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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

I call BS - I design in the west and manufacture in Schenzhen (and Shanghai) - you're only separated from the manufacturing if you refuse to get a passport and travel - it's a small world these days and the people a day away are friendly

The big truth here is in one of the last paragraphs of the article - Shenzhen (and China) is going through an accelerated industrial revolution - they're making many of the same mistakes the west made (don't forget the killer smogs of the 50s in London), and learning from them - Shenzhen has simply banned the 2-strokes scooters ubiquitous throughout Asia, replacing them with electric ones, petrol powered taxis incur a 3 kwai tax over the blue electric ones ....

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To be fair that's often not a viable expense on a student budget.

compared to what you'd likely spend for a build in the US vs in China you'll still likely come out ahead, I'd argue that if you can't afford to go you likely can't afford your project

Isn't the contention "it would have been possibly affordable / reasonable if mid-tier manufacturing were still locally available in the United States"?

It is, you just don't know about it I guess. I spent the past 15 years working for Sanmina, another global high-tech manufacturer like the aforementioned Flextronics. Just within the US we had facilities in CA (Fremont, Livermore, Newark, Costa Mesa), AL (Huntsville, Guntersville), NH (Manchester, Derry), WA (Bothell), SC (Fort Mill), NC (RTP), TX (Allen, Carrollton, El Paso), CO (Louisville, Colorado Springs), AZ (Phoenix), UT (SLC) and more. These are factories building everything from simple injection molded plastics or PCBAs to stuff like MRI machines and military avionics. In the San Jose area we helped do DFM on Bloom Boxes for Bloom Energy, and designed & build massive storage arrays for Netflix.

Just because most people don't know about US manufacturing doesn't mean it's not still around, and in fact has hit recent peaks as the economy has recovered after the global recession (we'll see what happens now that economies are wavering again).

Yeah, but if your factory is down a flight of stairs, and you have daily face to face meetings with your Manufacturing engineers, who get involved with the product at the first meeting, it's a whole lot easier.

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