Comment by mauvehaus
3 hours ago
If you can quote spindle runout, you know perfectly well that there's no meaningful IP in this market segment. That would have been achievable by any number of manufacturers a hundred years ago.
It's a pure manufacturing cost play to make something precise enough, rigid enough, and light enough[0] while being inexpensive enough for the market segment it's aimed at.
Is it a bummer that a US manufacturer went out of business trying to make money at that play? Yes. Is there anything nefarious going on with IP theft? Absolutely not.
[0] This is being sold to customers who don't hire riggers to move their machines.
how does a small US manufacturer compete when a foreign producer can duplicate 70–80% of the functional product at a fraction of the cost?
They can't. But how is that unfair? It's literally a choice we made.
And it's the one thing that unites every mainstream politician against Trump - they can't agree on tons of stuff, other than that we definitely should not be using tariffs to defend local manufacturers against Chinese (or any other) imports. I've been assured that those jobs are "not coming back." Well, big surprise - they're also not going to stop disappearing.
I agree some policy choices were made to get us in this situation. Biden largely left the first Trump era tariffs in place. The disagreements are on the broadness of them