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Comment by simgt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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