China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself (2017) | Hacker News Reader

China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself (2017)

washingtonpost.com

68 pointsunnawut30 comments

Reminds me of Zippers. Ubiquitous and seemingly "simple", making one that is reliable for years is extremely complicated and there have been similar issues with Chinese made ones:

https://slate.com/business/2012/04/ykk-zippers-why-so-many-d...

The modern version of "I, Pencil". And a useful reminder of how much of the world depends on surprisingly small single- or dual-source factories producing tiny but essential components.

> This cost the industry $17.3 million a year, according to the China National Light Industry Council.

Is this meant to be a lot of money? On the global trade scale? Or on the scale of China?

Considering they manufactured "38 billion ballpoint pens a year" that isn't much no. They probably made all of the costs of buying it from suppliers back in sales margins.

This is more symbolic of their manufacturing and design prowess which historically has been limited to: everyone else does the design, we just build it.

No. That’s why no-one bothered to do anything about it for so long.

Article is from January 2017

I didn't realize that when posted it. :( If anyone could help amend the title with the year...

Don't worry about it, if it hasn't been posted before and has evergreen value then posting it like that is fine by me. The 'news' in Hacker News is not to be taken literally.

Also from BBC then: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114

I have one remaining Cross ballpoint pen and one refill cartridge for it. It is the only ballpoint pen I have that is worth a damn. Unfortunately I lost the other 2 Cross pens I've had in my life.

The quality of most ballpoint pens today is deplorable. They leak or blob or don't write until you scribble a lot.

Muji pens are amazing in case you're looking for a recommendation. They're pretty cheap, but feel great to write with, and I've never had one give up on me prematurely. Its terrific for people like me who easily lose pens.

Dang, just visited a mall with Muji shop in it yesterday.

I will come back later to buy some pens

Thanks for the recommendation.

I also recommend Muji for pens. Also their mechanical pencils are great too.

Decries anti-globalism populism, then pursues nationalist goal of an all-China produced product. Seems like they want to have their cake and eat it too.

It's almost like the political thoughs of a leader of most other countries aside from America, are complex and can't really be effectively summed up in a short article about the manufacturing of a ballpoint pen.

Also, by 'they' do you mean all of China or just Xi?

> It's almost like the political thoughs of a leader of most other countries aside from America, are complex and can't really be effectively summed up in a short article

A nice way of saying "hypocrisy is politically useful, especially if you're not called out on it".

Not really. Supporting globalism doesn't implicitly lock you in to believing that every single item that a country makes should be produced in several thousand globe-spanning factories.

(Sidenote: globalism is a positive move for the proletariat and means that strikes are several orders of magintude much more effective (See: Marxism at the Millennium by Cliff, chapter four))

So when China acts protectionist, this is OK and in tune with free-trade globalism, because globalism "doesn't lock you in to believing every item should be produced internationally."

But when they accuse the US of that very same protectionism, this is not hypocritical, because of complex and nuanced reasons. Do I understand that correctly?

How is producing a single pen using solely the labour of residents of China 'protectionist'.

Can you explain where I have accused the US of being protectionist?

Fisher Space Pens are amazing ballpoints that never fail to write smoothly on the first try. Throw the others out. No connection, just picked one up as a kid and still use one: https://www.spacepen.com/

Who knew ballpoint pen tips were so complicated and specialized? Learn something new everyday.

They're simple enough.

Churning them out by the millions with sufficiently narrow tolerances to "just work" and doing so at an attractive price point requires a very finely tuned manufacturing operation and that kind of thing doesn't happen overnight.

If some despot had all the ball point pen production people rounded up and shot it would take us while before we figured out how to make ball point pens in the same volume at the same price again because there's a lot of tribal knowledge that goes into this sort of thing. This is basically the position China is in because they want to make ball point pens but they don't have any ball point pen people.

After two years and I still can't find a review of this pen? Is it being mass produced?

It's not a specific pen. Any pen made with steel balls made by TISCO would qualify. They don't seem to publish statistics. I found a document purporting to answer questions by investors [1], where their answer to questions like "did the media attention lead to increased order volume?" or "how large are the cost savings?" is basically "thank you for your interest, our proposed standard has already passed national review" without giving specifics. Those investors probably weren't satisfied with the response.

[1] http://tgbx.tisco.com.cn/upload/news/2017031406023863.doc

> Support great journalism > > We rely on readers like you to uphold a free press.

I think their ad copy is getting needlessly manipulative

With major world leaders regularly decrying the Free press these days it doesn't seem so needless or hyperbolic.

Even disregarding the Bezos ownership, wp is not a nonprofit. I dont see how they cant uphold free press without subscriptions, nor why they uphold it more than others.

I don't think there's really much free press out there anyway. If they're not beholden to a state actor, then they're mostly beholden to the interests of their media conglomerate and/or their billionaire owners.

Ed. I want to emphasise that this doesn't necessarily imply bad journalism overall.

And once you subscribe, you can't unsubscribe except by phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper

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