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> Creating domestic jobs this way doesn't have a great track record however

Especially when you gut the DoE and make zero effort to invest in either higher education or trades training.

If US wants a manufacturing revolution it needs to start with an education revolution.

I don't see how the US can compete with China on sheer production and access to manufacturers and suppliers of tech, compared to cities like Shanghai, Qingdao and Shenzhen, among others. It's like a candy store for engineers. Building a single plant just isn't economically feasible when you have so much uncertainty from the chaos at the WH. Not to mention, this will take a decade or much, much more.

A better way (IMO) to do it would have been tax incentives to build US plants to move manufacturing back in the US, have research university programs as feeders for tech innovation centers, and funding for technical colleges to expand their programs for skilled labor needed instead of gutting multiple agencies that would have overseen/guided this expansion. And oversight, of course. And attainable goals set in contracts to receive funding, not just, "here's a pile of money we'll forget about in 4 years."

Your only mistake is thinking those institutions are filled with competent people rather than being a jobs creation program for the inept

Digikey, McMaster-Carr. Lots of other options. they might not have a store front in your city, but they can get you everything you need for reasonable prices.

Those are distributors and there is only a handful of them.

In China they have the manufacturer down the street from the distributor who is down the street from your factory.

With Digikey we are paying $80 to overnight a $5 part from Minnesota. We need to be able to go send a guy to pick it up in an hour.

No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.

It's not JIT, it's that planning works on months advance notice like you mention is in large part because the supply chain is global and shipping takes a lot of time. When digikey has a month lead time because some component is out of stock, it often means "It's going to take a month for this to arrive from the factory".

In China, you can just go down the street to the factory.

As for shipping overnight, it's incredibly common in R&D and repair.

Only if the factory in China will make that thing today. If they are one their New Year holiday (I forget what they call it) you won't get anything. If they are busy making something else you won't get anything - unless by human factors you can convince them to work for you instead of meeting their promises to other customers.

Sure, but you don't have to wait 6 weeks for a cargo ship.

The concept of having centralized full-chain production for enormous productivity boosts is not some wild concept, it's ancient and well known. Industries have clusters because it benefits everyone in the cluster. The US has very few and weak manufacturing clusters.

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. It's economically irrational for any given individual to pursue vocational training in a field where there isn't a job waiting for them at the end. You can make the training in these fields available, but without the jobs, who will bother using it?

One of the root causes of the situation we find ourselves in is that the federal government has been subsidizing higher education beyond diminishing returns for decades. Simply removing the mechanisms to do that would be a net improvement.

> Define "produce", I guess?

If you're sincerely interested in the answer to that question, I'd highly recommend reading the article, because a good portion is dedicated specifically to answering that.

I read the article - up to a point. The guy goes to such great lengths not to admit that a huge proportion of the physical parts in the phone are from China. E.g, he keeps saying "Western distributor" to avoid saying "China-made." (Think about it: why would any reader care about the distributor's nationality?!) He just rambles on and on, trying to baffle us with bullshit - eventually I stopped reading.

There is zero chance that a smartphone will ever be made out of 100% US-manufactured parts, or even close to it. And the evidence is right in this article, if this is the best effort to manufacture a "US phone."

> Define "produce", I guess?

The article does, in fact. Their US made phone is manufactured, not just assembled, in the United States, and also attempts to source nearly all parts and materials from US suppliers as well.

Yes, and article starts out by definining manufacture as "assembly using more advanced tools than a screwdriver". They solder. Good for them. They keep mentioning that their resistors are made in the US. That's great, but not unique to them.

They don't manufacture their important components. Not even Apple does that. No one does. There is roughly zero chance that any of the non-interchangable bits, the SoC, the battery or the screen, is manufactured in the US.

And there is nothing wrong with that. It's just silly to pretend otherwise.

I mean, again, you could essentially just post FUD that is directly refuted in the article, or you could... look. They specifically cite their NXP CPU is manufactured in South Korea. But to act like fabricating the mainboard here in the US is not manufacturing is remarkably silly. Your previous post referred to "final assembly", which would suggest just plugging some final components together, which Purism clearly is doing significantly more than.

https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/#table-of-origin

As I read that, "more than a screwdriver" was to make a point about how hard it is to even fulfill the requirements for "assembled in the USA". "Made in the USA" is even stricter. And they were going beyond that and claiming secure supply chains with western distribution. It did seem a little like a marketing pitch since it focused on what they did versus what the final gap really was, but apparently they sell it to the govt for that big markup. Presumably you don't want to try and sneak things past such a customer.

If you're just thinking of price, the farther down the supply chain you go the less impact of tariffs.

All of their PR says "Made in the USA Electronics," which is oddly specific that it may refer to just parts in the phone and not the actual phone.

and how do you check if electrons in the circuit are US and not Chinese?