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Comment by foofoo4u | Hacker News Reader

> The global pandemic, which started in manufacturing-centric China, continues to disrupt supply chains and draw attention from politicians calling for a reshoring of production. The United States is not alone; calls for reshoring can be heard around the world: in France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.

> But is reshoring the answer to a nation’s manufacturing woes? Not completely. Better than reshoring is the broader concept of resilience — a manufacturing sector that can adjust in real time to supply chain disruptions anywhere while minimizing any loss to customers.

> The pandemic is inducing actions by U.S. manufacturers to enhance the resilience of their supply chains. And the government is not standing idly by.

Relevant excerpts on the topic from [The Emerging American Industrial Policy By Keith B. Belton ](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-amer...)

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Re-shoring something like electronics manufacturing is going to be quite difficult for those countries that outsourced it all to China.

For starters, you need factories i.e. physical buildings. Pick and place machines, machine shops for making precision plastic moulds, the trained personnel to run them and re-shoring all the knowledge for how things work and how to keep them working.

The entire supply chain for electronic components will also have to be re-shored as well. A lot of that depends on a local network effect (why Hong Kong was successful and why Shenzhen is successful).

In Australia we still have small pockets of electronic manufacturing (most of which was decimated by Japanese imports in the 1970s) so we are 50+ years from when things like that were routinely made here and rebuilding that is not going to happen at the stroke of a pen, it's going to require a lot of investment. That is something governments used to do quite well but the neo-liberal political movement not only killed manufacturing in this country, but also makes it impossible to restart it.

It costs me 1/10th of the price to have our circuit board made in China compared to the quotes I had from Australian factories. That is the kind of price difference that would kill my product stone dead.

Plastic injection molding tool design especially. It's not just capital intensive, but one of the deepest black arts I was adjacent to in my robotics days. I'm not sure I see a way to reshore that knowledge at any scale worth talking about without massive economic problems in the west. The way to learn (like any black art) is to start with simple designs and take on more and more complicated work, but the simplest designs are the ones with the lowest margins and the least worth reshoring. : \

Maybe the whole field changes with 3d metal printing getting cheaper allowing more experimentation by individuals and reducing the barrier to the field?

I don't know how that is going to play out. The metal 3D printer I have seen was quite incredible with the things that could be made out of stainless steel powder but the price of them doesn't seem to be coming down at the rate we normally expect with electronics.

I guess once somebody works out how to do it as a desk-side or small factory, high volume situation it might turn things around pretty rapidly on a precision injection mould but there is little incentive to develop such a thing while we still have access to the chinese market, even for complex moulds.

You're right about injection mould design being a dark art, there is so much to be concerned about that just getting something to fall out of the mould cleanly might as well be magic.

Western countries need to infiltrate their factories and steal their schematics and technologies.

Lol, you joke, but it's not like we're above that if push comes to shove. The trouble with a black art though is that it's hard to get the gist of what's going on just from what's written down.

The joke is that’s largely what happened when the west brought their tech to china

The first world uses their living conditions and high pay for that instead mostly - just give the right people worker visas. Most of the actual nationally conducted industrial espionage involved export controlled military industrial complex linked bits.

Business intelligence meanwhile is more about reverse engineering and observation while not crossing the red line into illegality. Things like deducing the state of thejr competitors by the number of cars in their lots at what time of day - "more cars at odd hours and weekends may hint at a frenzied rush and that they may be running behind schedule".

Modern business intelligence practices definitely borrow techniques well established fields such as OSINT and HUMINT, often bordering the life of illegality but never crossing it.

As someone who works in the reputation management industry, we often monitor major social media platforms for keywords and conduct sentiment analysis on individuals of interest. This is done with the intention of ensuring the correct narratives are understood by the public, and to ascertain potential internal threat actors/whistleblowers before they embark on their mission.

Oh man you must have some amazing stories. Any cool ones you could share?

It's not like China is hiding this stuff. They do this to themselves as in their own employees regularly steal schematics and technologies and spread it all over the place.

One interesting note about this, is that there are machines for automating manufacturing that are explicitly not allowed to be exported.

source: friend who did factory liaison for USA companies in Shanghai

Just want to underscore this point. The ability to produce complex molds quickly and cheaply is a huge advantage for China. Metal 3D printing however may indeed be a potential game changer here.

I wonder what exactly are their competitive advantage there

Materials cost? Salaries? Cheap CNC machines? Several mechanical engineers on call with long shifts?

Experience.

The whole world is currently offshoring this work to Chinese firms who already have the experience.

Has it ever occurred to you that the answer might be that they’re just better at it than us due to decades of experience at scale?

Not to pick on you in particular, I see this sentiment a lot. China is no longer cheap labor, their dominance in manufacturing is due to expertise.

> The way to learn (like any black art) is to start with simple designs and take on more and more complicated work, but the simplest designs are the ones with the lowest margins and the least worth reshoring. : \

We could skip that step by hiring experts from foreign manufacturers. Pretty sure they would prefer USD over what they are making now (judging by the outflow of capital from Asia to the west).

We could, if immigration wasn't a political poison pill

We're talking about a few highly qualified individuals in strategic industries.

And there's nothing preventing the addition of a "mentoring" clause where they have to train Americans with these technologies.

Operation paperclip would be a good place to look for an historical precedent.

It sure takes talent (like in most technology endeavours) but it still can be found in good old Europe. Our Lithuanian ME contractor is nothing but stellar. However his career path was not trickle up from 3D printing but a traditional engineering school.

Supply chain resiliency has less to do with "reshoring" then it does about common-sense redundancy to just-in-time manufacturing chains. Toyota understood this and has faired better then most through the pandemic, whereas most others stalled out and had no real recovery plans.

It's also crucial to note that the car companies in particular have managed to demonstrate a shocking lack of foresight here: half the problem with the chip shortage was executive panic at gasp maybe having old stock on hand, and completely mispredicting that car sales would go up and not down.

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