The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
There was an ad for Navy shipbuilding recently that did the rounds online, targeting gig workers [1]. The snake grows hungry, and slithers toward its tail. :)
I think it is a great development, the US decided to export jobs to other countries to pay less its own workers, so it fits well that now it has no expertise to build its war machines.
It doesn't even have to be like that. People want comfy WFH service jobs and college is basically just becoming 13th-16th grade at this point.
America is an advanced economy and the advanced work is where the money and comfy life is. No one did anything wrong, really the problem is that too many are doing everything right.
The only real answers to this is either immigrants (who undercut local workers) or some kind of wage incentive rebalancing/redistribution (which pisses off service workers above the median income).
No, LIRP and ZIRP are totally responsible for fundamentally causing 'growth' businesses to be valued ridiculously higher than 'dividend' businesses. Basically any business that was "profitably make stuff now" had to compete with "no profit now, but we'll for sure change the world in 20 years" for capital and making the DCFV denominator's risk-free-rate term 0 tilted the table 90 degrees toward the latter.
The reason comfy "knowledge" WFH jobs are so much more financially desireable than anything else is absolutely the fault of the FOMC. They killed price discovery.
I don't know why so many people on HN get ZIRP wrong.
The problem with ZIRP isn't the absolute level of interest. The problem is that the central bank thinks it can simulate negative interest through QE. The zero lower bound is ultimately a price guarantee by the government that it will offer an infinite quantity of bonds to the general public to prevent the interest rate from dipping negative.
Any form of lower price control will cause an oversupply. In this case (mostly rich) people are oversupplying capital to the government instead of simply spending it.
Since the money is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, their investment decisions are going to either be a random crap shot, since information is distributed in the economy and the people who have information to make informed purchasing decisions have no money, while the people with money have no idea what to do with it, or it will endlessly get cycled through more QE and government debt.
In a hypothetical scenario with negative interest, wealth deconcentrates so that money goes to where it needs to be.
Buddy I'm not going off an economic theory about ZIRP like you posted, I'm going off having run valuations on companies and seen that interfering with the risk free rate made bad companies (and their wasteful activities) valuable.
I agree the problem isn't the absolute level of interest. My point is the yield curve should reflect the market appetite for risk, and we broke that relationship.
100% agree. No-profit high valuation businesses can easily borrow its way into existence, and profitable businesses in the real economy have to compete for the same pool of money.
> America is an advanced economy and the advanced work is where the money and comfy life is.
The only advance is the downward spiral of the American economy. The money is in the financial industry and third sector only, which only profits from the dollar control.
Everything about this reeks to me. Why do we need to build so many warships? (To fight China? We're going to war with another nuclear power?) Why are we fighting Houthi rebels? But also, why isn't the government sponsoring this training? Why is it only thousands, and not hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers being trained? And when did the call go out that they were going to be offering training? (I never hear about these initiatives, or when I do, it's for a couple thousand people to get into a position that pays $18/hr starting. Might as well walk onto a warehouse job.) If this is so important, why did they close so many shipyards during realignment?
Because they're attacking commercial shipping heading to and from the Suez Canal? I mean it wlso pleases our Saudi allies but the shipping attacks are the main concern.
Igitur quī desīderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").[1] While I think there's immense scope for debate over what constitutes appropriate preparation in this or any other context, I believe the core idea, that effective preparation for war can prevent it, has merit. (Though it should not be the only way a country works to prevent war!) And there are ancillary uses for militaries, such as the prevention of piracy mentioned elsewhere.
The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”