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