OK, how do we work with our CMM and CAM software? How do we send files to clients and vendors? crickets

Not confidence inspiring.

The adjectives you use seem to be trying to build emotional investment in framing this a good v evil, rather than a sober look at the facts on the ground.

I do think it would be good if people would be more humble in what they think they know and be more willing to engage with the argument presented by the "other side", and not be so tribal. More introspection, and less blindly doing as they are told, while acknowledging "doctors", "scientists", "reporters", are all actually humans that have human emotions, various incentives, varying knowledge, who sometimes do stupid things, and sometimes things with malevolent intent. They are not all-being, all-seeing, all-virtuous non-humans, so don't take everything at face value.

I don't understand what "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" means. Who should be enforcing these consequences? What even is a "rhetorical consequence"?

As ever, the problem with creating an authority to regulate what is truth, is who is going to be that authority, and how are we going to prevent it from being corrupted by human nature.

Specifically to Kennedy, in his congressional hearings I've watched does not present himself as a doctor or a scientist, and also not anti-science. His main thrust appears to be that there are a great many problems in the status quo, the "authority" scientists and institutions don't have any reasonable explanations for them, and there are other scientists that are not financially entangled in the status quo that have theories that look to be worth pursuing. That is pro-science in the meaning of exploring the world in pursuit of truth. He is trained as a lawyer, and it is within his profession to be leading inquiries into intent and motivations of various parties in a dispute.

The characterization of him as anti-vax is a slur, and greatly simplified from what he actual advocates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2700754/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC545012/

Note the dates on those greatly precede Donald Trump ever running for the Presidency.

Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.

People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.

The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230

The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.

I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.

Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?

I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.

I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.