America’s top export in 2011 was . . . fuel? | Hacker News Reader

America’s top export in 2011 was . . . fuel?

washingtonpost.com

23 pointsacak21 comments

I'm reading the U.S. Census Bureau report from October [0] and I can't for the life of me figure out where these numbers are coming from, they seem to be flat out wrong.

Using NAICS product categories the "top 5" through October appear to be:

1) Transportation Equipment - 164.79 billion

2) Chemicals - 156.7 billion

3) Non-Electrical Machinery - 118.4 billion

4) Computers and Electrical Products - 102.4 billion

5) Petroleum and Coal Products - 81.26 billion

Am I reading this report wrong?

[0] http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_pr...

They could both be correct; it depends on how you slice it.

For example, the article notes, "Aircraft, motor vehicles, vacuum tubes and telecom equipment were next on the list of top exports."

In your list, both aircraft and motor vehicles are are grouped under "transportation equipment," making it a much larger group.

Understood, but nothing seems to add up to the given numbers. Nor do the categories used seem to be based on any standard I can find.

Its pretty easy to make almost anything you want appear to be the "biggest" if you can arbitrarily manipulate the category system used.

"Computers and electrical products - ~100b"

I wonder if they count iPads and iPhones as exports or imports. If exports, that means a massive chunk of America's consumer electronics exports are due solely to apple.

Aircraft, motor vehicles, vacuum tubes and telecom equipment were next on the list of top exports.

Vacuum tubes??!?

Makes (a small amount of) sense -- the only high-quality tubes I've ever seen were either manufactured in the U.S., Europe, or in various parts of the former USSR; Chinese tubes have a very poor reputation at least in audio circles.

Perhaps this is because nobody ever bothered to put a serious effort into outsourcing vacuum-tube production, in the same way ICs and microprocessors have been outsourced, leaving the remaining production still domestic?

Or maybe it's just that there are huge stockpiles of the things sitting around in the U.S. and they're slowly being sold off, both for domestic consumption and export, but the net result is an export of tubes? That wouldn't be hard to believe either.

According to this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz...

we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?

The only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?

Wikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...

You are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.

One of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.

I believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.

My money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.

X-ray emitters use vacuum tubes. That means, every doctor's office has at least one.

I guess that the radars and other high-power radio equipment still uses tubes too

Maybe in the form of CRTs?

I would guess that someone switched NAICS code 33411 "Computer and Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing" for NAICS code 334411 "Electron Tube Manufacturing," but that's just a guess.

Oil from the tar sands in Alberta is sent to the US to be refined and then sold so while the numbers might say one thing, the truth is a bit murkier.

And the Keystone Pipeline project, which is supposed to "create American jobs" (for a couple hundred temp workers) and "improve America's energy independence" (through oil exports), is designed to help move Alberta oil to US refineries and shipping ports on the Gulf Coast.

This is a very recent trend reversal. An earlier story I saw in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal discussed some of the background to the very large recent increase in exports from the United States to other countries of refined petroleum products that count as "fuel." Some more current stories

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0103-fuel-expo...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-1...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/12/the-2011-ar...

http://www.ogj.com/articles/2011/12/market-watch-oil-makes-s...

give more background on the rise in United States fuel exports and when the trend became apparent to federal government energy policy officials.

Are these really exports to other countries, or do shipments intended for or directly to US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan etc also count as exports?

We exported a lot of it straight into the ocean!

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