A competitive industrial apparatus needs people from all different kinds of skill and intelligence backgrounds. You need brilliant engineers to tool the plants and design products. You need trained hardworking people to work the factory floor. You need powerful and effectual businesspeople to coordinate and direct business. And you need middle managers and analysts to glue it all together. You need to attract people from all of these to build an industry. And you need a political environment which is willing to deal with the externalities of that industry.
> The Apple 3am example isn't making or breaking an industry product, it's just shitty management, probably needed because the product was scheduled to go onto a boat, something that isn't needed if made here, or some artificial bs. Imagine operating that way as a public company, I think that's working with unacceptable risk and a failure of management.
It isn’t an isolated example though. The 40 hour work week is a privileged concept. (Which even the US didn’t have until 1940) China’s developing industries are infamous for grueling hours, such as the 996 schedule, which has since been made illegal but is still practiced.
But we'll probably just talk past each other past this point. It will be interesting to see what happens. Like I said, I remember the Japan scare. Then all manufacturing going to Mexico (and my dad making sure he didn't buy the heche en mexico lable) before it finally landed in China.