Something on Automation. I believe it is 100% needed but it is NOT inexpensive and still requires people. In fact it requires people that are not your average factory workers today. You have to outlay a massive amount of money to build the machinery and it requires years of time and THEN you have maintain it. I know lot about manufacturing and automation. One of the things I am involved with is automation. Americans are not great workers by and large. The farther right they are, the more useless they seem to be IMHO. Not to mention loud, obnoxious and entitled.

The average machine where I presently work is now over $500k. Most are like $750k. These are basically standard off the shelf machines in the industry. Annual maintenance on them is in the order of $150-200k. Then you have to have operators to run them. An operator can be trained to setup and run them competently in 3-4 years. And the top manufacturers are in Germany, Switzerland, Czechia and Australia. There is one American maker and they are sub par. All the parts are made overseas as well. The other thing is the average person who is learning to run these machines is NOT well paid and I have to say about half of them shouldn't be running them but you work with what you can get.

Another example, a long time ago I worked at a Tech startup funded by the owner of a US machine maker. I actually helped them out from time to time. They made custom automated manufacturing solutions primarily for Automotive. The average machine they worked on at the time was about $10 million and they had to layout the cash to build these machines until paid by the customer. The build time was typically 3-5 years. The company had messed up on a machine that delivery was refused on and lost in court basically because of owner arrogance which was a blow. About a year later they were put out of Business by Delphi who refused to accept and pay for a machine that machined brake rotors. That machine today would probably run $35-40 million but back then was $12 million. The problem they claimed is it didn't meet the specification even though they had several check points along the way. The sad thing is that machine was built to the spec but the Delphi engineer building the spec messed up and the product was not to spec. But a small company that had fronted millions already couldn't take on a billion dollar company in court. Sadly I work with the putz that messed up that spec.

I could go on and on.