U.S. seeks to revive idled shipyards with help of Japan, South Korea | Hacker News Reader

U.S. seeks to revive idled shipyards with help of Japan, South Korea

asia.nikkei.com

132 pointsmikhael151 comments

The easiest way to "disrupt" the shipping industry is probably through software. Cheap and reliable software is loved by everyone. There are ships out there, military ships, running very old software. But even when new, some would say especially when new, software bugs can quickly render a ship unusable.

https://medium.com/dataseries/when-smart-ships-divide-by-zer...

>> The technician tried to digitally calibrate and reset the fuel valve by entering a 0 value for one of the valve’s component properties into the SMCS Remote Database Manager (RDM). The RDM program then attempted to perform a division operation by the valve property; a divide-by-zero arithmetic exception was thrown, not caught by the program, and the RDM crashed. Since other Smart Ship systems were dependent on RDM availability across the LAN, these other SMCS components including ones controlling the motor and propulsion machinery began to fail in a domino-like sequence until the ship stopped dead in the water.

Usually "distrupt" with software is used in the context of providing non software company shareholder value, right?

Or maybe I have been to naive all the time, and "distrupt" has always meant ruin a market with bloated software, middle men and lock-in.

Industries are becoming over reliant on software way beyond the point of diminishing returns into actually lowering returns.

How much do you know about getting into this field? I’d be interested to know more.

People interested in this thread and that are in the SF Bay Area might be interested in visiting the Bay Model Museum in Sausalito. It’s a giant model of the bay that was used for modeling water flow, floods, salinity and so on before supercomputers were economical for such things. It ceased scientific work in 2000.

Inside the Bay Model, you will find the Marinship museum. Marinship built 93 military cargo ships between when it was founded in 1942 and closed in 1945:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinship

Doesn't make much sense to revive shipbuilding in the US when you'd have to import the steel. We still wouldn't be competitive on cost.

National security is my guess.

The inability to build ships at scale doesn't bode well during today's return to cold war / inter-war geopolitics.

The government can help pay for the supply chain growth.

US navy orders mean long term contracts. Long time for a plant to come online, upgrade capacity AND still make a profit.

These are military shipyards, their establishment is not primarily profit-motivated

Are they not? Why do I believe these are always run by contractors? Is that real life?

They are run by contractors because the US government does not have riveting or hull welding in its core competencies.

They are operated by those contractors for a profit, profiting from the US government. The US government does not choose to establish and/or invest in yards, and grant operating contracts to those contractors, for the purpose of making a profit.

The US government does so in order to have a reliable source of naval construction and repair services in case of a military conflict.

Are they 100% domestic military production? Seem like expanding shipyard capacity would require contractors to run it and accept orders for at least other allied navies or maybe commercial vessels too. Otherwise, I don't see it working out sustainably.

Norfolk, Portsmouth, Puget Sound, and Pearl Harbor, are the four entirely domestic military naval shipyards. Newport News, the General Dynamics yard in Groton, and Ingalls Shipbuilding are effectively domestic-military-only shipbuilders.

Some commercial shipbuilders, notably NASSCO, do business with the US Navy for smaller classes of ship as well as auxiliary vessels, and potentially could take orders from foreign militaries.

But yes, there is a massive domestic shipyard and shipbuilding industry in the US that is military-only. There are almost 300 active ships and another 170 in the reserve fleet, almost all with far more complex maintenance requirements than the typical civilian vessel.

Like many government operations, the US government doesn't try to oversee day-to-day operations, and awards those by contract. Same with the operation of national labs, for example.

>> when you'd have to import the steel. We still wouldn't be competitive on cost.

Just because steel is made locally doesn't make it any cheaper. Transport costs are very small these days, thanks to modern shipping. So a local steel producing isn't going to sell below the worldwide market rate, which is defined by the largest steel producers and consumers on a global scale. I remember similar debates years ago about oil, that if the US produced enough domestically that imports could stop and local prices drop. That isn't how the modern world of free trade works.

Logistics and delays are a bigger issue than price. I'm not sure how well JIT manufacturing works for those products and at that distance.

So don't JIT. Just because it's cool doesn't mean it's a good fit in every case. Get a buffer stockpile and refill as needed.

The stuff you'd need to stockpile is unlikely to deprecate in value and it certainly isn't perishables, so doing so really isn't a big deal.

Also once you get an order you already know roughly how much steel you'll need - a bit of lag as you wait for the first batches to arrive really isn't a big deal in such a project.

Doesn't waiting mean union employees still getting paid and increasing costs in this industry?

If you don't assume that the drydock is sitting empty while the construction plans for the next ship are being thought up, why would it sit empty while you wait for supplies?

Presumably you'd get everything lined up before you finish your previous project. Hardly any construction just simply starts the day someone approaches a manufacturer anyways.

> that if the US produced enough domestically that imports could stop

Relevant to US shipyards, domestic oil can only supply domestic refineries if there's transport, and there's not enough oil carriers that satisfy the Jones act, because they need to be US built, US flagged, US owned, and US crewed. If the best way to transport the crude is by ocean, it's not going to be extracted and refined in the US; it only makes sense to do both in the US if crude is delivered by pipeline or rail. There's also issues with the grades of oil and how refineries are setup, but that's more tractable if there's supply.

> I remember similar debates years ago about oil, that if the US produced enough domestically that imports could stop and local prices drop.

A slightly different version of this which does carry some weight - an oil producing country could use an export ban to lower domestic prices.

In 1993, at the end of the Cold War, Secretary of Defense William Perry [0] summoned contractors to a dinner meeting, now called 'The Last Supper'. Unlike the original Last Supper, this one was the last (or the beginning of the end) for most of the guests: Perry told them that, having no more peer enemies, the US didn't need most of them. They would have to consolidate dramatically. At the end of the 1990s, 107 defense contractors had consolidated to five.

That was efficient and a good choice for the situation. Against a peer foe like the Soviet Union, you need lots of extra capacity to supply needs during a war when everything is consumed quickly, from ships to bullets. From the end of the Cold War until recently, that was unnecessary. The Taliban, Iraq, Serbia, Libya, etc. were not going to require so many munitions that there would be a crisis; they weren't going to sink any destroyers or shoot down any planes.

China is a 'near-peer' threat. As Russia's invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the capability of all of NATO - with combined economies maybe 30x Russia's - to manufacture supplies for Ukraine is insufficient. A war with China could be much larger; the US needs far more capacity.

Another, more critical reason is that some weaknesses are escalatory - they encourage escalation by the enemy. Chinese leaders, seeing the US lacks that capacity, are incentivised to escalate peace to conflict, conflict to war, a small war to a large war. Escalation is the bane of international relations - it is systemic and often cannot be controlled, leading to catastrophes that nobody wants but nobody can stop. Any professional foreign policy carefully constructs situations that are systemically de-escalatory.

(As an example, the US Space Force is changing from using a few expensive super-satellites to using very many cheap ones, in large part because having a few super-satellites is escalatory - it incentivizes an enemy to conduct a surprise attack, because they can knock out a large amount of capability at once.)

[0] OT: also a mathematics Ph.D. Do such people still rise to leadership in government? Or are they all maximizing click-thru for SV companies?

There’s a very big difference between what the USA does in proxy wars vs direct conflicts.

Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority, and is basically getting shipped leftover or soon-to-be disposed equipment. You have some really good points, but I would be cautious about extrapolating over Ukraine.

As a counter-point, you can look at what happened in Iraq when it was basically a large military power entering the Gulf War (and stealth fighter/bombers were in their infancy).

> Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority, and is basically getting shipped leftover or soon-to-be disposed equipment. You have some really good points, but I would be cautious about extrapolating over Ukraine.

The US and Europe is manufacturing artillery shells and other things, and cannot nearly keep up with Ukraine's needs.

That’s true, but the US and Europe also haven’t structured their modern capabilities around artillery. It’s a component of their doctrines, but wasn’t expected to be required in such large quantities as Ukraine has required.

They have astronomical stockpiles of other weapons like JDAMs able to be delivered by F-35, etc.

I think Ukraine is just in a weird situation, because they are fighting WWI-style. NATO has strongly aligned their doctrines with total air superiority, and Ukraine hasn’t been able to take advantage much in that area.

What I said about a lack of capacity is openly said by the US military to be a leading priority.

> They have astronomical stockpiles of other weapons like JDAMs able to be delivered by F-35, etc.

Why do you think that? Last I knew, which was several years ago, it was constrained. I think they ran out in some situations (nothing of much consequence).

It's well-known that the US and Europe are not structured for artillery warfare. The reason why Europe can't produce enough artillery is because they'd need to massively expand manufacturing to provide for a country that still operates using a land warfare doctrine.

Not that it's an excuse for the EU's poor showing here but it's not at all transferable to the ability of the US and the EU to fight a near-peer. None of the same considerations apply.

I can recommend spending some time in r/credibledefense for more on the topic.

It's not just artillery. It's surprising that seems to be something widely believed. Just off the top of my head, the Navy needs many more cargo ships to supply the Pacific during a war. They need many more anti-air missiles - and much cheaper options, because the missiles are too expensive and, with the advent of drones, too many are needed.

There’s a lack of capacity, but it’s a generalization to a very large cold-war style conflict. ie - you are right NATO has identified shortages, but it’s more of a concern for conflicts on world war scales.

Just searching around, the USA alone has 500,000 JDAMs sitting in warehouses. I knew it was a lot because of the recent quotes on what Israel has stockpiled. They are much more effective than artillery, don’t miss, and can be used for deep strikes on stealth aircraft.

My main point here is that Ukraine is a bad example of supply shortages, so I don’t want to lose sight of that. That conflict is a good example of shortages for _part_ of the military supply chain in an unexpected use-case. Full NATO involvement or support would have seen the end of the conflict by now one way or the other. The reason I say that is that Ukraine has put a major dent in Russia’s military with no modern air force, no navy, world war 1 tactics, and at best mediocre support from other countries.

> Just searching around, the USA alone has 500,000 JDAMs sitting in warehouses.

Where did you find that? I'm surprised they publish it.

"Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority,"

In a near peer conflict, we may not either. That is one part of the scenarios being thought through now. Some of that is already starting to trickle in as changes to things like the Marine Corps restructuring.

> Another, more critical reason is that some weaknesses are escalatory - they encourage escalation by the enemy. Chinese leaders, seeing the US lacks that capacity, are incentivised to escalate peace to conflict, conflict to war, a small war to a large war. Escalation is the bane of international relations - it is systemic and often cannot be controlled, leading to catastrophes that nobody wants but nobody can stop. Any professional foreign policy carefully constructs situations that are systemically de-escalatory.

Very interesting, can you recommend any source where I could learn more about such international relations mechanics and intricacies?

It's been a long time ... these days I just read about current applications of it ...

WWI is a classic study of it: Very broadly, many participants didn't want the war but the escalatory system of alliances, military capabilities, risks, etc. took it out of their hands. My vague memory is Barbara Tuchman's The Guns Of August focuses on it. But you can do better than my poor memory with some online research (see below).

You can also see it applied and discussed over and over in current international relations, though unfortunately without the context of the broader mechanisms and techniques: You can see the US finding ways to respond to Iran and Russia that are effective deterrents but non-escalatory, which they openly talk about. A strike on Tehran or the Iranian navy would be escalatory - they would have to strike back or lose credibility, domestically and internationally, and there would be the strong emotional component of dead Iranians. Hitting a supply depot in Syria is a different matter - costly to Iran, but not escalatory. The Iranians aren't idiots either - they are not assasinating American generals, for example.

If you want to read more:

* Look at professional international relations (IR) publications aimed at the public, especially Foreign Affairs (more essays, but by world-leading experts, practicioners and officials), Foreign Policy, and IR articles in Political Science Quarterly. The book reviews are especially good - the expert reviewers explain the book and provide context of other points of view, current and historical beliefs in the field, etc.

* Think tanks are prominent in IR and publish a bunch of readable things - better than reading the best journalism, in many cases, in terms of pure knowledge. But you need to be careful - some think tanks are scholarly enterprises, some are partisan hacks. IIRC U of Pennsylvania has a list of top think tanks. In IR, some are Brookings, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), RAND, Chatham House. Be wary of Heritage (basically provides retro-cover and talking points for conservative policy, organizing Trump plans), Cato (libertarianism advocates), American Enterprise Institute (corporate conservatives).

* Search with the terms site:.edu and site:.ac.uk

Hope that helps! Really, I'd find a good textbook or take an online course.

A good starting point would be Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations. He was a German Jewish emigre to the United States, and it was with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation that his book was used to create International Relations departments within universities across the United States in the immediate post-WWII period. Prior to Morgenthau and the Rockefellers, international relations was not its own discipline distinct from history, philosophy, law, jurism, etc. Morgenthau's book was the standard textbook for international relations for several decades, and in it he tries to outline European realpolitik for his liberal American audience. His is still probably the most literate, sophisticated, and nuanced international relations introduction.

On the topic of a systemic drive to increase ones power at the expense of others, leading to escalatory and conflictual international dynamics, your go-to book is John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He is also in the realist school of thought like Morgenthau, although you'll find that his style of writing is much punchier and pugilistic than Morgenthau's.

On the attempt to build systemically de-escalatory effects at the international level, I would pick up a copy of G John Ikenberry's After Victory. He describes how victorious countries following major wars would create a new set of rules for the international system, and how at least some of those post-war regimes attempted to reduce the returns to power in order to increase the stability of the system and reduce perceptions of threat and insecurity by weaker states. Note that he worked in the State Department during Bush Sr administration and has that direct experience of attempting to ensure order and stability following the end of the Cold War.

If you want to read case studies in escalation toward a war that no single actor actually wanted, I recommend Stephen Van Evera's Causes of War with a focus on his study of WWI. It goes well paired with Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.

"Do such people still rise to leadership in government? Or are they all maximizing click-thru for SV companies?"

Many of the people I know got out of government contract work because the policies and work environment were messed up.

There are only a couple idealistic people that I know of who joined government work after other careers. Technically one of those people was trading in even worse policies/leadership in the military for a defense contraring job as a civilian.

So even the people who are idealistic aren't wanting to stick around, especially if policies and politics are starting to get in the way of the mission.

I'm not talking about contractors, but about career civil servants.

Buy steel, sell ships is a hell of a value add.

The first question is: why would USA need help from Japan and South Korea to help build ships?

South Korea in particular has massive shipbuilding capacity which I expect would translate into expertise that could allow the US to modernize aspects of their industry.

Are there any startups working on disrupting US Shipbuilding?

There should be. This is going to be a huge need.

Autonomous ships will probably also be a big thing.

Like trains, autonomous ships fundamentally doesn’t seem to make any sense. What’s the upside? Having a crew of 19 instead of 22?

Container ships already have tiny crews relative to the amount of goods they transport. The systems are already highly automated and you need some level of crew anyway for unexpected events, maintenance, etc. The idea that "automation" is this magical thing when the labor component is already pretty small is just silly.

> Like trains, autonomous ships fundamentally doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Autonomous trains already exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste... for a long list of places where it's been implemented. The related article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Adva... has a list with six advantages of autonomous trains. Many of these advantages would probably also apply to autonomous ships (and other kinds of vehicles).

In spite of the intro, those seem to pretty much be all people-mover/metro systems. They're not long distance transport in potentially unpredictable conditions.

And none of them are without support crew; The crew just doesn't need to ride on the train itself, but rather waits in stations or in depots along the tracks.

Right. You don't always need to have a driver potentially doing nothing 99% of the time. But you probably have remote and station staff a lot of the time.

I’m not sure why container ships couldn’t be piloted remote if drones are. It’s just that it is cheap to hire a bunch of sailors from the Philippines so automation isn’t really necessary.

You probably want at least some on-site supervision. And most of your sailors are probably cheap anyway.

cheap suicide drone ships full of explosives...

Okay if we’re talking boats, not ships, a ton of things change.

How about cheap drone ships (with suitable propulsion) just shouldering DDGs?

That’s already a thing since the previous year

Sounds like a Torpedo.

Fully autonomous ships are pointless. But automation improvements across the US fleet while retaining reliability are a significant factor behind America's dominance of the seas.

Already a thing (mostly remote controlled drone ships). But you'll always need mitigating controls for unexpected or low frequency events, and it's not always feasible to fly in a crew at which point the crew needs to be on board. This effectively is the same as the crew that's already there right now, so it doesn't actually impact all that much.

The biggest benefit of remote, drone or automated piloting is the way you could make better use of a person's time, and maybe save a tiny amount of wages, but it's mostly the resulting functionality/features/business processes that is the benefit, not the headcount cost.

The problem is a skilled labor force for shipbuilding ie. too few of them.

Also union skilled workers who aren’t going to tolerate “hire fast, fire fast, fail fast.”

Workers are unionized in a lot of overseas industries that are more productive than the US. Don't know about Korea but they are in Japan and certainly in Europe. Part of it is have better union structures than we do; sectoral bargaining means any employers and unions spend less time fighting each other.

A big problem for US shipbuilding is the Jones Act, which is so protectionist it's easier for the industry to flee the country entirely than deal with it. It's really harmful to our overseas areas like Hawaii and PR too.

My point was that you will not solve this with a startup, because of how a startup must operate due to its inherent nature (ruthlessly capital efficient, constrained runway). You must operate this as a long term, sustainable operation (perhaps a public private partnership), like you would build a nuclear reactor over years or a decade. To not do this is to ignore the muscle memory needed to retain the core component: teams of skilled labor with options. It’s a flywheel you bring up to speed with capital, a pipeline/book of work far into the future, and domain experienced management.

Boeing is learning this the hard way currently, for example, and is in talks to buy the subcontractor (Spirit AeroSystems) it spun out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571819

I am from South Korea. Hyundai Heavy Industries' Labor Union, the union of the largest and probably the most productive shipyard in the world in Ulsan, is likely one of the strongest union in the world.

The union maintains a YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@HHIUN87728. It was established 1987-07-28.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXqkbpy-6s is an official music video of The Song of Hyundai Heavy Industries' Labor Union. Lyrics is like "Comrades, remember, the spring of '89, we will fight with our lives" etc, referring to one of the most legendary event in South Korean labor history, 128 days strike at HHI of 1989.

The union is a sectoral union, a chapter under Korean Metal Worker's Union, but it is so large it has a special carveout solely reserved for it. Korean Metal Worker's Union otherwise forbids company-specific union.

Since this was well received, here is a full translation of The Song of Hyundai Heavy Industries' Labor Union, done by ChatGPT and reviewed by me:

  The Song of Hyundai Heavy Industries Union

  Brothers of Hyundai, standing tall,
  Piercing violence and suppression's call!

  Forward! Forward! Let us rush on through!
  Towards the liberation of workers, true!

  Even if the power's violence is widespread,
  We'll fight with our lives, ahead we'll tread!

  Liberation! For liberation we fight!
  Struggle! For struggle we unite!

  At the vanguard of the workers' liberation call,
  Hyundai Heavy Industries Union, standing tall!

  The Sun is rising over the Mipo bay,
  The hot tears of our mothers, they say

  Forward! Forward! Let us rush on through!
  Towards the liberation of people, true!

  Comrades! Don't you remember the spring of '89?
  We'll fight with our lives, our destinies entwine!

  Liberation! For liberation we fight!
  Struggle! For struggle we unite!

  At the vanguard of the people's liberation call,
  Hyundai Heavy Industries Union, above all!

> A big problem for US shipbuilding is the Jones Act, which is so protectionist it's easier for the industry to flee the country entirely than deal with it. It's really harmful to our overseas areas like Hawaii and PR too.

In theory, protectionism should help the industry. The government has opened a niche for a US shipper and a US shipbuilder (or maybe a vertically integrated shipper and builder) to get mainland goods to Hawaii, PR and Alaska.

Doesn't seem like a wide enough niche to get much traction though. It's easier to simply not serve that shipping market.

And shipyards are hard to start. They've almost certainly got to be in environmentally sensitive areas, that are often pretty expensive real estate, and then you've got all the machinery and what not. Hard to get that done these days.

They'll tolerate it if appropriately compensated, e.g. if you structured the venture as a workers' cooperative where they share the upside as well as the downside.

Unions in the United States are entrenched with a particular government-backed structure that puts the high-ups far from the working guys... they're not all necessarily leftist or willing to accept models other than management-and-bargaining.

Before that union leaders were killed by US police

A lot of people believe the sanctioned union structure was a compromise with employers who did not want fully functional collective bargaining counterparties but who knew they couldn't eliminate unions entirely, and they could be right as far as I know.

An argument in favor of this viewpoint is the treatment of sectoral/sympathy strikes (and other important solidarity tactics like sectoral boycotts) under the Taft-Hartley act: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

People think of the NLRA as a legacy of the New Deal and therefore inherently pro-labor, but conveniently forget that the deal was changed by a bipartisan alliance of corporatists over Truman's veto.

Sectoral/sympathy strikes were historically the backbone of union power in the US and remain so today in jurisdictions with strong unions. Legally protecting ineffectual strikes but not effective strikes traps labor in a local maximum, where there's just enough to lose to disincentivize going for more substantial gains.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford

See paragraph about labor unions.

And

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass

from same link.

I'll just pop on over to the deep water port in my garage...

Besides the unions preventing any real innovation in construction, I imagine finding customers would also be a challenge.

No. Shipbuilding isn't an area for startups and unions are a very very small hurdle compared to getting the necessary materials. Just think of the steel. Anyone can order a few tons of rebar, but ask for 10,000 tons of plate steel suitable for ships and you will be laughed at. That isn't sitting in a warehouse or a back lot waiting for customers. An order out of the blue might take years to fill. The people that make steel work with regular customers and will always put those regular paying customers above a random startup who might not ever pay. If anything, they will want insane down payments.

Then think ship engines, the ones with blocks bigger than most houses. Order one of those out of the blue and, again not joking, it might be 10+ years. Those engines are targeting at future ships still on drawing boards, each is accounted for long before any metal is assembled. Any startup's order would be at the back of a very slow line.

A startup wanting to get into ship construction would have more success launching a new social media system, getting lucky, IPO, then use that money to purchase an existing shipbuilder. But at that point the "startup" is really just another a hedge fund investing in ship construction.

What makes this so much more impossible than SpaceX building rockets?

Is the payoff worse for ship builders?

Totally different scales. A falcon 9 rocket weights in at 550 tons, and most of that is fuel and the rest can be broken down into small parts. The average cargo ship might be 50,000 tonnes, literally orders of magnitude larger, and none of the major parts are road-mobile. The logistics are just totally different. Space X also competes in a rocket industry that is maybe 60 years old. Shipping is a 1000+ year-old industry making it, again, a couple orders of magnitude more mature. One might even argue that commercial cargo ships have existed for two, three or even four thousand years. Pharaoh paid someone to ship those blocks down river for the pyramids.

Then do the obvious thing - don't start with 50kt cargo ships. There was a funny article the other day about how some group - possibly the Columbians? I forget - was getting into sub manufacturing because they needed to transport drugs. That isn't military grade nuclear subs but it is on the path to them if for some weird reason they keep chugging away.

No company in the world starts with massive state of the art. It is a recipe for failure, the engineers need to learn in a lower-risk environment.

There's no path from point A to point B.

Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines anymore than manufacturing charm bracelets or ready-to-eat delivery meals. The requisite materials, logistics, and labor expertise are effectively unrelated to one another and separated by mountains in terms of capital and material resources.

As was said before, the only way in is basically to buy into an existing operation, at which point where you got the money from originally is irrelevant.

> Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines

You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.

But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd. As is the idea that small companies can't become big companies or move to make more sophisticated products.

You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed). They've already been beaten out of the market.

> You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.

I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more complete explanation of how you think this goes.

> But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd.

No it didn't. And certainly not the military shipyards discussed in this article. While a couple (Newport News, Brooklyn Navy Yard) have origins as more modest shipbuilding sites, the vast majority were purpose-built sites for military construction built with US government dollars. Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry. Massive industry was the go word.

These types of projects, continental railroads, interstate highways systems, and military naval shipyards, they can have private-public partnerships but they do not grow organically from more modest roots without public dollars.

> You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed).

This is irrelevant, pick your foreign military shipyard and you will find that the story is the same. Bohai, Zelenodolsk, Cherbourg, any of them. The government recognized a need for a new, larger, more powerful class of ships and either built or expanded the logistics necessary to construct the vessels.

> I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more concrete explanation of how you think this goes.

Imagining counterfactuals is fundamentally vague. Someone would need see an opportunity to move in to shipbuilding at the low end and take it. But that is the low end, ie, probably not starting at 50kt tankers. You're imagining scenarios where it doesn't work. That is really easy, most business ideas don't work. But successful companies come from the unusual situations where ideas do work, so the fact that you are good at imaging how things won't work isn't really material. You're one of the approximately 8 billion humans that isn't capable of founding a shipping startup. I am too. But nonetheless we can be confident that the best positioned people in the US could do it.

The issue is not the path, the issue is that US companies can't compete. The existing, established, US shipbuilders got whipped by the Asians. The question here isn't whether startups work, the issue is the market that they'd inherit if they got big doesn't support US shipbuilders.

> No it didn't.

You are, and I'm speaking quite literally here, absurdly wrong. Modern ships didn't pop into existence from nothing. Nothing does. The whole modern economy is just iterations of smaller simpler designs starting with wood fires and spears. It is just a basic fact that there is a path from any industrial activity to any other.

And companies tread it fairly regularly. It isn't unusual for people to move from one vertical into another.

> Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry.

The Manhattan project is within startup budget. OpenAI is talking trillions to develop AI, that is like 50 Manhatten projects. Nuclear science turns out not to be that hard once people know that splitting atoms is a very energy-plush operation.

And the dam example is silly. Are you suggesting the Hoover Dam was the first dam? No, the US had a huge dam building industry. It was a big project, but it was done by existing companies.

> Modern ships didn't pop into existence from nothing. Nothing does.

They didn't evolve from some minor capital investment. The problem is not one of ideas it is one of scale. In that sense, yes, they popped into existence from nothing.

The Panama canal is the result of centuries of technological development in the technology of canal construction generally, but fundamentally it is not the result of a startup or even a hundred startups building tiny canals until they had enough capital and expertise doing so to build a big canal.

It is a result of governments (plural, the first attempt failed), in a one-off immense expenditure of capital and manpower unable to be mustered by the entirety of the global shipping industry (for everyone with eyes and a map could see the potential), constructing something that was not there before. "From nothing".

What will the startup do that's so much better than the existing shipbuilders? China has much cheaper labor, and produces a huge amount of steel domestically. They build big ships and smaller ships. What does your hypothetical startup do that will let it compete against existing incumbents that have established incumbents with much more experience?

With drug trafficking, it need for new manufacturing is because they had an illegal use case. And those subs usually don't last more than one journey. It's not really comparable to the shipping industry at large.

Who were the existing providers in the space/rocket industry? NASA and their foreign counterparts?

Shipbuilding is much larger. Shipping is a huge industry with many parts. It is not necessarily impossible for a new company to come in to any single area, but they wouldn't be able to break into something like military ship building.

A possible avenue for 'disruptive startup' is the USV area, see Anduril. But even then that required immense amounts of capital because you are competing against the big dogs (Raytheon, Northrop Lockheed, Boeing, BAE etc.)

The existing providers were NASA and United Launch Alliance, the latter of which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. They merged their space launch businesses in 2006, because neither could individually sustain their launch services given 1) the expense of their systems, and 2) the low number of launches in the late-90s/early-00s. They were the sole provider to the USG from 2006-2015, only because SpaceX won its lawsuit against the Department of the Air Force in 2015, which had been blocking SpaceX from competing for DOD/NRO launches.

> Anyone can order a few tons of rebar, but ask for 10,000 tons of plate steel suitable for ships and you will be laughed at.

Sounds like yet another reason supporting concrete ships

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

Well there's the annual concrete canoe competition but we'll need a lot of canoe to replace a ship.

https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences...

or one might say, "we're going to need a bigger boat"

Maybe a startup can focus on making maritime drones, just like the Ukrainians do. I bet there's probably a lot of demand nowadays for that kind of thing. I checked and Anduril appears to be making something they call AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles).

USVs and autonomous torpedos are the future for this stuff. Conventional ships are more industrial.

There's no such thing as a blue water autonomous torpedo, there will always need to be a human-occupied platform to project power and manage military naval operations from.

This is without getting into the obvious problems of "lol how do you plan to control your USV? Pacific ocean spanning tether?"

As long as there are blue water navies, there will be military shipyards servicing them.

Looks like Boeing is finally delivering an "Orca" prototype XtraLargeUUV (85 t, 26 m) - more sub than torpedo. Seems to be pier deployment with 6k nm diesel/electric range.[1]

[1] https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sna-2024/2024/01/us-nav...

Very cool. Thanks for sharing that.

I wonder if instead of disrupting U.S. shipbuilding, it would be more cost effective to figure out containerization of weaponry. Figure out how to land a drone in a shipping container and you might be able to turn any standard civilian container ship into an aircraft carrier with 1000 drones, 10x the air wing of a modern fleet carrier. You also trivialize logistics for this - the armaments, fuel, spare drones, sensors, etc. also go in containers, and resupply could be done at any container port and carried by any other container ship.

There's a long history of this in both world wars, eg. auxiliary cruisers and escort carriers, and they were fairly effective. See eg. the Battle of Samar, where 18 escort carriers and their destroyer escorts took on most of the Japanese battle fleet and won.

Similar ideas have been tried in the past, they always end the same way. The converted civilian ship has zero survivability and is sunk by the first passing warship to the embarrassment of all the planners involved.

Today such vessels are so susceptible to anti-ship missiles and submarines that they're laughed out of any serious military planning meeting where the participants aren't already desperate for tonnage.

Right, but I wonder if developments in the rest of weaponry have changed the calculus around that. It's pretty likely that a fleet carrier or other purpose-built warship also has zero survivability in the face of a barrage of anti-ship cruise missiles too. That's what recent wargames have shown, and also has been born out by Russian experience in Ukraine. The strategy for survivability is "don't let hostiles get within your air defense bubble, and shoot as many missiles down with your CIWS as you can if they do."

An escort drone carrier could follow that strategy as well, and much more cheaply. The point is to make them expendable and cheap. Yes, if they get hit they're gone - that was always the case in WW2 as well - but there are now so many more options for blowing everything else out of the water that might get close.

> Right, but I wonder if developments in the rest of weaponry have changed the calculus around that. It's pretty likely that a fleet carrier or other purpose-built warship also has zero survivability in the face of a barrage of anti-ship cruise missiles too

This is incorrect.

> been born out by Russian experience in Ukraine

Defending your assumption with the Russian fleet is certainly a thing you are doing right now

The solution is similar to WW2. Build disposable ships faster than the enemy can sink them. This would work against most enemies except China can build them even faster

In a separate but combined effort, Europe is seeking to revive its artillery shell industry. the production capacity for artillery shells in Europe went up 40% since start of war, and wants to reach 1.4 million round by end of 2024. However, EU can only supply half of promised shells to Ukraine by March. Right now EU is having gunpowder shortages. The gunpowder is made from specific cotton which mostly comes from China. "Would you know it, deliveries of this cotton from China stopped as if by chance a few months ago," Breton added [1].

Luckily, recently Czech Republic helped to find hundred and thousands of shells for Ukraine recently [2]. Otherwise, because of the republican stalling in congress, Ukraine was only firing 4000 to 7000 artillery shells per day, while Russia was launching 20,000 shells daily [3]. Also very coincidental, Russia has started using 122-mm artillery shells that have similarities to Chinese-made shells [4].

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/...

[2] https://news.yahoo.com/czech-republic-found-hundreds-thousan...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nato-artillery...

[4] https://mil.in.ua/en/news/russia-has-started-using-122-mm-ar....

Fun historical fact, at the height of WW1, Germany was producing 12 million shells a month. Just in the preliminary bombardment at the Battle of the Somme the British fired 1.5 million shells. And now we're scrambling just to achieve one percent of the production we had a century ago.

All that industrial base is long gone, of course. Contrary to complaints about war profiteering, artillery shell production is not a terribly attractive business. The equipment can't easily be repurposed, it's not terribly sophisticated so the technological barriers to entry are low, you have one single customer, and the faster and better you provide your product the quicker the war ends and you go out of business. It's like combining the low margins and drudgery of running a factory that stamps out spoons, but with the added risk the spoons might obliterate the plant if a single worker makes a mistake.

I wonder if it's fair to call the hodgepodge of localized wars WW3 now? It's clear one alliance - Ukraine, Europe, US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Israel (recently aligned with Ukraine) - is fighting another alliance - Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Houthi. With countries supplying technology, money, military stockpiles, and in some ways, foot on the ground. With India trying to play both sides, via purchasing Russian oil, but involved in Aukus.

Wikipedia defines a world war as an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major powers. Times magazine said "two major power blocs of countries fighting for dominance, with numerous nations on each side taking up arms against each other in more than one theater" [1]

[1] https://time.com/6336897/israel-war-gaza-world-war-iii/

I'd think a world War needs to be hot, not proxy.

is the war still proxy, if the participants send machines (drones, tanks, missile systems) to the battlefields on each side instead of humans? Maybe this is the first post-human world war

> Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Houthi

China is the odd man out in this list. China is emphatically not a friend of Russia. Official CCP policy is that Russia stole Outer Manchuria from China in the aftermath of the Opium Wars of the 1850s. Russia is in fact the only country that still holds on to territory gained from the Qing via the Unequal Treaties.

If China ever arms enough to attempt to retake Taiwan (which is highly plausible before the end of the decade; 2027 is the current aim), Outer Manchuria--including Vladivostok, Russia's most strategically important port--will be the next target.

In the meantime, China is happy to hold Putin over the barrel and wring out Russian exports for bargain-bin prices. Russia is already a Chinese client state, even if it doesn't know it yet.

Not sure if you saw my original posting, the thread you're writing in. China is definitely a friend of Russia. On top of what I mentioned, China is the top buyer of Russian oil, and thus its major financial partner. And China just recently said relations with Moscow are at an historic high [1]

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/28/china-lauds-russia-...

> China just recently said relations with Moscow are at an historic high

Yes, and the scorpion promises the frog that it won't sting. Politicians can say what they please, the actions of the state speak louder:

https://www.newsweek.com/china-map-borders-territory-dispute...

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-andrey-rudenko-responds-chin...

China will continue economically plundering Russia so long as it's in their favor; the Western sanctions mean that Putin's options for oil exports are limited.

Arguable destabilizing NATO has some significant advantages in whatever eventual aims China has towards Taiwan.

China benefits from destabilizing the US, but NATO in general does not concern China, because, unlike Russia, China doesn't have its sights set on conquering Europe. If anything China would have preferred that Russia didn't invade Ukraine, because it's (slowly, slowly, slowly) putting the US on a war footing and eroding the advantage in inertia that China currently possesses over the US. Fortunately for China, Congress includes enough Russian assets that the resulting political deadlock seems likely to continue paralyzing the US, to China's benefit. If the US doesn't miraculously turn around its legislative (and, potentially soon, its executive) obstructionism, then Taiwan will probably fall to China, regardless of the intervention of the US and its allies (with the only hope for Taiwan being a sudden onset of incompetence from the Chinese military).

> China benefits from destabilizing the US,

Does it? A destabilized and broke US can't buy as many goods from China as a rich and powerful one, even if there are other advantages/disadvantages to be had.

The CCP purposefully subsidizes its own industries to the point of economic lunacy specifically to destroy the domestic industries of other countries, and thereby make them dependent on Chinese exports (yes, this is the famous venture capital model of "subsidize the service until we have a monopoly and then jack the prices to the moon", but applied to geopolitics). They have plenty of headroom (and a huge domestic market) to pivot away from an export-focused economy while still gripping the rest of the world by the balls for at least a few decades.

China spends a lot of diplomatic breath on NATO not because NATO is a direct threat, but because it wants to discredit the concept of defence treaty organisations, especially within and standing against the aspired spheres of influence of great powers. A South China Sea NATO lookalike is a major nightmare, and if NATO proper is discredited the odds of that fall dramatically. If the US is seen to fink out on Estonia or whatever, the geopolitical calculations in the Philippines change dramatically.

True, but I think it's unlikely that Putin will test article 5 by invading the Baltics before China attacks Taiwan (if anything, the invasion of Taiwan is Putin's best chance of establishing a land bridge to Kaliningrad; without the US's complete attention, NATO's ability to break a Russian blockade in the Baltic Sea is bleak). And once China has Taiwan and a secured route to the Pacific, it doesn't need to care nearly as much whether or not the rest of its neighbors are militarily aligned.

Right but territory disputes (without actual fighting) are also just political speaks. Money and military supplies from China to Russia speak louder than political speaks - even without some of the Chinese bank settlements, China is still the main funder of Russia's war

Alliances and friendship are orthogonal. An alliance is a pragmatic short-term matter. Friendship is something more fundamental and typically lasts longer.

Germany and the USSR were almost allies during the early years of WW2. The Soviets supplied Germany with massive amounts of raw materials, helping them to circumvent the British blockade. There were even serious talks on the USSR formally joining the Axis powers. The talks ultimately failed, as Germany and the USSR could not agree on their spheres of influence in the south.

Then the war between Germany and the USSR broke out, and Cold War followed after the war. All these changes happened in less than a decade.

China and Russia haven’t fought a border clash since the 1990s. But they are mire frenemies than friends, both fear each other because they share such a huge border and don’t have a very peaceful past, but they can be friends when both are threatened by the USA.

2027 is the current aim

That's what some say. But how do you know?

Outer Manchuria - including Vladivostok - will be the next target.

Very unlikely, even if Taiwan collapses quickly.

2027 is the target that both China and the US have projected for the invasion of Taiwan. Whether it will actually come to pass, who can say, but this is the timeframe that military planners are using to procure equipment today.

> Very unlikely, even if Taiwan collapses quickly.

Indeed, it won't be easy for China to take Taiwan. But modern US power projection is accustomed to using overwhelming force against weak adversaries; the US hasn't had a peer conflict in decades. I give the advantage to China because of geography: it will be easier for China to project power into Taiwan than it will be for the US to project power across the pacific. China knows that carriers and a known number of fixed airfields in allied nations are the weak links. And if China takes Taiwan it will result in the greatest outpouring of Chinese nationalist fervor in our lifetimes, and there's no chance that the newly-triumphant military will want to sit on its laurels when it could be asserting China's new status on the world stage by turning its revanchism towards Russia.

2027 is the target that both China and the US have projected for the invasion of Taiwan

The US has not released a definitive assessment. Jinping apparently did make some announcement that the PLA should be "ready to" invade Taiwan, but that's not the same as "is going to." And may just be propaganda for the PLA's 100th anniversary.

> China is emphatically not a friend of Russia.

China seems to be manufacturing drones for Russia these days, which puts them in a very specific light.

Chinese arms and tech dealers are pretty open about who they trade with. Although I can’t imagine that they are trading without at least tacit approval from the CPC.

> Chinese arms and tech dealers are pretty open about who they trade with.

Are you meaning it should be excused or discounted?

And yeah, it's impossible the CCP wouldn't be involved in some way.

Those manufacturers are literally creating military weapons.

This sort of feels like the "how do we define a recession" debate. You can establish some guidelines, but I think there's also a sort of "I'll know it when I see it" qualitative type judgement too. I'd say if you can still make lots of money writing apps for scheduling dog massages and aren't persuaded to go pick up a rifle or work an ammunition press, we're still a ways off from a real world war.

Ukraine has implemented a draft, but software developer is still a highly paid position there. Many other countries have compulsory military service. So that really depends on your perspective. The US is different due to its power and geography. The draft in the US was hugely unpopular, so is likely but going to happen again, at which point, by that definition, we'll never get there. But, like you said, "I'll know it when I see it."

The world wars were also about Total War.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

We definitely seem to be in a build up to a possible total world war.

But this might be more like Hitler's invasion of Poland than full blown world war.

As in the pre-skirmishes.

Perhaps the prelude to world war, but not yet full blown...

> I wonder if it's fair to call the hodgepodge of localized wars WW3 now?

No. It would take direct nuclear strikes between major powers and hundreds of millions in casualties for anything to be called ww3. Would you call the korean war ww3? How about the vietnam war? Or any of the dozens of wars since ww2?

> It's clear one alliance - Ukraine, Europe, US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Israel (recently aligned with Ukraine)

The only alliance is between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ. Countries with shared linguistic, cultural, religious and historical heritage. Israel is more of an enemy than an ally as they sell stolen tech to china and russia and are culturally, historically and religiously alien to the US and the anglosphere.

Also, you might want to read the history of what the US did to japan, korea, taiwan, philippines, etc if you think that 'alliance' really exists. Even better, you might want to read the history of their rivalries between each other.

There is a reason why we are moving chip production away from taiwan and ship building from sk and japan.

> Times magazine said "two major power blocs of countries fighting for dominance

Never take nonsense you read in media seriously.

Wars between developed states, who can more easily afford this stuff, are gradually becoming (have become?) a thing of past, and thank goodness.

depends on the type of shell, e.g. this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur is probably a bit sofisticated..

> you have one single customer

Who has no credit limit and is willing to spend like their life depends on it. That's what makes war profiteering so profitable.

The US is too weighed down by legal and regulatory barnacles for this to have a chance.

Which regulations?

Environmental ones, perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=335yX5kj7is

Environmental laws are necessary to make sure we’re not poisoning ourselves or the planet.

That doesn't mean the current laws are not contributing to a problem that is prolonging a war that kills people and has a very nasty environmental impact.

Winning wars fast is good environmental policy.

Just because environmental laws made aid to ensure humans to poison our planet, doesn't meant the current policy is perfect, effective, or the best policy possible.

Environmental, labour, safety and energy are the usual 4 horsemen that I have seen. Just listing a random point from my collection of squeaky-wheel arguments on the topic:

* I frankly don't know how to make it a persuasive message, but my experience in English speaking countries is that it is generally illegal to make mistakes or skimp on quality. That means it is impossible for industries to learn how to do new things. Look at the treatment of Boeing after 2 airplane crashes for example and ask what that would mean for a new company attempting to learn how to operate in the space. With no room to fail, it is a challenge for new companies to succeed. There were even calls to nationalise them which is ... not likely but also not comforting as an investor. It is darn risky to put money into manufacturing spaces with attitudes like that, it is safer to go with cat picture delivery platforms.

* The US has particulate air pollution that is half of South Korea's and a quarter of China. It is a pretty reasonable guess that air pollution would be mostly industrial production that the US would shut down for environmental concerns.

* US labour laws are an impediment. That new fab plant that TSMC was trying to build in the US seemed to be falling over because it was illegal to use skilled, experienced labour.

* The US is seeing declines in per-capita energy availability and flat actual production. That is almost certainly a policy choice linked to anti-fossil-fuel ideologies, Asia has been seeing seeing crazy growth. It is hard to do energy-intensive activities like manufacturing in an environment where securing energy is a battle.

There have been something like 50 years of anti-industrial policy in the west. A lot of the capital was built in China/Asia. It should be a literal embarrassment that we're being outdone at capitalism by nominal communists and legitimate authoritarians.

Capitalism is not at odds with authoritarianism. They are orthogonal. The only thing capitalists must not do in those places is piss off the dear liders of their country.

Yeah. How could the Chinese out-capital the US if capitalism was at odds with authoritarianism?

But unless it adopts some really stupid ideologies a liberal system should be able to produce more and better capitalists than an authoritarian one. Free markets breed capitalists like dropped donuts attract ants. It isn't like China is getting the best value out of their billion-odd people; the inefficiencies caused by over-centralisation there are still breathtaking and tragic.

> Look at the treatment of Boeing after 2 airplane crashes for example

Well, Boeing was taken to task not for trying to innovate and making mistakes but for lying (fraud) and regulatory capture of the FAA (something a smaller competitor can’t do and in fact likely prevents smaller competitors). As an investor, the former should make you wary and as a flier the latter should make you scared.

> The US has particulate air pollution that is half of South Korea's and a quarter of China. It is a pretty reasonable guess that air pollution would be mostly industrial production that the US would shut down for environmental concerns.

Considering the primary stated motivator by many industrial companies for outsourcing to China was labor costs and not environmental regulations, I wouldn’t be so confident in this claim. This is borne out by research which tries to compare environmental regulations across regulatory regimes:

> In our newest research, we compared risk regulation in China and the United States, and we have also found a more complex pattern that does not support the longstanding conventional view of U.S. regulation being much more stringent than in China.

https://www.theregreview.org/2021/12/20/xu-wiener-comparing-...

> * US labour laws are an impediment. That new fab plant that TSMC was trying to build in the US seemed to be falling over because it was illegal to use skilled, experienced labour.

I don’t know what you’re referring to but generally the problems with such endeavors are that skilled work in a different cultural and regulatory environment is challenging and this applies to European companies trying to enter the US market and US companies trying to enter other markets for the first time too, especially when it comes to complex technical projects. Also, the primary labor laws that tend to be an impediment are things like worker safety and compensation. The latter is a bit less important for highly skilled labor but safety is certainly not. I think the bigger problem is trade arrangements that have long ignored these rather than estimating the cost worker safety regulations impose and taxing products from regimes that don’t have good regulations.

> The US is seeing declines in per-capita energy availability and flat actual production. That is almost certainly a policy choice linked to anti-fossil-fuel ideologies, Asia has been seeing seeing crazy growth. It is hard to do energy-intensive activities like manufacturing in an environment where securing energy is a battle.

That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity.

> It should be a literal embarrassment that we're being outdone at capitalism by nominal communists

China hasn’t really been a communist country in anything more than name for quite a while and is actually pretty capitalist despite their own claims to the contrary (they still like to pretend): https://www.cato.org/policy-report/january/february-2013/how...

You seem to like to state something that may be true but jump to a conclusion without any supporting evidence for making that claim. I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing (at least on the Lex Friedman interview as I generally find him an insufferable blowhard) and it’s quite annoying.

1. But the reason US labour costs are higher is because the US has a legislated minimum wage that is much higher than any equivalent the Chinese have. The US has a massive population of poor people that could otherwise have been employed at the same rate as the Chinese.

One of the explicit points of minimum wage laws is that they prevent Chinese-style sweatshops. People bring that up less these days though since those sweatshops ended up bringing wealth to China.

2. If you pick one of the studies linked in that article, you'll see that Xu & Wiener conclude "the US written rules were more stringent for risks of toxic chemicals and most air pollutants, whereas China's written rules were more stringent for risks in agriculture" [0]. I think that supports my theory that US particulate air pollution is lower because of environmental regulation.

> That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity.

The US has effectively banned nuclear power, so we're still talking ideology for that one. The vast, vast majority of China's energy comes from fossil fuels [1].

> I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing...

I don't know why you're criticising style but leaping straight to someone who is highly successful in his field as a comparison, but sure. If only millions of people would take my opinions seriously!

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.13797

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china

Boeing wrote most of the book on how to do this stuff safely - they just stopped following that book once they bought MDC and its management took over (and arguable laid off the engineering people at MDC who could do it the MDC way safely).

Thats why Boeing is trying to undo it, and repurchase Spirit Aerosystems.

Note the past-tense in that opening though. The aircraft industry moved from a less-safe state to a more-safe state, then less-safe states were banned.

This raises the question of how feasible it'd be to build new companies. The way that is proven to work (start less safe, then ratchet up standards) is no longer possible because the start of the path has been made illegal. The people who are outcompeting the US are not doing it by starting at the low end and working up.

There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't meet the accepted safety standards for this industry as a startup.

There is an excellent reason; startups generally have no idea what they are doing and are very sloppy compared to an established company. Not only that, but they have to be trying to do things differently - otherwise there was no point starting a new company.

Those two factors add up to unsafe practices. It is likely enough that it needs to be factored into investment plans.

In aviation specifically the standards and practices for the industry are widely available (start with the public domain retrospectives from Project Apollo).

I'm going to note that SpaceX does not seem to be struggling beyond what I would expect to develop a new heavy lift system. Yes, lots of RUD moments, but not an unexpected amount.

I actually agree with you in broad terms, we do have too much hard to follow regulation - but Aviation isn't one of those cases - every rule we have in that sector was paid for in lives.

> In aviation specifically the standards and practices for the industry are widely available (start with the public domain retrospectives from Project Apollo).

Startup chaos has never been about documentation not being available. There is an almost infinite amount of useful and relevant material that the average startup ignores.

> SpaceX does not seem to be struggling beyond what I would expect to develop a new heavy lift system.

Exactly. We expect some rockets to explode and some rockets did indeed explode. They aren't the safest machines on the planet. If SpaceX was expected to have no exploding rockets, they wouldn't be able to operate their business.

> I actually agree with you in broad terms, we do have too much hard to follow regulation - but Aviation isn't one of those cases - every rule we have in that sector was paid for in lives.

I counter-agree, but ... spending lives is acceptable. We already accept it in all sorts of fields for more trivial things than aerospatial success. If people dying is unacceptable, it is literally impossible to run a civilisation; we don't know how to do mining, forestry and construction without the occasional death. And the first thing that'd go is people doing deliveries on motorcycles, where we have this mysterious tolerance for risk.

We should have consistent standards, not randomly high standards for aerospace. It is bizarre that people can just accept someone getting on a motorbike but it is controversial for Boeing to exist as an independently managed company after around 2x plane crashes.

Outdated protectionism like the Jones Act.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-...

For all the faults of the Jones Act, I don’t think that explains the challenges of US ship building. If anything, it keeps US ship building efforts alive when foreign ships would have killed it.

Not really. All the Jones act has done is make it impossibly expensive to ship things between US ports. It has reduced naval traffic in the US considerably which hurts American shipbuilders.

Conversely that naval traffic MUST be done on US-built ships with crews that no how to man them which is a national security thing. I don’t see how allowing foreign built ships ie foreign crews helps with that aspect. Consider that we’re trying to onshore industrial things precisely for that purpose now in preparation for a potential war with China over Taiwan.

I also challenge that it’s also impossibly expensive because it that were the case things in Puerto Rico would cost much more whereas they’re a little bit cheaper than Miami.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

That’s not to say that the Jones act should have reforms applied, particularly with respect to helping Puerto Rico compete more fairly, but I don’t think it’s clearly one of those totally evil regulations that’s hampering US creativity and ingenuity from flourishing.

Is Puerto Rico getting its supplies from the USA or from foreign countries? If the latter, the Jones act doesn’t apply. This much more of a problem for Hawaii, since it is much farther away from foreign ports and shipping costs are much more substantial.

> Under the Jones Act, any ship carrying cargo and traveling between ports in the United States, or to the United States from a foreign country, has to be built in America and owned by an American

https://time.com/4961159/what-is-jones-act-puerto-rico/

Yes it also applies to Hawaii:

> Hawaii and Puerto Rico share many similarities. Among those is the devastating effect on island economies of the Jones Act, which prohibits international vessels from carrying cargo between U.S. ports.

https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/2022/08/how-the-jones-act...

The problem is that shipping is the only way to deliver lots of goods to Hawaii and Puerto Rico (origin of shipment doesn’t really matter here). Other states have terrestrial borders and thus don’t care as much.

https://apnews.com/article/us-army-ukraine-russia-ammunition...

Historical preservation means cannot upgrade production

Considering the existing precedence with Italy and Australia (both of which build us navy ships), I doubt it

Australia's manufacturing capacity is rather unimpressive and the Adelaide military fabrication is a serious effort but at least partially a jobs program. We are not the place to look if you want to try to challenge China's manufacturing prowess.

The obstacles are political, not regulatory.

Most developed countries have similar regulations. Many are also capable of changing the regulations when they don't work or the outcomes are undesirable. The US usually can't do that outside an acute crisis. The politics are highly polarized, and the system makes it unlikely that there is a stable coalition controlling every relevant branch of the government.

And the politics are a polarization lock in part because the politicians are controlled by the money interests in the US. For something to move, those interests need to move their bought off politicians in some unified way.

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