Quoted from vid1900:

Is there any way we can use coal to make a pinball machine cheaper?

Quoted from Stones:

Not with oversea manufacturers.......you know how much toxic shit some of those Chinese workers are breathing in?

Quoted from SadSack:

Do they also provide suicide nets and store credit for everything you need in your 6' x 8' shared bunk cell?

Quoted from cottonm4:

Some interesting discussions going on here. But all you talking about here is Economics 101 Supply and Demand Equilibrium being sought. And---discovered.
It is an interesting proposition to discuss the merits of Econ 101 Supply/Demand equilibrium in abstract while one is sitting on his ass in class listening to the professor expound on the logic and virtues supply and demand issues. It is quite another proposition when that same one (me) watches as his own job leaves the country for Mexico and is handed a pink slip shortly thereafter.
I have personally felt the sting of outsourcing---my job left me. I also enjoy the benefits of outsourcing every time I go to Harbor Freight, for example (come on, we are pinheads and we JuuuuST LuuuuV Harbor Freight. Admit it )
But nothing new is going on here. Outsourcing has been going on for ages. But here in the good ol' US of A, the outsourcing may have been a company moving a factory and jobs from New York, or Chicago to the midwest where wages and taxes were cheaper---and there were vey few toll roads "out here in the wide open spaces".
Case in point #1: In the late 70s I was running a small retail business in a small to mid-sized Nebraska town. As I recall (perhaps incorrectly, so please consider my numbers to be magic numbers), the prevailing wage was around $4.50 to $5.00 per hour for people who had been at their jobs for years. The city fathers got together and built a small industrial park. An automobile parts manufacturer out of Chicago, Perfect Circle Piston Rings, moved to town and set up shop in the park to make piston rings. And the starting wages were $5.50 and up. It upset the local labor market for a little bit and Perfect Circle was now enjoying cheaper midwest taxes and lower labor costs compared to where it came from.
Nobody in the Nebraska town was bitching about the new jobs except for the established businesses that were now having to scramble to replace lost long-time employees and raise wages for the others still left.
If anybody in Chicago was mourning the loss, I never head about it.
What has changed since then? Those Perfect Circle jobs would have left for China instead of Nebraska. And workers from Chicago would have been able to move from Illinois to Nebraska if they had wanted to. It is a little harder to chase a job across the border.
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Case in point #2: My city's main industry is producing aircraft. The plane maker/employees in Wichita KS are unionized. Several years ago, Cessna Aircraft started a new airplane model and chose a small town in the southeastern part of the state for its location to build a new plant. Good paying jobs in southeastern Kansas are few and far between. Cessna comes in and raises the local wages and is still paying one third to one half of the wages it paid in Wichita.
Wichita and its employees did not like it. But the jobs stayed in state and did not leave the country. And Cessna got cheaper wages.
Later on, Cessna went to China to produce a new airplane model.
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Case in point #3: I used to work for Boeing building the 737s, 747s, and 757s you fly on. Boeing was founded and headquartered in Washington state. Boeing's main production happened and still happens in Washington state with a large manufacturing plant in Wichita. Boeing is/was unionized in Wichita and is still heavily unionized in Washington state.
Several years ago, Boeing restructured and moved its home offices from Seattle, Washington to Chicago. The Wichita plant was sold and is now called Spirit. Spirit is an independent company but its largest customer is Boeing.
When Boeing was preparing to start building its new 787 it started looking around for places to build a new factory. Of course, the union and employees wanted to have the 787 built in Washington but Boeing (as do many other companies ) started shopping for incentives from other states. It becomes dog-eat-dog as prospective cities pony up with tax abatements and other give aways to attract (and poach) jobs from other cities and towns.
The state of South Carolina the pat on the head from Boeing due to some real nice tax giveaways and lots of cheaper non-union labor. As you might surmise, Boeing had to send out lots of its highly trained unionized labor to teach the new South Carolina aircraft workers how to build an airplane. So, now Boeing builds 787s on both sides of the country.
Long term, I would expect Boeing to continue to grow its South Carolina operations and shrink Washington state operations and continue the trend to cheaper labor.
At least the jobs did not leave the county---yet. Wait until China gets its large commercial jetliner online in a few more years. Don't take this lightly. Boeing is the USA's largest exporter. Competing in the world market with China for jet sales will be cutthroat.
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30 or 40 years ago, we used to make idle talk about how much money we could save if we could cut out the middleman. Back then, when we talked about the middleman we were usually unwittingly referring to the wholesalers and distributors. Factory direct was what we wanted. Did you lose your job because the factory bypassed your wholesaling behind and sold directly to me? I'm so sorry but that's the breaks. Tough shit for you; Maybe next time you will try to get yourself educated to get a better job.
Now, here we are 40 years later and the internet is the fly swatter that makes it possible for us all to buy "factory direct". First, it was Walmart that cut out the wholesaler. And then Walmart cut out the manufacturer by buying up China. And next, along came Amazon, that is eating everybody's lunch, including Walmart's.
Between the Amazon/Walmart bookends, everybody's nice paying job with a pension is at risk.
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All of the above is to try and illustrate that business is always looking for cheaper labor costs as well as other cheaper inputs. The big difference now is that transportation makes it easy for production to happen worldwide but makes it difficult to follow jobs across borders.
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I laugh when I hear people taking about cheap Chinese products and try to extend that cheap quality to the lack of skills of Chinese people. If what you bought was of cheap quality, that is because it was designed to be cheap and built cheaply for the cheap buyers that frequent Walmart and Harbor Freight.
As attested to earlier on these pages, Apple's iPhone is not of poor, cheap quality. China will build, and can build, the quality that is required.
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As far as jobs go, to quote whoever. "we have seen the enemy and he is us" ! It all depends on who is lucky enough to avoid the job chop axe the longest.
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A few months ago I needed some new gas shocks for my hatchback lid. Publicly traded auto parts stores like Autozone, Advance Auto Parts, and O'reilly's ( all who just love cheap Chinese car parts ) have run all the mom and pop auto parts stores from town. Tit for tat, I use Google and found an online auto parts store for my gas shocks. These shocks were cheaper than the big three auto parts retailers prices, so I bought online.
I had a choice in prices. One brand sold for $48.00 a pair. The other brand was $3.00 cheaper. "What was the difference?", I asked. The more expensive pair was made in the USA. Hmmm. OK. For three bucks it was worth buying USA. Both of these choices were cheaper than Autozone etc.
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Here is something about the political system in the US that perplexes me. We have this 50 year old boycott with Cuba that morphed somewhere along the timeline that we cannot do business with "communist Cuba", while at the same time while we shop the next "bargain" at Walmart---or Harbor Freight---we send all of out money to Communist China.
For the longest time, I have wanted to print a T-shirt that says, "Down with Communism Shoot Castro", on the front while the back would printed to say, "Support Communism Shop Walmart". I wonder how long I could wear a shirt like that before Walmart would kick me out of the store?
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I started rambling quite a while back so I will shut up now. But I leave with a question:
I once read somewhere that years ago, Gottlieb outsourced its wire harness work to some Indian reservations in North Dakota or some other nearby state. Nowadays, most of the auto makers wiring work goes to Mexico. Why couldn't the car makers send their wiring work to the reservations instead of out side the country?

Quoted from cottonm4:

Well, in Japan, it might have been "Slave" but it was certainly not trash. Japan was making some good products by the early 70s.
And I don't think anybody could consider Honda motorcycles from the 60s junk. It was Milwaukee USA made Harley-Davidsons that were junky oil leakers.

Quoted from cottonm4:

I was not suggesting govt. intervention in free markets, but you do raise an interesting point. At the same time, it is govt. policy that allows, or dis-allows, markets to enter or leave the country.

Quoted from Haymaker:

Every time I hear people babble on about machines taking over peoples jobs I have to roll my eyes. If you lose your job to automation, that sucks, but hopefully you've developed skills to be useful elsewhere. Automation isn't going to lead to less jobs. I refer you to the luddite fallacy: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/ Sure I suppose one day technology could advance so far that everything is automated, but honestly its not a major concern for a long time to come

Quoted from Homepin:

That's fine but certainly not logical. Seems your bias is brought on by flag waving and there is nothing wrong with that. If your bias is because of perceived "poor quality" issues, then I will be pleased to show that you are very wrong when it comes to Homepin products. You can go and look at them today and see for yourself. (replacement pinball boards and Hankin tables are available today, right now, in the USA).
Homepin pinball machines will also come with the following as standard (subject to change):
Shaker motor
programmable electronic coin mech
full size leg mounting plates (WMS style)
power switch in the conventional position
tool kit
Illuminated flipper buttons
Full side rails to protect cab artwork
...and many other things usually considered as extras by most other manufacturers.
In short, Homepin has taken the savings we make by building in our own China factory and given those savings back to the customer. Not just with our price but with REAL VALUE extras.
Our RRP (Recommended Retail Price) for a Thunderbirds pinball (subject to change) - in Australia - is AU$6499 (including tax - purchased from one of our retailers). That's about US$4934 in today's money. We believe that some future titles we produce will be even cheaper yet retain the same quality. You want to keep paying current prices then go right ahead and stick with the "made in USA" idea but it isn't a sound one for many reasons that others have pointed out here as well.

Quoted from ThatOneDude:

Those cars don't depend on maps for things like roadwork. They are processing road conditions on the fly. Google cars are successfully managing live road issues today. And, again, in the future, the road itself will be reporting conditions on the fly as well("lane 3 + 4 closed, all traffic in section X merge to 1 + 2").

Quoted from SadSack:

Autonomous cars will be banned from traditional roadways by 2025. There will be a big push to convert traditional roadways into smart roadways where human-driven cars will be forbidden. The unforeseen problems of a shared roadway will become an insurmountable obstacle to a peaceful coexistence of both driven and driverless automobiles.
The perception that computer programs will be responsible for road deaths will be the motivation for "luddites" to win the perception wars. It's just that at-fault driverless cars will be a very easy target to pull on heartstrings, even if they are much less often at fault.
The faith that technophiles have in silicon and iron is laughable. The stuff works great in a laboratory environment and works terribly in the real world. For example, what is the calculus when a child runs in the road.. and how is that different if a dog or deer runs in the road? There are tons of questions regarding the algorithms and the companies developing the technology considers these questions trade secrets. Does anyone remember talking cars? Some technology is interesting, but impractical. The idea of Total Recall ubers running around everywhere is fantasy. I'm happy to entertain disagreements.

Quoted from Haymaker:

Take for example manual transmissions. Once the norm, pretty much everyone could drive a stick. People hated automatics because they were expensive, felt sluggish, ect. Nowadays its hard to get anything in a manual trans unless its a sports car and even then its getting difficult. In the future, when people ask if you know how to drive a manual, they'll be talking about a manual driving car.

Quoted from jwilson:

For people who just want an appliance on wheels, Toyota has you covered.

Quoted from SadSack:

25year membership in SAE and I have not once been amazed a single time by technological change. I am amazed by tech neophytes' faith in the 21st century religion know as technophillia.
I'm not alone: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/autonomous-cars-biggest-roadblock-are-drivers-afraid-to-let-go