All we have is the weather? California is the largest agricultural producer of any state, and it's not even close. Plants like growing here for the same reason people do.

Because they get all the water that can possibly be piped in from somewhere else.

Good? If it's the best place for producing a product, but requires an input from somewhere else, that's how businesses work.

That's pretty much true of half the USA.

And if the last several years are indicative of the trend, wildfire season is now a substantial part of the year.

When I took a machining course, the instructor sat in the corner and showed us YouTube videos in Mandarin with English subtitles to teach us the equipment.

We are never going to catch up.

You are making lots of projections from a single anecdote and conflating a state’s policies/economy with that of a country of 25x the population.

Detroit was once one of the US’s largest population cities, at nearly 2.5 million residents in the late 1960s, falling to less than 1 million by the 2010s. On this scale, California is still in the peak days of the 1960s, but we aren’t showing any current signs of shrinking. Maybe AI will be the catalyst for massive job losses, but that’s for the future to unfold.

Machining is a low value part of the economic supply chain, like sweat shop clothing. While I don’t want to lose it, it’s being dominated by countries (China, Taiwan) which are willing to throw MASSIVE money at the industry. TSMC was literally a whole-of-country effort to centralize the entire world’s supply chain of cutting edge semiconductors on one island. China is winning because they have cut-throat competition between companies and they don’t slow down for legal concerns such as regulation or intellectual property. That is only going to last for a certain amount of time before people will demand better living environments (which is partly why they have such a terrible fertility rate).

What a myopic attitude.

3 to 4 decades ago anything from China was poor quality and US manufacturing was tight tolerance.

When we outsourced, we did the training to get them where they are today and stopped investing in our skills at home.

There are still skilled people here who can train and the knowledge is not some sort of eldritch incantation.

The main issues with learning is lack of jobs and lack of opportunity to apply skills if you have them.

I had to pay an instructor to show me YouTube videos because the college wouldn't admit to being unable to find domestic talent.

> There are still skilled people here who can train

If you don't acknowledge you're losing the race, you will never catch up.

China probably caught up the same way starting 40 years ago. Watching VHS tapes in English (or German, Japanese, or French) with Mandarin subtitles*. Clearly "never" is untrue because it's been done once already.

IMO this is all cyclical.

* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.

Most of the comp sci videos on youtube are indian, but is India the cutting edge producing of comp sci innovations?