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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

What are they manufacturing? It must not involve any metal. Due to the tariffs on metals manufacturing costs have increased significantly for anyone using them.

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It must not involve electrical components either, or any of the other inputs the US cannot produce at the scale or price-point of other countries.

As someone who grew up in a machine shop, still in manufacturing, and have my own hobby shop, its gross how much raw materials cost. I can get finished parts shipped from China cheaper then I can buy the raw material here in the US. I almost wept looking at over $500 for a simple 2x4 foot sheet of 1/2 inch thick 6061 aluminum.

Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead.

It is going to get worse. Iron/steel and aluminum are some of the most common elements on the planet. They are literally everywhere. The cost is in the energy for production, and to a lesser extent transport. But energy is not only going to become more expensive but actually hard to get (thank you again AI). Canada has energy, from empty land for wind/solar/hydro, to oil, to enormous piles of uranium ore. That is not an enemy worth making.

I remember people taking about smelting aluminum as a way to put overproduced solar electricity to a good use. Would come in very handy now.

It would, but smelting is not a process that likes being started and stopped. Once furnaces and other bits and pieces are up to temperature they want to stay there. Thermal expansion is a thing, but also letting them all cool down is throwing energy away. And iron workers don't like sitting around "on call" waiting for energy prices to swing enough to justify going to work.

Same too with customers. The people buying bulk metal need is when they need it. They don't want to wait around, literally, for the winds to change.

If only there was a way to replace a BOF or arc furnace with Nvidia Blackwells.

Perhaps their founder contacts are in the ragebait and clickbait manufacturing business.

Or perhaps people are thinking longer than you and realize it’s a problem America isn’t domestically producing these things? I can not stand that trade offs and thinking about domestic production cant be done because otherwise smart engineers pretend like the economy is black and white and thus if a price goes up due to a lack of domestic supply that will always be the case. Industrial policy is designed to fix that, it will not be magically fixed overnight but neither will it be fixed if we do nothing and call people idiots when they try things.

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