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Re:High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads... by ghaff on Thursday April 26, 2018 @03:43PM (#16934976)
>There's a startup building prefabricated house using robots and cheap labor in a factory,

Not my area but various companies have been trying to do this sort of thing forever. I can remember reading stories about partially pre-manufactured modular homes decades ago and it's never panned out. It seems to be one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense on paper but people don't want it.

Re:High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads... by larkost on Thursday April 26, 2018 @04:12PM (#16935232)
I grew up in a Sears & Roebuck home, as were a good portion of those on my block. The Wikipedia article on the subject says that there were 70,000 of them built[1]. So I see this as more of something that has come and gone, probably a few times, and we are back on the up-swing.

The Sears & Roebuck were partially assembled (think wall by wall), and then those parts were hoisted off the freight trains and nailed together. There was still a lot of work that needed to be done (often by professionals), but it really cut down on the (especially local) costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home