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sockpuppet2  2d ago (inv.nadeko.net)   Edited 2d ago   1173 thread views

What it takes to source USA-manufactured components and tooling for a chainmail grill scrubber

inv.nadeko.net

The website is a user-friendly proxy for youtube - if it has trouble loading the video, there's a link to the youtube page (or just edit the url).

You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...

(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)

If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.

As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.

(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)

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It looks like a crappy scrubber to me, but if I were so inclined I could make a functionally equivalent thing from local materials in my basement (located in North America) for something like $2.00 USD BOM cost (zero to me since I'd have everything needed sitting around down there somewhere). Yes the chainmail links would take some time, but I don't think it would be a very hard 8 hour day? If I were on minimum wage this would be better than buying the thing from this guy!

So the problem is not "it's hard to make things in America", it's "it's hard to make stupid drop-ship style crap in America and sell at a profit without some kind of gimmick" -- like, IDK -- making annoying videos about how hard it is to make things in America.

How would you make a functional equivalent in your basement? Do you spend a lot of time working with stainless steel? Do you think their design is stupid drop-ship style crap?

I would probably use wood for the handle -- I do indeed spend enough time working with stainless steel that I have some in the basement, and the tools to shape it. (wouldn't be much if I used a wooden handle and just rivet the steel to it)

Do you think their design is stupid drop-ship style crap?

Yes - it looks like it would not be good at cleaning grills.

You can't because they specifically need welded chainmail links and the other samples they tested fell apart. Pretty sure you don't have that lying around, and they also said that the chainmail was the biggest part of their BOM.

Of course it was also harder to make it in America than China even for the standard stuff. For China you just send the cad files to some Alibaba sellers and poof you'll have a pallet full of parts in a month. The video specifically said that finding someone who could design and make the molds in America was hard, and since the molds are a one-time capital investment they don't really affect the BOM much. For all these parts the BOM of the US made stuff isn't much higher than China, but the difficulty and hassle is much more. That's the entire point of the video.

You can't because they specifically need welded chainmail links and the other samples they tested fell apart. Pretty sure you don't have that lying around, and they also said that the chainmail was the biggest part of their BOM.

Actually I can -- I have wire, and I have a welder. Both are literally in my basement right now.

Anyways it doesn't sound like their chainmail was even made in America, so I guess I could buy some from the same coolies making theirs in India if I were pressed for time.

Or I could buy some lockwashers and weld them up -- this would probably cost five bucks or so.

They are making something seem like a big deal when it isn't -- they just don't have the market to set up a proper factory, so they are using the limited production run + marketing + high price model to make a buck. Similar to the dropshippers pimping crap on Amazon.

Oh so you didn't even watch the whole video

Why would I want to watch an extended advertisement from a couple of retarded hipsters?

I went to their website and looked at their shitty scrubber.

Buy the product, not the story.

Embarrassing comment. If the video didn't exist and the transcript had been posted here it would have been AACQed, and you would have upvoted it.

I... don't think I would? Not sorry, not embarrassed.

Destin is not a retarded hipster. He's got one of the best channels on Youtube, and is genuine, earnest, and personable. I just checked, and he's been posting on Youtube for 18 years.

Do you want to learn about how carburetors work? What about Prince Rupert's Drops? What about firing a baseball out of a cannon at the speed of sound? Or maybe a rocket powered golf club? Or a bicycle that steers backwards?

He makes interesting videos, and you're embarrassing yourself with your attitude.

Most popular youtubers are in some ways retarded hipsters -- it's not the end of the world. They also have a tendency to leverage their popularity (and their slack-jawed faux-excitement about formerly basic knowledge like carburetors and potato guns) into the marketing of crappy products -- it's nice that this guy is (trying to) make his crappy products in America, but that doesn't make his hour-long ad interesting. (and means you should take what he says with a grain of salt -- he is literally selling you something.

As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.

CPC wants to rule, or at least have veto power in the world by providing quality stuff in quantity at an unmatched price.

Quoting JZ281C from twitter

I used to think that CN will appreciate its currency to help rebalance trade. This makes sense for an economic perspective, but from a geopolitical perspective it would make sense to keep CNY undervalued for now.

My main mental-model recalibration is recognizing that geopolitical considerations increasingly dominate economic calculations.

The big unknown is whether China's end game is co-existence with the US, or destruction of the current US political-economy. If it is the latter, then it will continue to be extremely aggressive with its strategic offensive in the global trade/tech domain.

CNY undervaluation is increasingly concentrating global industry in CN. This is a geopolitical move. You cannot understand this with economic logic.

CNY undervaluation sacrifices present Chinese living standards/consumption in exchange for future geopolitical dominance.

CN is essentially engaged in a war of attrition of national will power against all the other great powers including India. Countries that cannot suppress popular demand for higher present standard of living will lose geopolitical power to CN over time via de-industrialization.

There is no free lunch. Any attempt to compete in industry with China will involve major sacrifices in present standard of living. Any country that cannot out-save China will lose. Competing with China is not about policies. It fundamentally requires national mobilization similar to a total war. Simply printing money to subsidize industry without suppressing consumption will lead to inflation and eventually debt/currency crisis. US didn't have a market economy during WWII, it had wage/price controls and War Production Board to coordinate industrial production at the national level. People planted victory gardens and accepted rationing.

All in all, if you want to fight China geopolitically, maybe you should not have utterly burned out the goodwill of the working classes. Maybe they'd be willing to make big sacrifices then. Asking people you have been trying to replace to accept a 1950s standard of living will be a hard sell.

All in all, if you want to fight China geopolitically, maybe you should not have utterly burned out the goodwill of the working classes. Maybe they'd be willing to make big sacrifices then. Asking people you have been trying to replace to accept a 1950s standard of living will be a hard sell.

Can you elaborate? Who's "you," how was the goodwill of the working classes burned out, and who's being asked to accept a 1950s standard of living?

Honestly China can keep selling stuff cheaply to the rest of the world forever for all I care. Western economies becoming uncompetitive and obsolete just gives them the kick up the ass they need to rebalance away from welfare spending and towards investment/research.

I recently purchased a new hammer. For less than 20 dollars I got myself something from AliExpress with a quality far superior to the hammers priced twice as high in my local hardware store. Just watch this video and tell me you don't want that hammer. The days where "China" was synonymous with "low quality" are over.

Those hammers at the hardware store were made in china too, so that says nothing about western manufacturing

I don't know about the hammer, but I don't want this guy to frame my house.

In a similar vein I needed a USB isolator. The price from Aliexpress including postage was 7e. From western stores the same product (marginally different plastic case, identical innards using ubiquituous Analog Devices isolator IC reference design, almost certainly produced in China) would have cost me 40e and 10-20e postage. People can talk about undervalued currency but that doesn’t explain the nearly 10x price difference.

People can talk about undervalued currency but that doesn’t explain the nearly 10x price difference.

Middlemen making money. The cost you pay in a shop at home is almost exactly determined by the seller's idea of how much the market would bear.

You also have to pay local sellers to take the risk of prepaying for product and importing it. If it doesn't sell you're left with huge losses.

Dropshippers don't need to worry about that.

The market is willing to bear that 7e and the European online stores have few sales. Then people wonder why customers are ordering from China…

Sometimes, people want to pay that price. There was a funny joke I saw on twitter about how a someone's girl wanted some piece of jewelery. Guy said no, found it on aliexpress for 15% of the price, sent her the link and said he'd buy it and then wondered why she was upset.

Yep, China undervalues its currency but that is not enough to explain the large price difference any more between the stuff they produce and Western stuff (at the same quality level). They are just better at manufacturing these days and while dumping can explain the price differences in some key industries I'm pretty sure the Chinese government isn't directly funding their fake watch industry which is still able to sell Rolex replicas indistinguishable to the common man (see if you can tell which is the genuine and which the replica) for around $500 (and this is with a clone movement, if you're happy with an A2824 inside the watch which is still a very dependable movement, VSF is currently running an offer for ~$300 for a Starbucks).

Rolex could sell Rolexes for $500 each but they'd much rather sell them for $10000

Nah, the R factor Rolexes have a free sprung balance wheel which is a lot more complex than the regulated balance wheels used in the replicas. The cheapest free sprung movements out of China are still around $1,500 or so. I think the genuine production cost for a Rolex for one of their subs is somewhere around $3,000-$4,000.

They haven't replicated the free sprung balance wheel for rolexes because of the closed caseback which means it isn't important but the ACE replica 324 movement (used in the open caseback Patek 5711) costs around $2k, is free sprung and generally keeps worse time than the cheap regulated 3KF replica 324 movement (costs around $150).

Fair point, high end reps are part-for-part identical to rolexes except for the balance wheel. You can even install a genuine rolex balance wheel on a rep.

My guess is the rolex bom for a freesprung balance wheel is quite low, but it probably took serious capital investment in building a bespoke machine to calibrate the balance wheels.

Seems like seiko had teething problems on their own line and sold a bunch of watches that couldn't keep time. Anyways Rolex has been making these balances for decades so their in house cost is certainly quite low

Isn’t this largely purchasing power? Stuff in China is cheap, so you don’t have to pay workers very much, so stuff in China is cheap.

Chinese workers aren't cheap anymore in the global scale of things. Go to India if you want to see real cheap labour. Chinese labour is now solidly in the middle ranges of cost.

Right, and I assume that the price of Chinese goods will rise on a lag, as did the goods of Germany*, Japan and Taiwan.

*”Jerry-rigged” used to have the same valence as “Chinesium” if I remember correctly.

Jerry-rigged

It's said to be older than Germany.

It’s sometimes thought that the jerry in jerry-built or jerry-rigged comes from Jerry as used as British slur against Germans during Word War I and II. This disparaging term is real, a pun on the name Jerry and the pronunciation of the first part of German. This insult, however, is found by 1915, which is sometime after we first find evidence for jerry-built and jerry-rigged in the 19th century.

So, who (or what) is jerry? We’re just not sure. But, we hope these don’t remember some poor, shoddy craftsman named Jerry (a nickname for such names as Jeremy, Jerome, or Jeremiah) for all time.

/images/1749603858020829.webp

An inspiring video, but it's still hard to square the fact that a US-made stick of metal and plastic sells for fully 1/6 the price of a Nintendo Switch 2. The grill scrubber looks like solid product, but if I put 6 of them together, I don't think I'd have even close to the value of a new portable game console.

I get that that is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and maybe I don't have a good baseline appreciation for the cost of strong metal things compared to complex electronics. I've paid almost as much as the scrubber for a glorified chunk of construction material before, but I was not happy about it.

It's just that if I saw that on the shelf next to the $15 wire scrubbers, I'd assume it was motorized. If that's what it's going to take to bring back manufacturing to the US, I question whether the general public is willing to pay for it.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A musical greeting card (open card, plays tune) has a bill of materials of like 30 discrete components.

When you look at something and say "surely this part is done by a machine and not by humans" stop and consider that no maybe this is actually still produced by a human.

I thought The Hardware Hacker by bunnie, while a bit dated by now, had a fascinating tour of Chinese electronics fabrication.

The Nintendo Switch 2 probably doesn't have humans soldering individual components to boards and instead uses more automated surface mount tech, but I presume there's still a lot of manual bullshit involved. You probably don't just have trucks backing up to the factory and dumping raw parts on one end and on the other end out pop Switches.

Well, chainmail is famously is famously very labor-expensive to produce. I would estimate that the main market is reenactors and LARPers. I would further assume that most LARPers do not actually expect that their life will depend on their mail's ability to defeat Bodkin arrows. So some of them will reasonably decide that they do not need to spend half their salary on mail made from steel rings which were forged shut, and mail from aluminum rings which were merely bent shut -- or even latex printed with a chainmail pattern -- will serve their purposes well enough.

If high-end chain mail was a billion dollar industry, I think that its production would be much more automated and cheaper -- having a machine assemble the rings and use a laser to forge them shut sounds difficult, but not the most difficult engineering feat humanity has accomplished -- and one might be able to buy high-end chainmail for merely a thousand dollars per square meter or so eventually.

From the stills of the video, I can not determine if the rings are actually closed or not. For the price of the product, I hope they are. They will see a lot less stress than in combat, but a medieval knight (or the inheritor of their mail) would certainly have had access to an armorer who could replace a broken ring, while the average American is very unlikely to find someone to do so below unit cost if a grill eventually defeats the grill scrubber. (The silicone might also not last for decades, but if the company stays afloat for that long, it could offer replacement parts for that at a low price.)

The 75$ price tag means that this product is targeted at enthusiasts, people who saw the video and care about US manufacturing. (From what the guy said when I was searching for a picture of the mail, it seems that their mail is partly sourced from India, though.) Niche audiences famously are willing to pay a hefty premium compared to the mainstream.

If chainmail grill scrubbers ever come to dominate the market, it will be because cheap knock-offs from China are offering a similar performance to the US ones at a small fraction of the price.

They were pinching pennies on a 37c bolt, of which there is one in the product. I'm sure their cogs is much lower and they are selling based on perceived value - you can see that they are currently sold out.

I'd imagine that as they learn the market better and branch out to more retail partners the price may drop. But as a premium product there is also the paradox that raising the price may help sell more units.

This video really sold me on protectionism. There's tons of value in having someone somewhere who can make what you need.

Protectionism, by what means and to what end? "Protectionism" usually connotes zero-sum (or negative-sum) trade policy and a goal of maintaining employment in specific jobs (which may become obsolete), while "industrial policy" could be any intervention aimed at increasing a desired capability/capacity (e.g., STEM scholarships and incentives for skilled-labor apprenticeships or lowering import barriers for certain industrial inputs).

Protectionism, by the means of tariffs to the end of preserving the jobs of tooling makers in the United States against unfair Chinese competition. Of course if other domestic firms think they have an edge, that competition is still there.

This wouldn't protect obsolete jobs from destruction, because of those obsolete jobs would die out both domestically and in China.

Of course if other domestic firms think they have an edge, that competition is still there.

And the history of American ship and automotive industries?

Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks because it only protected domestic shipping from foreign competition, not specific modes from each other.

Last I checked the US automotive industry is perfectly healthy. I'm don't see any consensus that US made cars are inferior to foreign ones, and in my experience they're perfectly fine.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships

The US shipbuilding industry was only strong in the mid-1800s. Since the rise of iron and steel ships, massive government spending was able to buy military ships, but protectionism and subsidies failed to maintain a competitive shipbuilding industry.

Ford and GM only make good cars because of international competition, and Chrysler has never made good cars, at all (Chrysler fans won't be mad about me saying this, because they like that Chryslers are bad). The only long-lived US motorcycle manufacturer is Harley-Davidson and it not only needed tariffs to survive, it's also bad.

Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks

I think you could not be more wrong. While I did not find any neutral specific numbers, my gut feeling is that shipping a container by railway is several times more expensive than by container ship.

If you look at a map of Eurasia, you will find that the shortest single-transportation mode from Shenzhen to Amsterdam is over land. Yet China does not ship to Europe by rail, but uses container ships, which need to travel a lot further. Some of it will be geostrategic considerations (you do not need to rely on foreign states for transit, and if the EU instates tariffs, then it is a lot easier to redirect your ships than building a railway to Mexico), but most of it comes down to costs.

A container ship can load upwards of 5k (TEU) containers, and the only part which will see substantial wear and tear are the propulsion system. If you have an ocean somewhere, you are all set. Sure, you will pay a hefty premium to go through the Suez canal -- from naive considerations it should be priced slightly below what it would cost you to go around the horn of Africa, but all the rest of the way (excluding the harbors) is basically provided for free by Earth, and international treaties prevent states through which you pass from making you pay taxes for the most part.

By contrast, a freight train might typically have 150 cars. If we assume four (20-foot, TEU) containers per car, that is six hundred containers. Both the engine and every axle of every car will experience wear. Unlike waterways, railway tracks do not occur naturally on Earth, but need to be painstakingly constructed. To make matters worse, land is not always very suited for building railroads. Mountains in particular make building railroads much more expensive. The tracks will certainly also experience wear, and whoever owns them will bill you for the privilege of using them. There is plenty of international water, but almost no international land, so your train will have to reach an understanding with the states you pass through, which will likely involve you paying money (taxes, union wages, etc) and might also come with regulations which prohibit you from running your diesel engine on the cheapest fuel it can take.

While I did not find any neutral specific numbers, my gut feeling is that shipping a container by railway is several times more expensive than by container ship.

Rail is surprisingly more efficient than many forms of shipping (e.g. barges).

Thanks for the link. Given that the ships in that graph were rather small, I tried to calculate the force per ton for a TI-class supertanker. To my surprise, it turns out that the number I get out (F/m=P/v/m=37MW/(30.6km/h * 441kT)=10N/T) is rather similar to the barge.

From physics, I would have assumed that the friction of a ship has roughly two components, one which is proportional to the cross-section of the underwater parts of the hull (and to the velocity squared) and one which is proportional to the area of the underwater hull (and to the velocity). Notably, both of these are decidedly sublinear to the displaced water volume, so going from a 1kT barge to a 441kT supertanker should really lower friction.

Now, it could be that the 37MW are the absolute maximum rating of the engine, and that in normal operations it used only a fraction of that power at top speed, or that the conversion of the engine power into a forward force is inefficient for some reason, but I do not have a great explanation.

I notice I am confused.

The other curious thing about that table is that once your railroad track has an incline, the story becomes much different. For example, with an incline of 1%, you will tithe 100N/T to gravity, regardless of your velocity.

But we can also invert that. An incline of 0.1% (one meter per kilometer) imposes a force of 10N/T from gravity. Per the plot, a 60ton railroad car on such an incline (which would not even be noticeable to the naked eye) would (once we push it a bit to overcome static friction) accelerate until it reaches a velocity of 150km/h. Now, if you try to tell me that 40 foot container filled with water falling door forward out of a plane would reach a terminal velocity of 150km/h, I would already find that unlikely.

I would like to roll a will save to disbelieve, please.

Don't container ships usually travel much, much faster than barges?

I think I read somewhere that surface ships actually experience drag proportional to the cube of speed, due to the bow wave.

From physics, I would have assumed that the friction of a ship has roughly two components...

The physics of shipbuilding is incredibly counterintuitive. This is because we have bad intuition about the physics of fluids in general, and the physics at the intersection of the fluids air/water compounds this.

One super counter-intuitive concept is the Froude number, which is a dimensionless quantity that determines (roughly speaking) how fast a ship can go at max efficiency, but doesn't depend on any of the quantities you mention. The formula is:

Fr = V/√(g×L)

Where:

  • V is ship speed
  • g is gravitational acceleration
  • L is waterline length of the ship

There are dozens of other constants like this that ship designers measure/use, and none of them are intuitive.

Your statement is not supported by your link. The article says:

Barges are less efficient than rail with any appreciable speed.

The graph in the article says that barges still are more efficient than trains below around 10 km/h (6 mi/h).

In Railroads and American Economic Growth, an economist estimated that, if 12-mi/h (19-km/h) railroads had never been invented and instead the Midwest had been connected to oceanic trade with an extensive 7-mi/h (11-km/h) canal network during the late 19th century, the cost of the resulting increased inventory requirements would have been essentially negligible. Most freight transportation does not need to be fast.

This argument applies to international shipping, but not to us domestic shippingnwhich has been made obsolete by rail and road. I guess to be more specific, my argument was obviously that US shipbuilding for the domestic us market was made obsolete by trucks and railroads.

all the rest of the way (excluding the harbors) is basically provided for free by Earth, and international treaties prevent states through which you pass from making you pay taxes for the most part.

Applies to international shipping but not to us domestic shipping covered by the jones act.

Unlike waterways, railway tracks do not occur naturally on Earth, but need to be painstakingly constructed.

Railroad has reached every single US population center since before modern sea shipping existed.

And many of those population centers are landlocked, not accessible by ship, only by river barge if at all.

If you look at situations where people have gotten caught doing cabotage, you'll see that it happens only in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately those markets are too small to sustain an actual shipbuilding industry which requires significant economy of scale.

I will grant you that shipping within the continental US is mostly not done using waterways. Part of it are historical reasons. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, while the Panama canal, was only finished in 1914. Before that, oceanic coast-to-coast shipping had to run around South America, which is a big detour.

Now, if someone needs to ship a lot of bulk cargo (like coal) from New York City to Miami or even Los Angeles, I would guess that in theory (asides from the Jones act) it might still be cheaper to use ships. However, NYC is not known for its coal mines, so any coal which ends up there was likely transported there from the hinterlands by railroad. If you already have your cargo neatly loaded onto railway cars, reloading it on a ship (and then potentially unloading it back onto railroads on the other side) is likely not worth it just to take advantage of the lower shipping costs per kilometer for boats, if your distance is only a few thousand kilometers. And as you point out, there are effects of scale -- if half of your cargo goes to landlocked destinations, then investing in railways seems like a better idea.

I guess the polar opposite of the US in that regard is Japan, which famously consists of multiple islands. If half of your cargo goes from one island to another, it makes sense to focus on ports and use railroads for passengers and getting the goods from the ports to the landlocked locations only.

Unfortunately those markets are too small to sustain an actual shipbuilding industry which requires significant economy of scale.

The three big shipbuilding nations, in order, are China, South Korea, and Japan. Of these, Japan will likely use transport ships a lot domestically, and I can imagine China doing likewise to connect coastal cities separated by thousands of kilometers.

But looking at South Korea, a 600 km x 200 km peninsula, I do not see them doing a lot of domestic transportation over the ocean when the US with its many thousands of kilometers of coastlines does not. To be honest, I am also not convinced that the ships which ferry containers between Hokkaido and Honshu are the same ships as the ones which ferry containers between Shenzhen and Atlanta. Larger ships certainly offer better fuel efficiency, but might also require deeper harbors and might be more expensive to load and unload. So naively, I would expect that the perfect ship size to carry containers half around the world will not be perfect ship size to carry containers for a few 100 km.

In short, I do not see why you would require a thriving local market for transport ships to build ships for transporting goods over the ocean. Sure, it might help to start small and then scale up, but the only strict requirement is access to a sea which is sufficiently connected to the world's oceans.

I do not see why you would require a thriving local market for transport ships to build ships for transporting goods over the ocean.

That's exactly the point. Intercontinental shipping and domestic shipping can essentially be thought of as two separate markets with very little intersection.

The Jones act was a misguided attempt to protect US domestic sea shipping from international competition. It did stop foreign carriers from moving US domestic shipping by boat, but didn't stop railroads and road from eating the market. As a result, Alaska, Hawaii, etc. are screwed as nobody wants to build a new shipyard just to build the one or two ships needed to serve those routes. In my imo the Jones act should be repealed in order to help out our islands, but if it were repealed, I doubt that sea shipping would pick up much market share on the continental US.

International sea shipping is a totally different beast. In a sense, nearly all international shipping is cabotage, as goods shipped between two countries are almost always shipped by a carrier from a third country. This is in sharp contrast to air travel, where air carriers are almost universally required to serve their home country on every route. The result for sea shipping is that there's a winner-take-all single market for shipping and shipbuilding. Countries with heavy subsidies and favorable regulatory environments are the winner here.

If the United States revoked cabotage and enforced a system similar to that of air travel, it would certainly encourage diversification of the shipping industry, including potentially US shipyards able to make halfway decent cargo ships. But something like this would be such a shock that it's likely impossible.

Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks

The EU moves more freight by coastal ship than by rail. American coastal shipping was rendered obsolete by the Jones Act, not by improvements in land transport tech.

I'm don't see any consensus that US made cars are inferior to foreign ones, and in my experience they're perfectly fine.

If by "cars", you mean "cars" and not pick-up trucks, then the only reason why US-made cars are still a thing is because foreign companies opened up non-union factories in places a long way from Detroit. That is not the outcome classic protectionism would have been looking for.

The pick-up truck market is an example of classic protectionism working, admittedly. There are lots of union jobs making pickup trucks for sale into a protected domestic market. There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.

Jones Act

I don’t think that’s true. The Act doesn’t put any restrictions on US shipping, only foreign shipping, and US shipping was strong for about a half century after it passed. The decline in US shipping instead seems linked to the decline in US industry post-war. Unless you’re taking that decline as a given and talking about the death of small American ports that can’t be serviced by foreign shipping?

The Act doesn’t put any restrictions on US shipping, only foreign shipping, and US shipping was strong for about a half century after it passed.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships

The US shipbuilding industry was only strong in the mid-1800s. Since the rise of iron and steel ships, massive government spending was able to buy military ships, but protectionism and subsidies failed to maintain a competitive shipbuilding industry.

Of course the Jones Act regulates US shipping - the whole point is that it prohibits US shipping using imported ships.

But when it was written, the US made its own ships, on colossal scale. Getting US ships was no issue. It’s only after US shipbuilding declined that any of this became a problem. That’s why I’d lay the blame more at the feet of deindustrialization.

It puts restrictions on shipping as a class of economic activity in moving things around vs other classes of economic activity in moving things around. This means the ancillary things around shipping that would make it more efficient and cheaper over time don't happen because the market for them just isn't there, leading to shipping as a whole (US and foreign) losing out to other means of transport.

There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.

In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.

But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.

But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around.

Anti-Americanism is highly concentrated in the environmentalist left and liberal professional class.

Below them, a lot of things associated with America are loved, from Disney to conspicuous consumption to Las Vegas and Hollywood to the Wild West and Cowboys and Indians and ‘take me home, country roads’ and In-n-Out burger and fanboats in the Everglades and Twin Peaks and Twilight and police procedurals with those old Ford crown victorias and oversized portions and endless suburbs where even a cop can buy a 6 bedroom McMansion with three cars in the drive and cheerleaders and jocks and frats and (American) football (yes, all these things blend into some kind of generic Americana).

That’s why it’s not uncommon to see relatively affluent right-ish leaning German or British or Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks, Mustangs, Chargers etc. Often they will go on vacation to ‘Americana’ places they associate with American movies, music and culture like Vegas, Miami, LA or even Nashville despite very high American salaries and hotel prices making vacations in the US more expensive than almost anywhere else in the world for Europeans.

Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks

These are extreme outliers and really rare for the simple reason that US style pickup trucks solve the problem of hauling stuff or people around in a very poor way. They’re expensive, huge & heavy (a major problem when trying to drive or park them) and don’t protect the cargo. People who need to haul large amounts of cargo buy either a van or a trailer. People who need to regularly carry people and regular goods buy a station wagon.

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The crossover and truck craze is largely driven by cafe distortion. Just because us carmakers don't want to build sedans doesn't mean they can't compete - they build crossovers just as well as forign companies do.

foreign companies opened up non-union factories in places a long way from Detroit. That is not the outcome classic protectionism would have been looking for.

Why not? The presses are still here and they place orders in the domestic supply chain for parts. Those factories aren't fully vertically integrated, neither do they import all of their inputs.

Protectionism is often the disease. Rather than erroneous regulation enabling complacency, the solution is becoming more competitive. That means simplifying the regulatory environment, improving logistics and encouraging similar businesses in the same area.

China is known to engage in dumping, so you can't survive just by being competitive.

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