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Comment by vablings | Hacker News Reader

Right now, it is virtually impossible to have a supply chain completely removed from China for the manufacturing of low-cost drones. They are literally world class in production of PCB's and even PCBA.

There simply isn't enough engineers, capital expenditure and factory space to move away from this paradigm

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Yeah U.S. has a really serious problem with the deprioritization of science education over the last 45 years. There are very few really skilled scientists and engineers in the U.S, they are concentrated in specific geographic metros, and many of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

If the U.S. got into a serious peer conflict, the relative lack of human capital is a huge problem. In WW2 we could get away with a few scientists and engineers designing military equipment that's produced in bulk and then lots of foot soldiers employing it. Today, with the increasing complexity of modern weaponry and the ability for the weaponry itself to be an incredibly lethal force, the bottleneck is in building out the supply chain. Each component requires a skilled engineering team optimizing it and ensuring it fits into the overall whole.

Our next "Sputnik Moment" is coming. At some point we're going to be forced to reorient our education system away from performative progressive ideology and towards achieving practical results.

https://www.space.com/10437-sputnik-moment.html

> reorient our education system away from performative progressive ideology and towards achieving practical results.

NCLB was cooked up by Republicans along with defunding schools, school choice, and the homeschooling. You are correct that it is performative but there is nothing progressive about the last 20 years of public education.

You're pointing the the wrong direction there, look at the groups actually attacking and refusing to fund public schools better in the US... The actual issue is the systematic dismantling of public education for religious and ideological reasons; evolution, climate change, vaccinations all ideologically convenient to the religious conservative right in the US.

We need adequate funding for public schools but there is no real correlation between funding levels and student outcomes. A lot of that money is simply being frittered away. One of the best ways to start would be to destroy teacher's unions because they usually act in ways contrary to students' best interests.

Going to need one hell of a citation on that first claim because there's a lot of evidence showing reality follows the opposite intuitive correlation, additional funding does provide better outcomes. [0]

> destroy teacher's unions

States have tried doing essentially that and it's not worked for decades. So I say we should actually fund schools, pay and support teachers like we actually want educated kids before we try yet again to blame underpaid, undersupplied teachers trying to wrangle ballooning class sizes of rowdy kids.

[0] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/how-money-matter...

I would argue the educational teaching criterias from the states (and fed) are the problem with educational outcome, not the teachers unions.

It wasn't the progressives that just slashed the science research budgets in half :/

We do have PCB manufacturing and assembly in the US though, it's just far cheaper and plentiful overseas so companies usually go there for mass manufacturing. The true bottleneck is the components those are barely made in the US at all.

If it's not price competitive then it is functionally useless. The only reason we have PCB manufacturing in the USA is probably because of DoD requirements and the government doesn't want to risk TS information falling in the hands of foreign adversaries. By extension these manufacturers don't give a toss about your average person, and they have insane MOQ's (10,000+) rather than PCBWay or JLCPCB where you can get MOQ for as low as 5 PCB/PCBA

You know who has capital? The US government. It's very plausible that the Army could fund the infrastructure needed for this industry as a national security imperative.

Manufacturing is often thought as this concept that you can just throw money at any time, I'm afraid to say often you are throwing your money into a void. Equipment is one thing, but engineers are literally the lifeblood of production infrastructure. Without them you are pissing into the wind

The Army already has a branch specifically devoted to engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers. While its primary focus is civil engineering, training and employing electrical and electronics engineers certainly doesn't seem out of the question.

I would return to my old manufacturing job in a heartbeat if the pay was even remotely close to my current SE position.

but therein lies the problem: china has hoards of programmers getting paid something closer to your manufacturing job's rate.

Sure, but we can start to take incremental steps in that direction. I think everyone has finally realized that offshoring strategically important manufacturing sectors was a mistake and so now we have to reindustrialize regardless of the cost.

Well that's certainly an awkward pickle the USA has found itself in, isn't it?

It seems like it but the USA v China angle is way more complicated than these types of super power rivalries have been in the past. The USA is a massive part of the Chinese economy. It'd be weird for a country to attack either the largest part of it's supply chain or it's largest customer.

I'm struggling to find an academic source to provide any level of detail beyond confirming this basic fact, but Germany and Britain's economic ties before WW1 were actually not too different. They were rivals but also major trading partners.

I won't try to shoehorn the past into the present, but for the very specific point about intertwined economies, it has in fact happened before.

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