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sockpuppet2  2d ago (inv.nadeko.net)   Edited 2d ago   1213 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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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.

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.

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.

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