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Comment by janalsncm

20 hours ago

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now.

By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge, transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

32 comments

janalsncm

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ffsm8  16 hours ago

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

  • simgt  16 hours ago

    How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.

    We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.

    • ux266478  12 hours ago

      It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)

      China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.

      2 replies →

    • gregw2  13 hours ago

      Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:

      "The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.

      Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."

      https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-factor...

      2 replies →

  • schmidtleonard  13 hours ago

    Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.

    • coderenegade  3 hours ago

      This. The century of shame, when Western powers came knocking on their door, is etched into the Chinese cultural psyche. East Asia was home to mature nations that learned the hard way that self determination is fundamentally tied to your ability to defend your interests. This is especially the case for China, which saw itself as the center of the universe.

      The US won the cold war and came to believe they were untouchable. Private interests don't care about nation states, and there was more money to be made by selling the foundation of the West's security than there was in preserving it, especially since the enemy had been vanquished.

delfinom  16 hours ago

No the point is "overhead". You don't disturb working setups because you will cause engineering time to update the setup, that engineering time is added to the cost overhead of a job. Time is literally money, even if the employee(s) are salaried, their time is factored into the cost of a job.

The knowledge is still there, but American labor is expensive as hell compared to overseas competitors and so any shop in the US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs to remain competitively priced.

When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones because you decided to change shit on a whim.

  • mschuster91  12 hours ago

    > The knowledge is still there

    Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.

    There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.

    And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.

    [1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-disappearing-hole...