Really insightful. Reminds me of another huge issue I was reading about in the crazy shortage we have in plumbers, electricians and construction workers in general. For two generations everyone has been told they had to go to college, take on lots of debt, and work in a cubicle doing random soulless stuff.
I can tell we are from the same town. I wrote about this dynamic. The debt ladder vs the skill ladder. We spent a generation acting like knowing how to do this stuff is optional.
Feedstock is not sovereignty. The choke point is the conversion chain (processing → manufacturing → know-how). And licensing is the perfect political weapon because it wears a bureaucratic mask: it doesn’t look like an embargo, but it behaves like one.
Once the knowledge ecosystem migrates, “reshoring” isn’t capex — it’s rebuilding a craft tradition. Seeing a lot of that in the Nuclear sector today.
Really insightful. Reminds me of another huge issue I was reading about in the crazy shortage we have in plumbers, electricians and construction workers in general. For two generations everyone has been told they had to go to college, take on lots of debt, and work in a cubicle doing random soulless stuff.
I can tell we are from the same town. I wrote about this dynamic. The debt ladder vs the skill ladder. We spent a generation acting like knowing how to do this stuff is optional.
https://open.substack.com/pub/therustbeltreader/p/reflections-the-return-of-the-real?r=1zsa3b&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Yep. You can take the kid out of Pittsburgh but you can’t take the Pittsburgh out of the kid!
100%
Feedstock is not sovereignty. The choke point is the conversion chain (processing → manufacturing → know-how). And licensing is the perfect political weapon because it wears a bureaucratic mask: it doesn’t look like an embargo, but it behaves like one.
Once the knowledge ecosystem migrates, “reshoring” isn’t capex — it’s rebuilding a craft tradition. Seeing a lot of that in the Nuclear sector today.