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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now.

By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge, transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

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No the point is "overhead". You don't disturb working setups because you will cause engineering time to update the setup, that engineering time is added to the cost overhead of a job. Time is literally money, even if the employee(s) are salaried, their time is factored into the cost of a job.

The knowledge is still there, but American labor is expensive as hell compared to overseas competitors and so any shop in the US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs to remain competitively priced.

When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones because you decided to change shit on a whim.

> The knowledge is still there

Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.

There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.

And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-disappearing-hole...

A growing business can afford to create a new production line to replace the aging one without dismantling it. TSMC doesn't have to wind down production of their previous node to make a new one.

Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s optimal. If you can get the same output with a cheaper or faster process, there’s a clear business justification.

However, you are right that engineer salaries have to be factored in. If expensive engineers are unfamiliar with an old process, it will take them a lot longer and the break even point will be pushed out farther.

Modern shipbuilders know all about that.

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.

We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.

It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)

China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.

I remember when there was a big push to make ball point pen tips, and how a but less than 10 years later they succeeded in making them domestically.

Rings a bell. Sounds simple, but being able to reliably make huge numbers of tiny little metal spheres with tiny tiny tolerance is a serious feat; being able to do that brings knowledge and experience that unlocks an entire level of the tech tree.

It would also require a degree of consensus and quality of leadership which is completely lacking.

A degree of consensus and unity in leadership which is foreign to current American culture.

bollocks. there is profound unity and direction in US leadership, and has been for years -- it's all written by the Heritage Foundation and funded by a few oil and tech billionaires.

it's been like that since before George W Bush was lock-step with Fox News and a GOP led Congress.

the only difference is in 2025 the billionaires funding these things are as foreign as they are domistic

The leadership in democracy does what the population wants, even more so in the past couple decades.

Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting systems are far from being the best we can come up with in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting for these days.

Yet people actively decided as they did, while almost fully knowing where it leads. It could also have been worse given progressing senility, attempt to overthrow government etc. We are not in a new territory after all, just continuation. Tariffs are new mexican wall.

At least accept how your nation thinks on average, no weaseling around simple fact of today's reality.

In fairness while people do obviously want them they also want all the current conveniences of modern life and more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term environmental effects. Essentially I think the average joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging climate concerns just like the gov does.

I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear that political participation was never more direct and organized than now in the age of social media. The fools and resentful who always were numerous have found a way to unite and bypass the establishment and educational filters which were effectively restraining politics before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who are being elected squarely and fairly represent the people who voted for them.

I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they are selected by a system that was designed to estimate the preference of a population (more likely the preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic system designed differently would have a different outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not at the same scale.

[0] https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-b...

1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...

Yet somehow the desires of the population is fulfilled to a higher degree in authoritarian China than in the beacon of democracy USA.

This uh valiant defense of China misses my point entirely. People in democracies have no excuse hiding their personal responsibility behind flawed leadership.

By the same token, hiding comprehensively broken and undemocratic governance behind "it's the publics' fault, because they get to vote for one of two candidates owned by wealthy donors every 2 years" is the opposite of useful.

This phenomenon is not limited to the United States, the trend is global including many parliamentary republics.

Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:

"The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.

Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."

https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-factor...

This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.

The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.

But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.

[1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-supplier-t...

[2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...

Thanks for the links and call out on the PCBs!

Regarding components, it's not like they are making chips in the same plant as a laptop plant in China either, are they?

I guess the question is which components function or cost benefit the most from tighter coupling, and which components (eg antenna) do you isolate to keep your secret sauce internally controlled.

So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.

I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.

The components aren't made in China

Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.

This. The century of shame, when Western powers came knocking on their door, is etched into the Chinese cultural psyche. East Asia was home to mature nations that learned the hard way that self determination is fundamentally tied to your ability to defend your interests. This is especially the case for China, which saw itself as the center of the universe.

The US won the cold war and came to believe they were untouchable. Private interests don't care about nation states, and there was more money to be made by selling the foundation of the West's security than there was in preserving it, especially since the enemy had been vanquished.

~~~~~we could just hire them and buy their knowledge if it weren't for trade wars~~~~~~~

Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.

what's it?

Likely this one on the tooling & die industry, and the process knowledge that has evaporated from America over time. https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52

Exactly this one.

Probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0

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