouthpiece by comparison.
In it, Robby Soave is heaping praise upon President Trump for saying that in order to Make America Great, we need to flood it with immigrants.
I logged into our HR portal just to verify that we have not been purchased by The Babylon Bee (we have not), as this is normally the sort of thing which I'd assume to be satire.
I watch a bit of Smarter Every Day on YT. I even bought the Smarter Scrubber after watching the episode for it. And I believe him when he says that the tools needed to make things here, sadly, aren't being made here. And worse yet, maybe a handful of people here have the knowledge to do so. He gives examples of it throughout the video.]
I’m very familiar with Destin from Smarter Every Day.
Absolutely love his content.
But his experience in this specific situation is 100% non-generalizable. He is one man, deliberately rallying against a system which is functioning exactly as designed.
The technological history of the 20th century was written almost entirely by Americans. Airplanes, telephones, assembly lines, refrigeration, transistors, highways, portable radios, decoding the human genome, integrated circuits, diagnostic medical imaging, CNC machining, atomic power, satellites, computers, electronic commerce, additive fabrication… people born, raised and educated the US invented nearly all of it.
The one thing which the Asian countries contributed was to make it cheaper.
They did not achieve this by way of innovation, they did it by lowering standards for quality, paying their citizens less, and removing barriers such as rules which prohibit dumping waste into land adjacent to drinking water supplies.
And Americans are shockingly short-sighted. We’ll happily protest for a $30 per hour minimum wage, while simultaneously spending those same dollars on cheaply-made products imported from countries in which the average wage, and the average quality of life, are far below our own standards.
That’s why a 19 inch color TV set cost $499 in 1980, which was the equivalent of half a month’s wages at the time. Today, a comparable piece of tech will set you back a few days’ pay.
If we want to move manufacturing back to the US, we’ll need to accept those prices once again.
If we want to move manufacturing back to the US, we’ll need to accept those prices once again.
This is also a non-generalizable statement. There are quite a few things you can buy that are made in the USA that are competitively priced to things made in PRC. TV's and other electronics are not on that list. But other things, ranging from pennies per unit to hundreds of dollars, sure are. The irony is that these things may or may not be of higher quality, which was the staple of American manufacturing.
Also, I'm only comparing to things made in PRC. There are things made all over the world and they can be cheaper or more expensive and of better or lesser quality than competitive products made here, in the PRC, or anywhere else. But I don't think that was the point Destin was trying to make with this video.
The thing that stood out to me in the video was that here in the States, we don't have tool and die makers. That means even if you have a great idea for a product and want to mass produce it, you end up in the PRC to have your tools made. You can then bring those tools back to the States, set up a factory, and start producing the product and as soon as you release it, the market is flooded with copies. Those copies aren't really copies. The people who made the copies are the people who made the tools and they set up shop before you did. And that's where American manufacturing has to come back to: to the point where they are truly made here from the start. That was the key thing I took from that video.
I was having this very same discussion with my brother about a year ago. I told him about the machines we use to manufacture reflective products. It's done by cutting very fine v-grooves in hard copper plates and molding off that. These are excerpts from those discussions:
These grooves must be perfectly parallel and are often just a few thousandths of an inch deep and spaced just a few thousandths apart. To get that kind of accuracy - we're talking similar to microchip manufacturing - takes a very specialized machine. They are custom made just for us, take many months to make and cost 1-2 million dollars a pop. And they only do one thing: cut grooves in metal in a single plane. They first make the base out of granite, like a giant surface plate. Then they mount and grind the ways (the sliding parts) to nearly a mirror finish. The ways don't actually slide on each other, but ride on a very thin (.0002") cushion of high-pressure air. The air bearings alone require specialized compressors and air filtration to work properly. To get the accuracy, the ways are measured with lasers, and the software in the machine compensates for any discrepancies.
Of course, the rooms are temperature and humidity controlled. There is a standing joke that farting while the machine is cutting can ruin the part. When they are running, there is the whine of motors, but you can't really see it moving, unless you watch for a while. All you can see is the spindle is a blur at 10-12 thousand RPM. The cuts themselves have a finish smoother than any mirror, except for maybe the Hubble telescope. We use an electron microscope to check the accuracy of our cutting diamonds and the cuts they make. It's a Tescan Vega 3, and it goes up to 1,000,000x, but the mastering guys rarely go above 50,000x. There's a poster on the wall in that room of a pollen grain blown up to the size of a basketball.
When the machine is running, the chips that come off are microscopic. It ends up being a super fine copper dust, and we have very expensive filters (HEPA on steroids) to suck it away from the cut. You don't want to be in the room when it it cutting without some form of respirator, as particles that fine can really **** up your lungs. Think heavy pollen, as that's the size of the pieces. Since cutting fluid is used, it's oily/sticky, and it can make a huge mess. Filters alone are about a thousand bucks each.
His reply was this: Next time someone complains that "we don't make anything in this country anymore, US manufacturing is dead", please tell them this story. Yes, it's true, we no longer make T-shirts and tires and even washing machines in the US. We make commercial power generators and aircraft engines and cool **** like you just described. We leave T-shirts for the third world. The US was, as of 2018, second in the world for total manufacturing, behind China (who only overtook us in like 2013 or something), but even that is a dubious statistic, given the difficulty of obtaining accurate information from China.
No, we don't make plastic toy **** anymore. We don't make the thousands of useless do-dads that flood our shores incessantly. What we do is high-tech and specialized.
This is also a non-generalizable statement. There are quite a few things you can buy that are made in the USA that are competitively priced to things made in PRC. TV's and other electronics are not on that list. But other things, ranging from pennies per unit to hundreds of dollars, sure are. The irony is that these things may or may not be of higher quality, which was the staple of American manufacturing.
Also, I'm only comparing to things made in PRC. There are things made all over the world and they can be cheaper or more expensive and of better or lesser quality than competitive products made here, in the PRC, or anywhere else. But I don't think that was the point Destin was trying to make with this video.
The thing that stood out to me in the video was that here in the States, we don't have tool and die makers. That means even if you have a great idea for a product and want to mass produce it, you end up in the PRC to have your tools made. You can then bring those tools back to the States, set up a factory, and start producing the product and as soon as you release it, the market is flooded with copies. Those copies aren't really copies. The people who made the copies are the people who made the tools and they set up shop before you did. And that's where American manufacturing has to come back to: to the point where they are truly made here from the start. That was the key thing I took from that video.
First, we're in a period where we have high tariffs and low U.S. production, which is intended to spur U.S. production. Once production ramps up in America--probably by foreign companies who move here to avoid tariffs--we'll have non-tariffed U.S. goods. The prices should lower, and there should be more people employed in good-paying jobs. Win win.
Next, you're right about tool making. One of the main reasons why I manufacture in Taiwan is because my supplier was willing to buy the expensive tooling for me and amortize the cost over a number of orders. I'm not sure that happens here. Also, the Taiwan government fosters this type of business, fosters exports, and has extremely favorable tax exemptions for companies that export.
That said, additive manufacturing is turning the tooling business on its head. I can 3D print a mold with special filament, send it off and have it made into a steel mold. Or simply use 3D printing instead of needing a mold at all. I'm looking at purchasing a 3D printed bass enclosure for my new car that costs less than the injection-molded or plywood-manufactured enclosures that have been historically on the market.
New technology is disrupting the manufacturing chain. I can only imagine what will happen when robots start to integrate. Will FSD electric trucks show up at my door with a robot to deliver my UPS package?
I watch a bit of Smarter Every Day on YT. I even bought the Smarter Scrubber after watching the episode for it. And I believe him when he says that the tools needed to make things here, sadly, aren't being made here.
(...)
The thing that stood out to me in the video was that here in the States, we don't have tool and die makers. That means even if you have a great idea for a product and want to mass produce it, you end up in the PRC to have your tools made. You can then bring those tools back to the States, set up a factory, and start producing the product and as soon as you release it, the market is flooded with copies. Those copies aren't really copies. The people who made the copies are the people who made the tools and they set up shop before you did. And that's where American manufacturing has to come back to: to the point where they are truly made here from the start. That was the key thing I took from that video.
I have two very different responses to this, and I’m going to post them as two different replies. This is the first of two.
They are not gone, but your point is well taken. Tool and die work in 21st century America has become a specialist industry, employed mostly when relatively low volumes of unusual or especially high-quality parts are to be produced.
Often, as Rleete has noted, this is because the application is very special, such as producing spacecraft, nuclear weapons, ultra-deep submersibles, warplanes, etc. I compare this craft to the work of contemporary artisanal bakers and cheesemakers, who preserve the “old” skills and produce their wares in much the same way as was done hundreds of years ago, in contrast to the factory-agriculture model of late 20th / early 21st century.
Since you’re familiar with Smarter Every Day, go back and watch video # 288, entitled “The Mind-Blowing Machines that Stamp Millions of Metal Parts,” in which Destin visits T&C Stamping in Athens, Alabama which produces the cooling shrouds which go onto the US-made Briggs & Stratton engines used on US-made John Deere riding mowers. It includes time spent in the tool & die facilities. I’ll embed the video at the bottom of this message.
That video is a great watch, and it reminds me of my own personal experience. From 1999 – 2013, I worked at a company called Harris Broadcast, which is 130 years old and manufactures things like radio and TV transmitters. And by “manufacture,” we made everything but the transistors and the wire. The factory in Quincy Illinois is a perfect model of vertical integration. In addition to the huge R&D bureau, they have a metal shop which does sheet metal forming, casting, electroplating, and painting. They also manufacture printed circuit boards, do wave-solder assembly, wind their own transformers, and so on. They even own a few thousand acres of land on which to perform practical tests of new antenna designs at scale. The kind of stuff which is so unique that they had to develop the computer models to simulate them from scratch, and this is how they verify that the computer models are accurate.
They can afford to do this all in-house, as the market for their products is extremely small, and the value is extremely high. In my current job at WGN TV, I bought a transmitter from them in 2021. I paid $1.2 million for it, and I expect it to still be in service long after I retire.
And, a coda: Harris Broadcast isn't called Harris anymore. A few years ago, the parent company (which is 90% about military and aerospace) decided that making commercial radio equipment wasn't high-enough margin for them. So they spun that part of the company off into a business which is now called Gates Air.
Gates Air continues to operate profitably, within their little niche industry, which is too small to attract the attention of firms like Huawei or Foxconn.
So, here’s the rub:
When politicians say that we “need to bring manufacturing back to the US,” which manufacturing are they talking about?
We already do a disproportionately large amount of the high-skill / high-margin work here. It's just not the sort of work which has any sort of visibility to the average American as they walk through the aisles at Wal Mart.
Are they referring to t-shirts and novelty pencil erasers?
Or is it just an empty promise? Something which feels good during election season, but has no actual meaning in the real world?
There's a fantastic interview starting at 25:00, with a guy who was working as a supervisor on the night shift at a shitty company but had no path for career advancement. He went to community college to learn machining, and then spent his own money to purchase the MasterCAM software package, which he taught himself how to use it.
And now he's a tool designer at T&C.
Is that not the American Dream still very much alive and well?
Last edited by Joe Perez; Nov 16, 2025 at 03:42 PM.
The thing that stood out to me in the video was that here in the States, we don't have tool and die makers.
In the 18th century, there were no Tool & Die makers anywhere in the world.
Starting in the early 19th century, France, Germany, the UK and the US all started inventing the concept, across a variety of industries.
Here in the US, we came up with the Bessemer process, assembly line production, the Blanchard lathe, power looms, electroplating, linotype, mechanized agriculture, continuous-roll papermaking, rubber vulcanization, interchangeable parts, automatic threadforming, refrigeration, sewing machines, vernier calipers, factory electrification, pretty much the whole industrial revolution.
And companies such as Bridgeport, Cincinnati Milacron, Brown & Sharpe, Ingersoll, Kearney & Trecker, Pratt & Whitney, National Acme Co., the list goes on. Roughly 2/3 of the firms which defined precision machining and toolmaking the 20th century were American, with the rest being distributed across Germany, the UK, and in later years, Japan.
So I don’t buy the complaint of “there are no toolmakers in the US.”
For one, It’s false. They simply happen to be expensive and highly specialized, as I covered in the previous reply.
And for two, there were no toolmakers at all, until a bunch of blacksmiths and mechanics decided that there needed to be, and so they created that whole industry from nothing two hundred years ago.
The Asian countries have simply done what they do best, which is to copy the innovations of others, at a lower price.
They can do this partly because the people living in the countries exist at a lower standard of living than in western nations, partly because those countries have comparatively lax rules concerning safety and pollution, and partly because those countries actively encourage intellectual property theft.
So, when politicians say that we need to “need to bring manufacturing back to the US,” are they planning to accomplish that by allowing companies to dump toxic waste into waterways, and implement state ownership of housing and commerce so that a person can afford to live on $5 a day?
Or is it just an empty promise? Something which feels good during election season, but has no actual meaning in the real world?
What the MAGA party faithful appear either unable or unwilling to understand is that by ordering a DOJ investigation last Friday, Trump has effectively sealed the files once more. It is no coincidence that he did this just a few days after the House of Representatives scheduled a vote to compel the release of the files. He is truly a master of manipulating his supporters.
When I changed my avatar to the Ministry of Truth about a decade ago, it was part of a running gag here on the forum, in which three other members were the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty. Braineack still has his.
If you weren't a member back then, you'll have to trust me that it was a very clever joke at the time. I don't remember what the joke actually was, but I'm certain that it was clever.
I honestly never imagined that it would become a fairly accurate picture of the US Presidency in 2025.
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